THE INCOME 'COUNTER-REVOLUTION'
Herman, Edward S.
THE INCOME 'COUNTER-REVOLUTION' EDWARD S. HERMAN Who gets what in dollars and cents According to Arthur F. Burns, writing in 1951, the "transformation in the distribution of our national income ....
...It is not easy to be optimistic about prospects for improvement in our income distribution or system of priorities...
...banks if necessary to finance living expenses...
...The expectation of a shrinking differential was based in part on the belief that Western technology could work productivity miracles in the now "aware" Third World, a belief which reflected a failure to grasp the nature and intractability of the institutional obstacles to development widely prevalent in the LDCs...
...In the U.S...
...have been used in such a way as to leave both a great many people unhappy and a huge array of unsolved problems...
...Low wages are assured by stagnation plus U.S.-supported terror...
...They are what economists call "externalities," much discussed but treated as "exceptions" to market beneficence and underrated in importance...
...But recent developments have been based on special factors of the modem era and may not be a passing abnormality or transitional phase of the growth process...
...Bureau of Census, Current Population Reports, "Money Income in 1972 of Families and Persons in the United States," 1973, p. 45...
...Poverty line budgets also rest on the assumption that people at the lower end of the income scale have the time, energy, motivation, resources and information to shop with high efficiency...
...And by and large the trade-investment-aid package offered by the West has provided neither adequate growth nor minimally humane social orders among Free World LDCs...
...This implies not only that larger absolute increases in income go to the more affluent but that relative inequalities remain intact...
...And the threats to domination by privileged elites tend to be greater today than in the early years of Western capitalist development, again partly because of the duality between rich and poor countries and the spread of ideas and knowledge of the possibilities of a better life for both rich and poor alike (although by radically different processes...
...Even the great profit windfalls of the oil companies and mass public hostility accompanying the shortages has yet to result in a significant reduction in the tax privileges of that industry...
...and, on the U.S...
...Nixon never possessed sufficient power, however, to use unemployment and state force to really weaken the unions enough to make a dent in inflation from that direction...
...we had shared the prevailing view that economic growth was economically beneficial to most nations...
...They are taken from a recent study by Pechman and Okner, who use data for the year 1966 to make a great many of the corrections necessary for a fuller picture of pretax income...
...The distribution of income in the United States is highly unequal, and has changed little in this respect since the end of World War II...
...Both the political and economic analyses underlying these perspectives were superficial, and their narrow empirical base has crumbled under the impact of a quarter century of experience...
...The Pech-man-Okner adjusted data show a significantly greater degree of inequality than the commonly used Census money income figures...
...Another special factor in the modern era has been the efforts of the rich countries to shape the post-colonial developments in the Third World, not according to their own image, as in the common cliche", but according to their interest...
...by training and material aid, has had as its main purpose the provision of an "insurance policy" against internal social revolution...
...On the basis of an elaborate analysis of data for 43 LDCs, they found that, The position of the poorest 60 percent typically worsens, both relatively and absolutely, when an initial spurt of narrowly based dualistic growth is imposed on an agrarian subsistence economy . . . The gains of the top 5 percent are particularly great in very low income countries where a sharply dualistic structure is associated with political and economic domination by traditional or expatriate elites...
...it was $19,071 higher in 1969 and has since crossed the $20,000 mark...
...Nor are they unduly troubled by the fact that the Brazilian income distribution has worsened markedly under the junta, the relative share of the richest 5 percent increasing from 29 percent in 1960 to 38 percent in 1970, the real income of the poorest 40 percent falling absolutely...
...This not only involves huge direct waste that these countries cannot afford, it also has an obvious socio-political component, helping to keep the lid on any internal challenges to the rule of traditional elites...
...As a transformation in income shares, therefore, the "revolution" was over by the time it was discovered...
...The invasion of 1965, however, preserved a large U.S...
...The best we can hope for in most countries is a relatively benign leadership with roots in and a real concern for the masses, in contrast with the now widespread Free World system of corrupt, extravagant, brutalizing, "grab and run" elite leadership...
