POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY" AND THE WELFARE STATE
Harrington, Michael
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels described "conservative, or bourgeois, socialism." A part of the bourgeoisie [they wrote] wants to remedy social grievances in order to ensure the...
...It has the same effect as a direct expenditure of government money, since lowering one group's rate effectively increases the rates of everyone else...
...and the 0.6 percent of the people with incomes over $50,000 got 0.9 percent of the cuts...
...and in the end public opinion will veer their way...
...And third, there was the response to the social demands of the '60s which, though "pell-mell and piecemeal," led the government to make a commitment "not only to the creation of a substantial welfare state but to redress the impact of all economic and social inequalities as well...
...opposition to the direction of government spending (public investment and subsidizing competition...
...In 1974, a study carried out by the National Farmers Union documented the consequence of the government's pursuit of corporate priorities in the fields of America...
...As the economist Lester Thurow assembled the data: U.S...
...These figures, it should be noted, were computed on the basis of very conservative assumptions—the fact that imputed rental value of an owner-occupied house was not considered to be a tax expenditure and neither was the failure to count in the accrued value of capital gains during a tax year...
...As the Joint Congressional Committee staff computed the price for nonproduction in 1970, there were $5.2 billion in direct federal outlays to the farmers, and food cost the consumer an extra $4.5 billion in higher prices due to the scarcity he had already subsidized in his role as a taxpayer...
...POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY" & THE WELFARE STATE 247 This is nearly a billion bushels more than the actual total harvest of 7,669 million bushels of wheat in the U.S...
...Since corporations are the primary economic units in the society, such countercyclical tax policy must, as Keynes so well understood, be kind to executives...
...Moreover, it is a mechanistic and silly economic determinism to try to reduce all of the complicated international politics of the postwar decades to a reflex of a militaristic economy...
...Moreover, as will be seen, these tens of billions of taxpayers' dollars made an important contribution to the inflation of the 1970s and helped limit America's ability to respond to the crime of global malnutrition...
...Over a period of three decades, the government helped build 10 million units for the better-off and 650,000 units of low-cost housing for the poor...
...So, most of the $14 billion was a handsome, if unconscious, gift to the wealthy from the lesswelloff...
...The Council was, of course, talking about the private-profit criterion...
...The welfare state, Wilensky asserts, has an egalitarian effect, because the "pay out is typically more progressive than the financing is regressive...
...This latter policy benefited mainly the largest landowners and producers...
...Over 30 years ago, Michael Kalecki shrewdly anticipated the problems that would arise in such an undertaking...
...So, ". . . if the major historic turn in the last quarter of a century has been the subordination of economic function to societal goals, the political order necessarily becomes the control system of society...
...Second, he treats the welfare state narrowly, concentrating on social security programs, but ignoring the tens of billions paid out in the dole for the rich in the Internal Revenue Code as well as the gains made by the corporate class as a result of federal economic management...
...Here one sees vividly how the capitalist structure of the welfare state was the decisive reason for the great Inflation-Recession of the '70s...
...It is the notion of industrial (or postindustrial) society associated with thinkers like Raymond Aron and Daniel Bell...
...All of this is clearly related to the growth of the welfare state, particularly in its role as manager of the economy...
...I t is a scandal that the tax system is not, as is so often claimed, progressive...
...It's a ridiculous situation," he said, "for us to be squeezing down essential public activities in order not to touch private investment and tourist spending—but apparently that's life...
...In 1975, the projected federal budget for 1976 contained no less than $91.8 billion in tax expenditures...
...Those billions of dollars had been assigned to the housing of the affluent on the grounds that their discarded dwellings would eventually "trickle down" to the poor...
...This was, and is, clearly the case in energy policy...
...Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc...
...That welfare state, then, is not a new form of society, any more than Bismarckian "socialism" was...
...Joseph Pechman and Benjamin Okner did a careful study of the tax burden in the United States...
...That conclusion is wrong, but Wilensky honestly arrived at it on the basis of a flawed, but revealing, method...
...One of the quintessential domains of the "new men" was and is economic policy...
