The Politics of Rich and Poor:
Flaherty, Francis
BOOKS Where the money went During the 1980s, yachts became so common that the Atlantic and Pacific oceans received their own area codes (871 and 872, for those with a need to know). At the...
...But in his latest work, The Politics of Rich and Poor, he sees in statistics and stories like these persuasive signs that the era he helped usher in may soon end...
...Only time will tell...
...Will the nation soon be similarly disgusted, at last outraged by the immoral coexistence of the two central eighties symbols-the billionaire and the bag lady...
...Francis Flaherty liberal policies...
...From the cloth-coat Republicanism of Nixon they have evolved into the mink-coat elitism of Ivan Boesky and Betsy Bloomingdale that is as remote from the average American- and as politically vulnerable-as the Bernstein fete...
...Phillips explains how the traditional Republican policy of tight money is a boon to (rich) creditors, for instance, and how economic deregulation during the Reagan years "favored upper-bracket Americans...
...He believes the nation is in a Republican "capitalist heyday" similar to the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties...
...Americans who had embraced FDR's Social Security could only shake their heads at radical chic...
...Moreover, the book has special dimensions...
...He also assesses the Reagan economic record and finds it woefully wanting...
...As for his cycle theory, it is hard to prove or disprove...
...All three eras feature such traits as conservatism, tax reduction, bad times for labor, increased debt, entrepreneurialism, polarization of wealth, economic deregulation, and suffering in the farming and mining sectors...
...The rich have gotten too rich and the poor too poor, and the people are restless...
...And in 1988, despite strong voter response to Jesse Jackson's populism, Michael Dukakis played the centrist and gave George Bush the White House...
...George Will noted that the 1988 federal budget interest payments constituted "a transfer of wealth from labor to capital unprecedented in American history...
...He pointedly asked, "If a Democrat can't make something of that, what are Democrats for...
...To the poor, though, money wasn't speaking at all...
...A 1987 poll found that nearly 60 percent of Americans believed that the rich are under-taxed...
...Finally, the book has a moral heft...
...In any case, perhaps the Phillips book and the splash it had made will galvanize Democrats to seize the cudgel and rap the rich...
...The Republicans lost the Senate in 1986 because of disgruntled Midwest farmers, and Republican support among the young fell a significant 5 percent between 1984 and 1988...
...Phillips does not predict when the political turnabout will occur, though he trou-blingly observes that a cataclysm like the Depression is often the immediate cause...
...lady...
...Money used to talk," gossip columnist Suzy said of the era...
...Republicans were incredulous...
...The Republicans now suffer from analogous excess, Phillips says...
...While the Forbes 400 tripled their net worth, the United States became, in Senator Moynihan's words, "the first society in history in which the poorest group...
...As the numbers pile up page after page, the reader becomes repelled by the obscene aggrandizement of so much by so few with so many in want...
...by its end that multiple reached a stunning 93...
...Since the mid-1980s, they have been the stuff of much commentary...
...the lionizing of the robber barons and of Donald Trump and Lee Iacocca-are often striking...
...Democrats are "history's second most enthusiastic capitalist party," the author declares...
...The historical answer, Phillips says, is that the Democrats are for what the Republicans are for, only a little less so...
...Even as Michael Milken pulled down his $550-million per annum, the poorest tenth of U.S...
...During the Reagan years the "party of the little people" largely punted, failing to protest plutocratic Republican policies...
...The result was that Richard Nixon, railing against limousine liberals, was borne into the White House by the Silent Majority...
...However, the parallels Phillips draws among his three Republican heydays-homelessness now and in the Gilded Age...
...This modest conclusion is a prudent one, too, for who can gauge the precise domestic political impact of the savings and loan crisis, the revolution in the Communist world, U.S...
...First, it sharply indicts the Democrats for failing to follow their own philosophy...
...Jimmy Carter, for instance, laid the groundwork for Reagan by appointing Paul Volcker as Federal Reserve chairman, raising Social Security taxes, and unleashing economic deregulation...
...Only time will tell...
...Now it shrieks...
...Second, the Phillips book nicely sketches the mechanisms by which Republican policy, both now and in earlier times, has helped the wealthy and hurt the poor...
...Big-buck television shows like "Dallas" and "Falcon Crest" lost viewers and, in May 1989, even the Wall Street Journal said, "the message is clear: Rich is out...
...is the children...
...The Democrats' one heyday, the New Deal era, was predictably marked by progressive taxation, welfare programs, economic regulation, and other THE POLITICS OF RICH AND POOR Wealth and the American Electorate in the Reagan Aftermath Kevin Phillips Random House, $19.95, 262 pp...
...By the 1970s, for instance, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal had evolved into Black Panther parties at Leonard Bernstein's Manhattan digs...
...They do not interfere much with capitalist momentum, but wait for excesses and the inevitable populist reaction...
...While such Reagan measures as reducing the top income-tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent clearly benefit the wealthy, Phillips explains the workings of less patent preferments...
...But in framing and documenting the issues fully, Phillips has crystallized the debate so well that the book will probably be its basic text...
...For proof, Phillips cites the growing signs of discontent...
...And, in certain Manhattan precincts, a millionaire was redefined in the 1980s as one whose annual income exceeded $1 million...
...Indeed, if it takes a Republican analyst to write the Phillips book, what are Democrats for...
...global decline, and the like...
...Champions of a third political party-for the powerless-strongly agree...
...Some critics call the approach excessive, but it nicely echoes the excesses of the era...
...Eventually, one party will always replace the other and anyone can call the transition a cycle...
...citizens saw their real income shrink nearly 15 percent from 1977 to 1988...
...Phillips offers so many statistics on rich and poor that the numbers soon benumb...
...As in prior capitalist heydays, there was a burst of real technological innovation and entrepreneurship, Phillips says, but unlike in prior periods the profits were more paper than real...
...Phillips did not discover the polarization of wealth and growing disgruntlement, of course...
...Instead, he concludes only that "as the rich grew richer, all that could be said was that more and more Americans were beginning to notice...
...history...
...These cycles, Phillips suggests, have a natural life, growing from a genuine popular perception, maturing, and then spoiling as the party in power becomes elite and remote from those who put them in office...
...Kevin Phillips is a political analyst whose 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority, provided the basic strategy for the past twenty years of predominantly Republican rule...
...At the decade's start, CEOs earned 40 times the average worker income...
...The great things promised were not delivered," Phillips declares, blaming Reagan for speeding America's global decline and the like...
...Phillips has a cyclical view of U.S...
...in a 1989 survey voters ranked poverty as the nation's second biggest problem...
Vol. 117 • October 1990 • No. 17