...Obviously, where there are large numbers on the margin of subsistence or comfort, the capture of even a proportionate share of rising income by the upper income brackets is contrary to general welfare interests, even if absolute incomes of the poor are increasing...
...Contrary to the expectations of many, this division has sharpened since 1945 as the rich countries have, on average, grown faster in per capita incomes than the poor lands...
...It was recently disclosed that overseas Americans have also been able to escape British income taxation, because they have been held liable only for taxes on income received in Britain...
...Lon Nol, Thieu, Park, Balaguer, Suharto, Marcos, etc., all have in common institutionalized venality, terroriza-tion of the masses, and service to the needs of "the expatriate financial, commercial, and technical elites" specified by Adelman and Morris as tied in closely with a worsening income distribution...
...9, 1971) cites one foreign economic expert as saying that "Per capita income is about the same as before 1965, but it's less equitably distributed...
...As U.S...
...Finally, if satisfaction is a function of relative position as well as absolute income, then people in the lower-income brackets may be "worse off" (less satisfied, more alienated) even with rising absolute income...
...As the greatest world power after 1945, the U.S...
...Only substantial material blows are apparently capable of breaking through the false consciousness of racism, of Meany-Commentary liberalism (with its emphasis on Red-New Left threats), to a unification on the basis of real interests and issues...
...We had also not greatly questioned the relevance today of the historical association of successful economic growth with the spread of parliamentary democracy...
...and his restructuring of government expenditures and taxes at the expense of the weak and poor was an important and partially successful effort at getting the income distribution back to the 1929 degree of inequality...
...The latter suggest that in our era of rapid economic growth, inflation, increasing political conservatism, and the spread of the military junta in the Third World (frequently under U.S.-sponsorship), income distribution has become more unequal to a degree that makes it reasonable to characterize the past three decades as an era of "income counter-revolution...
...In the U.S...
...This has meant interventionist efforts to create and sustain a neo-colonial elite...
...As may be seen in the accompanying Table, the bottom fifth of families in 1972 had only 5.4 percent, the top 20 percent had 41.4 percent, and the highest 5 percent had 15.9 percent of money income...
...If poverty line definitions are biased downward, however, if relative incomes are important determinants of welfare, and if equality is an ideal that carries weight and has social consequences in its own right, then very limited satisfaction can be derived from trends in poverty line numbers...
...Greater income equity, and the majority interest in general, in most Third World States, call for real revolution, with a transfer of power from traditional elites to people committed to the interests of the majority...
...the 3.1 percent rate for LDCs, applied to India's base of about $80, represents an increment of $2.48...
...Between 1947 and 1972, the share of the top 5 percent of families declined from 17.5 percent to 15.9 percent or by 1.6 percentage points...
...If "social necessities" rise with increasing consumption opportunities, poverty lines will have a downward bias for this reason as well...
...It is obvious that the substantial growth and huge real income now produced in the U.S...
...and for ready availability to the rural masses, with South Vietnam and Indonesia, where the governments have no interest in such mundane matters, illustrates the point...
...In that client state hunger is rampant, with much of the potentially rich agricultural land unused or misused, and with fewer than 1 percent of the farmers owning 47.5 percent of the land, many of the rest operating under semi-feudal tenure conditions...
...policy has been the unremitting support of counter-revolution in this age of Third World upheaval...
...A few of the totalitarian free enterprise LDCs such as Brazil, Iran, Indonesia and South Korea have grown rapidly in recent years, but by a process combining the turning over of a large part of development to external interests and ignoring or deliberately depressing the condition of the underlying population...
...reflects the success of dominant, mainly business interest groups, in maintaining political and social power and in defining public and private priorities...
...declined or re- mained stationary in five of the eight years 1966-73...
...The distribution of income reflects, first and fore-most, the structure of interest and power in a society...
...When that power is consolidated more firmly in the hands of a wealthy minority, as after the Brazilian coup of 1964, the Dominican Republic invasion of 1965, or the Chilean counter-revolution of 1973, the income distribution moves sharply in the direction of increased inequality...
...leadership is reliable, and its use of torture and stifling of a democratic order does not bother either Bankers Trust or the military...
...Insofar as equality is a goal in itself, and a condition for a less competitive, less growth-oriented society, stable income shares under conditions of substantial inequality mean at best holding the line, not moving closer to a major end...
...Despite a mass of rhetoric claiming devotion to democracy and self-determination, the clear essence of U.S...
...As just implied, a second factor is the ability and willingness of these elites to use force to assure their privileged command over income...
...The last two columns of the Table show how important some of these differences may be in influencing the degree of inequality...
...in case after case, "the more firmly entrenched the expatriate financial, commercial and technical elite, the greater the concentration of income in the hands of the top 5 percent...
...This tax dodge is illustrative of a flexibility in working the crevices of the tax system that is not available to the lower 90 percent of income-receiving units...
...Incorporating wage supplements, capital gains, the value of the services of owner-occupied homes, and indirect business taxes, they found that these adjustments not only raised average income by almost 60 percent, but had "a dramatic effect on the distribution of income...
...The U.S...
...Among them oil importers like India and Pakistan have been unable even to sustain their unsatisfactory growth rates of earlier years and show signs of stagnation and even retrogression...
...This arbitrary line tends to be biased downward for class reasons, including a simple desire on the part of the affluent to minimize payments for the needy (often based on poverty line definitions...
...The 1974 Economic Report of the President focuses on the fact that the number of persons below the line has declined from 39.5 million in 1959 to only 24.5 million in 1972, or from 22 percent to "only" 12 percent of the population...
...That is, as time elapses tax lawyers, wealthy individuals, and business firms devise new ways of reducing tax liabilities, and the higher the tax rates the greater the incentives to escape taxation...
...If it be said that this would mean "totalitarianism" in the Third World, the reply is that totalitariarism in a particularly obnoxious form is prevalent now, and with official U.S...
...The Wall Street Journal also reported the use of army troops in the Dominican Republic to evict peasants from land needed for the construction of a plush foreign-owned vacation resort in which George Meany, among others, had an interest...
...But given the post-1947 increase in, and use of, loopholes-the system of "creeping preferences"-and the rise of more regressive state and local taxes, it is probable that the slight equalization of pre-tax money income would be at least offset by appropriate adjustments...
...The Census Bureau also collects sample data on earnings, but again, unrealized capital gains and expense accounts are not "earnings...
...There is little basis for optimism that increasing world inequality will be reversed in the near future...
...The great social costs of inadequate preventive medical care and poor, overcrowded lower-income housing, with cumulative deterioration and ghettoization of large urban enclaves, and major health and morale effects on happiness and work efficiency, are not taken into account by private enterprise...
...Even if the share of income going to the lowest 20 percent is constant, or even falling, their absolute levels of income may rise if aggregate income is increasing...
...Attrition" of the tax system may also result from deliberate legislative creation of loopholes, frequently done on the ground that the solution to one inequitable privilege is the granting of an equalizer to some other insistent party...
...The median (middle) income of the top fifth of families (in 1969 dollars) was $10,565 higher than that of the bottom fifth in 1947...
...The most important single contribution the American people could make toward improvement in income distribution and welfare in the Third World is, therefore, negative: seeing that their government in Washington terminates its long support for neocolonialism...
...It reduced the share of the poorest fifth by 0.6 percent and increased that of the upper fifth by 5.3 percentage points...
...Change, if it comes, will likely arise out of a continued series of shocks and a failure of the system to "deliver," not only to the bottom 20 percent but to the lower 80 percent...
...As in Brazil, Indonesia and South Vietnam, both the affluent consumer and the military are treated with solicitude and command an unreasonably large share of increments to social output...
...Attrition is reflected, for example, in the fact that the effective tax rate paid by commercial banks declined from 38.3 percent to 16.8 percent between 1961 and 1972...
...These figures refer to a narrowly defined pre-tax money income, however, which includes welfare payments but excludes (among other things) realized or unrealized capital gains and the impact of taxes on income shares...
...Measurement of income inequality is fraught with difficulties, both conceptual and because of data limitations...
...But inflation redistributes income from the poor and lower middle classes to the more affluent...
...These elites "need" any growth dividend to meet a rising international consumption standard, so that with sufficient force at their command they may capture all surpluses and even depress further the real incomes of the masses (frequently via inflation in a context of downward pressures on money wages...
...Thus, even if inequality in the literal sense remains constant, or even increases, it is at least debatable whether the welfare of the poor may not still be improving...
...A number of these special factors arise from the extreme division of today's world into rich and poor countries and the ready communication and unequal power relations among them...
...This view was echoed in Fortune and other vehicles of conventional opinion, and it has been widely accepted in the intellectual community from the Truman era to the present...
...The Economic Report of the President chose not to feature the interesting statistic showing that the decline in numbers below the poverty line ended in 1969, rose in 1970 and 1971 and returned to the 1969 level in 1972...
...The military plays a large role in these societies and absorbs a large fraction of aid plus increments to social output...
...The income distribution effects of this phenomenon are discussed in the next section...
...Stern explains this as a result of the extreme dependence of politicians on campaign funding by the wealthy...
...It failed to improve thereafter, and began a small but perceptible move toward increased inequality after 1968...
...Johnson also introduced the large-scale use of social welfare "quiescence"-inducing programs to the middle- and lower-income-classes, financed out of their own pockets by regressive social security taxes...
...has actually risen substantially...
...The "revolution" was deduced from a relative decline in the share of income going to the top 1 and 5 percent of income-receiving units in the U.S...
...The worldwide rise in the price of food and other raw materials has had a mixed impact on poor countries, depending on their structure of imports and exports, but on balance it has been unfavorable...
...The idea of temporary regression in mass welfare at some stage in the growth process had been suggested earlier by Kuznets and others on the basis of Western historical evidence...
...The Nixon Doctrine formalized a support of such regimes, which was, however, in practical effect well before Nixon and is being continued under the Ford Administration...
...That is, the gap may have widened between income received and income required to supply strongly felt wants (based on what the affluent now consume, a matter rapidly communicated by salesmanship to all potential buyers...
...direct intervention recedes, in response to the impact of Vietnam, the capacity of neo-colonial elites to protect themselves from their own people must be enlarged accordingly...
...policy on the distribution of income and wealth in poor countries subject to dominant U.S...
...Thus, unrealized capital gains and interest on tax-exempt bonds do not show up in these data...
...The building up of a large neo-colonial military force, linked to the U.S...
...per person increment exceeds the original total per capita income figure for India...
...Contrary to Michael Novak, this issue is a tool serviceable only to the diversionary efforts of status quo politicians- or worse...
...This has helped pacify the blue and white collar classes, who have also received enough benefits, hope, and opportunities for "making it," as well as ideological conditioning, to identify with the system and its prime beneficiaries...
...In sum, as a recent study by Irving Kravis notes, there is a "growing polarization of income levels in the world," with three-fifths of the human race having per capita incomes of $310 or less a year and the gap between rich and poor nations increasing...
...open-door entrants and affluent domestic consumers...
...Another difficulty in assessing income distribution trends is conceptual...
...With Nixon, business domination of government reached a pinnacle reminiscent of the 1920s, and a deliberate "income counter-revolution" was begun and accelerated in the early second term...
...Nixon's early reliance on tight money and unemployment to control inflation, if carried out with sufficient vigor, might have weakened labor's bargaining position...
...Where they are actually threatened with income redistribution downward via democratic processes, the termination of democracy in favor of "order" and "austerity" is a foregone conclusion (vide Brazil, Uruguay, and even more conspicuously, Chile...
...Medical services are provided almost exclusively by highly trained, certified, and expensive practitioners, so that the poor obtain such services only sporadically and after the onset of illness...
...In their recent invaluable study of this subject, Economic Growth and Social Equity in Developing Countries, Irma Adelman and Cynthia Taft Morris state in their preface that "The results of our analyses came as a shock to us...
...Given roughly constant shares, the gap between rich and poor in the U.S...
...THE INCOME 'COUNTER-REVOLUTION' EDWARD S. HERMAN Who gets what in dollars and cents According to Arthur F. Burns, writing in 1951, the "transformation in the distribution of our national income . . . may already be counted as one of the great social revolutions of history...
...and "broad-based economic growth provides a way to achieve redistribution only where accompanied by social and educational development as well as substantial broadening of political participation...
...itself, the income distribution improved slightly from 1929-1945, mainly as a result of the devastating effects of the depression on property values and incomes, plus the higher taxes and full employment of World War II...
...According to Peter Henle of the U.S...
...side, the interest of the leadership both in the "open door" for its expanding economy and dependable political allies...
...The recent sharp upswing in prices has almost certainly reduced the real incomes of the lower two-fifths of income-receiving units since 1972...
...banking accounts-by which means incomes are not received in Britain-with the employees borrowing money from U.S...
...between 1929 and 1945, a decline which also led to great expectations for New Deal type reformism in further reducing inequality...
...This "social welfare" approach to income distribution, however, at least as it has been applied in the U.S., has been based on a rather arbitrary and low minimum required budget, which allows little or no room for leisure, minor luxury, and status-sustaining expenditures that are essential to a sense of well-being in a con-sumerist society...
...on a mass production basis to meet low income needs, and the poor can only afford hand-me-downs in various stages of decay...
...distribution of income has remained approximately constant since World War II...
...Nixon continued this scheme while also systematically eliminating direct federal contributions to health, education and welfare ("fat...
...Even in the U.S., where relatively extensive and dependable information is collected on incomes, there are serious deficiencies in available data...
...taxes on the first $20,000 of income for the first three years of working abroad, after which the exemption rises to $25,000...
...Ford has shown no propensity toward bold innovation in the field of economic policy...
...from weak bargainers and people with fixed money incomes to owners of real property and speculators...
...These optimistic doctrines and pronouncements had an important political and ideological function in the Cold War environment of the post-1945 era...
...A Wall Street Journal report (Sept...
...influence...
...This is a result of both the structure of income and our excessive reliance on the market for its disposition...
...and incomes transformed into expense accounts do not appear as income...
...It is an unsettled question whether Nixon's problems arose out of Watergate, or whether Watergate proved so tenacious because of Nixon's failures on the domestic economic front...
...The threat of Labor government elimination of this windfall has revealed that many Americans and their employers have arranged for salaries to be paid into U.S...
...The market has long failed to perform satisfactorily in supplying cheap basic necessities such as housing and primary medical care...
...And the Journal also described the more specific ways in which repression affects the class distribution of income: When a union attempted to organize construction workers at a foreign-owned ferronickel mill project last year, Mr...
...In assessing trends based on official statistics it is important to recognize that tax "avoidance" (legal) and "evasion" (illegal) are not only a prerogative mainly of the upper-income classes, but are functionally related to both time and the level of tax rates...
...And even a George McGovern, with his modest liberal reformism, appears to have been beyond the pale of acceptability at this juncture...
...While the soldiers kept order, the contractor fired 32 allegedly leftist leaders . . . The strike was broken in eight days...
...It is a testimony to the power of status quo forces in America that one should see as the next step in improvement, not the development of a new humanism, but merely a capacity on the part of ordinary people to pursue their own real interests...
...Thus the huge growth dividend of recent decades has been used to reinforce and increase inequality...
...Breaking the grip of these interests and values is no easy matter, the growth of recent decades having strengthened many vested interests and narrowed our range of choice...
...Much of it is gathered in connection with IRS tax collections, in which case incomes leaking through tax loopholes are often excluded by the definition of taxable income...
...Gunnar Myrdal wrote in 1968 that "it is abundantly clear that the discrepancy between the economic well-being of the haves and the have-nots, so far as South Asia is concerned, is rapidly widening...
...Benign neglect" of the underclass, and social polarization, are the natural counterparts of this system of priorities...
...It is true that oil profits have bolstered the position of some relatively underdeveloped countries, such as Iran, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia, but others have suffered in the same process...
...The inescapable conclusion," says Kravis, "is that the benefits of economic progress have been confined to a minority of the world's population...
...Another illustration is the tax status of Americans working overseas, who have been exempt from U.S...
...The recent huge arms sale arranged by the Pentagon with Iran, a country with a 70 percent illiteracy rate, involving $2.5 billion in advanced planes, helicopters and missiles, is a reminder of the sobering fact that arms purchases in the Third World are growing twice as rapidly as its overall economic growth...
...Bankers Trust, as well as the Pentagon, is "bullish on Brazil" under junta auspices (quoting a recent widely placed ad by the bank)-its open door is wide, its support of U.S...
...Given the enormous initial income discrepancies between rich and poor, this means that the absolute income gains in the rich countries are huge, and steadily widening, relative to those in the poor countries: the 3.6 percent rate of per capita real gain for the developed countries, 1960-1971, applied to the 1959 per capita U.S...
...In 1947 the lowest fifth of families received 5.1 percent of money income, the highest 43.3 percent, Money Income Shares in the United States Adjusted and Unadjusted, for Selected Years Since World War II 19471 19721 19662 1966 Adjusted2 % % % % Lowest Fifth 5.1 5.4 4.3 3.7 Second Fifth 11.8 11.9 11.3 9.9 Third Fifth 16.7 17.5 17.3 16.1 Fourth Fifth 23.2 23.9 24.5 22.6 Highest Fifth 43.3 41.4 42.6 47.9 Top 5% 17.5 15.9 16.0 22.1 Sources: (1) U.S...
...With stable or increasing inequality, for example, there may be a decline in the number of individuals or families who fail to meet some minimum living standard- who fall below a "poverty line"-and are thus said to constitute a social ill and problem on the basis of some concept of need...
...Not only has growth been slow on the average among the poor countries, income distribution within them has tended to become more unequal...
...One factor is the extent to which the aggressive development and marketing of new consumer goods by rich countries to local poor country elites results in a perverse "international demonstration effect," which absorbs in autos, gasoline, roads, gadgets, and luxury housing resources that might otherwise contribute to basic development...
...The slight decline of money income of the top 5 percent and 20 percent of families reversed itself about 1967 and edged upward through 1972, and the share of the lowest fifth peaked in 1968-69...
...The community of interest rests on the need of Third World elites for external support, given their lack of any mass domestic constituency...
...But the options offered to them by their leaders, the media, and the political system, are exceedingly narrow, and the issue of "crime in the streets," a self-fulfilling product of benign neglect, preoccupies many...
...This article focuses on some of the recent evidence on changes in income distribution, both between and within countries, and some neglected factors which may have contributed to the results...
...The high and relatively stable degree of inequality in the U.S...
...The Dominican Republic provides an even clearer case study of the regressive impact of U.S...
...And its damaging effects have been greatest on the poorest (India, Pakistan, Sub-Saharan Africa), often suffering from elemental hunger and dependent on a shrinking external largesse...
...This was most clearly reflected in the 1974 budget, billed in Nixon double-speak as returning "power to the people...
...Average weekly spendable real earnings of production workers in the U.S...
...At least as important is the domination of the media by the upper 5 percent of income receivers and their refusal to focus on income distribution and tax inequities as first-order issues...
...the really depressed underclass is relatively small, but so is the group receiving the benefits from the system of creeping tax preferences...
...The "income counterrevolution" thus continues in a new form, by conservative policy default, which nevertheless amounts to an act of choice...
...vast numbers have sub-standard housing, inadequate medical care, and even nutritional deficiencies...
...A comparison of the provision of health services in China and North Vietnam, where they are organized systematically for prevention...
...investment stake, and tax subsidies and low wages have encouraged a considerable further influx...
...As absolute income rises certain basic physical needs and comforts can more readily be met, but even in a rich society like the U.S...
...The fiscal regression process was slowed up by the sapping of Nixon's political strength and the accompanying disarray of his allies...
...A continuing income revolution was thus envisaged both for the U.S...
...They pointed to capitalism and "free world" membership as an assured source of income and distributional improvement, and thus as the proper route for peoples who might otherwise be tempted by radical alternatives...
...Homes are rarely produced in the U.S...
...The stable shares of the pre-Nixon years was based on consensus politics plus expansionary full employment policies, rooted mainly in military expenditures...
...These computations were made from a 1967 Survey of Economic Opportunity and other sample data for 1966...
...The Table also suggests that the U.S...
...Adelman and Morris found socio-political factors to be of great importance in explaining cross-country differences in income distribution...
...Sources: (2) Joseph A. Pechman and Benjamin Okner, Who Bears the Tax Burden?, Brookings, 1974, p. 46...
...There are some indications of a regression in relative income shares in recent years...
...continues to provide substantial aid, including training, equipment and arms to the Dominican police and army...
...This assumption is contrary to well-known facts...
...It will be noted that the U.S...
...In brief, then, income distribution has tended to worsen in the poor countries of the Free World because rapid growth has generated wealth that has been used not to improve the condition of the masses but to serve the growing consumption needs of a neo-colonial elite...
...and its friends and clients...
...support...
...In Rostow's system, and in orthodox trade theory, "aid" and private international capital flows would serve as supplements helping to bring about sustained growth in the underdeveloped countries and "factor price equalization" as between rich and poor lands...
...Balaguer sent in the army to help straighten things out...
...A community of interest has united Third World elites and the leaders of the U.S., resulting in a huge influx of military and intelligence "aid" into the LDCs, occasional violent intrusions (Vietnam, the Dominican Republic), and a steady general support for conservative, increasingly military-dominated regimes...
...which may have added something personal to Meany's well-known acquiescence in the crushing of free unionism in America's client states...
...The truck drivers were more difficult to cope with than the peace marchers, and like Herbert Hoover before him, Nixon simply exhausted the supply of feasible conservative options...
...Department of Labor, earnings data show "a slow but persistent trend toward greater inequality in a period, 1958-1970, of steadily rising incomes...
...Even a huge misadventure such as Vietnam failed to loosen the grip of the military-industrial complex on our disposition of resources...
...With the post-election dismantling of his jerry-built structure of controls, Nixon ran out of easy opponents and opportunistic policies...
...has been the leader in this process...
...Even the Wall Street Journal noted that "the [U.S.] embassy has done nothing publicly to dissociate itself from the terror...
...As Philip Stern points out in his Rape of the Taxpayer, only 1 in 100 taxpayers gets any substantial income from capital gains, and only 1 in 10 gets any such income, yet the Congress persists in taxing capital gains only half as severely as wage and salary income...
...These middle- and lower-middle-classes have become more restive in the last few years under the pressure of inflation, declining real wages and the political lessons of Watergate...
...The less aggressive, more open, but equally conservative Mr...
...Our results proved to be at variance with our preconceptions...
...slightly more unequal than in 1972...
...Belief in a continuation of the revolution was also based on the greater inequality observed in poor countries, which brought forth Rostowian-type stage theories in which growth would lead to affluence and equality as part of a "natural" process applicable throughout the world of free markets...
...figure of $2,830, represents a per person increment of $102 a year...
...Data extending beyond Asia on rates of growth of real per capita income for the period 1950-1971 indicate that the rich countries of the "free world" continue to grow somewhat faster than the poor...
...With roughly constant shares since 1947, real incomes of the lowest fifth have risen in proportion to the total, and numbers below the poverty line have diminished...
...The preservation of their position has required a costly diversion of resources into the military (the "insurance policy") and a subordination of development and welfare needs to the consumption-oriented demands of U.S...
...The rather modest 1929-1945 transformation, furthermore, was essentially a redistribution from the very top to the middle-income classes, with the relative position of the bottom fifth unchanged...
...The result is that we have an inflation more rapid than would probably have prevailed under a McGovern Administration...
...Among the many, ways of looking at the fractured world of our day, one that has become commonplace is the division between the "rich," "developed" nations and the "poor," "under" or "less developed" countries (LDCs) of the "Third World...
...Even before Nixon, tight money under Johnson had pushed interest rates up to new heights, with direct upward income redistribution effects and a depressant (regressive) impact on new middle-income housing-lower-income housing was already negligible...
...The "one world" of Second World War euphoria has obviously not materialized...
Vol. 101 • January 1975 • No. 11