...Its giant American enterprises are vertically integrated and part of an international corporate conspiracy that has existed since the 1920s...
...Military spending has the marvelous quality of conferring subsidized profits on inefficient corporations producing goods that do not, like the power generated by the Tennessee Valley Authority, compete with the output of other firms in the consumer market...
...This simply shows that the rich have most of their holdings in long-term assets, which are not subject to income tax, and that they have a positive incentive to minimi7e their income...
...As of now, however, it is primarily and fundamentally capitalist, and this is the key to the secret history of the great economic and social crisis of the '70s...
...248 MICHAEL HARRINGTON Using the government's figures, the top I percent of the people get "only" 4.8 percent of the annual income...
...And that was, not simply in theory but in fact, the one that the government had followed...
...The financiers and Wall Streeters who participated in considerable numbers in the antiwar campaigns of 1968 understood this even if some self-proclaimed Marxists did not...
...it is, rather, a new way of protecting the old order...
...For instance, the deductibility of mortgage interest and property taxes yielded homeowners a tax subsidy of almost $13 billion—almost ten times as much as was spent on public housing assistance in 1975...
...Predictably, the richest states—New "POSE-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY" & THE WELFARE STATE 25 1 York, California, Massachusetts—take a maximum advantage of this law...
...The government proudly and openly states that these are motivated by capitalist considerations...
...In the economic sector there is a shift from goods-producing to a service economy...
...So, it would be well to outline how the patterns that are writ so large in energy policy apply to all of big business in the United States...
...In 1975, the Treasury prepared, at the request of Senator Walter Mondale, an analysis of tax expenditures as they showed up in 1974 spending...
...Either figure is outrageous...
...It may well be that the poor do not get more benefits from it, because they die earlier and work longer than anyone else in the society...
...only they have an old, and quite capitalist, content...
...Therefore, the accomplishments of agricultural technology became, quite literally, a fetter upon the system...
...There are, Bell says, five "dimensions, or components" of the term, postindustrial society...
...Marx and Engels glimpsed the essential mechanism of this phenomenon long ago (which is hardly to argue that they said the last word on it...
...This means, Bell holds, that "the long-run historical trend in Western society" is "the move away from governance by political economy to governance by political philosophy . . . a turn to non-capitalist modes of thought...
...Business, he said, is opposed to government spending for three reasons: a dislike of government intervention in the economy, as such...
...It cost billions of dollars not to produce those bushels of wheat in a hungry, partly starving, world...
...If the dominant figures of the past 100 years have been the entrepreneur, the businessman and the industrial executive," Bell argues, the "new men" are the scientists, the mathematicians, the economists and the engineers of the new intellectual technology...
...For instance, realized capital gains are taxed at Income, it will he noted, is less maldistributed than wealth...
...However, the basic and intolerable fact is not really in dispute...
...Most government statistics omit capital gains as an element in family income...
...There are 46 percent of the poverty-stricken in the South, but only 17 percent of the Medicaid payments are made there, and the three affluent states disburse 50 percent of the funds...
...One might infer that this is the case because of the political power of wealth in America...
...In 1969, the Wall Street Journal reported that there were $2.5 billion in subsidies for the urban freeways, which facilitated the commuting of the privileged, 246 MICHAEL HARRINGTON and only $175 million for mass transit...
...In that year, the two-tenths of 1 percent of the taxpayers who had incomes of more than $100,000 a year received 12.6 percent of the subsidies in a number of major categories...
...More to the point, the rationale whereby the government redistributes burdens from the wealthy to the working people is that it is necessary to make the capitalist system work...
...As the Council of Economic Advisers put it in its 1969 report, "Investing in new housing for low-income families—particularly in big cities—is usually a losing proposition...
...the poorest states do the least...
...the central cities were turned into devastated regions instead...
...And yet, if capitalism is not inevitably and intrinsically militarist, the great fact remains that arms spending is peculiarly congenial to it...
...When capital gains are realized when stock is sold and a profit is taken —they are income...
...The other antecedents of planned capitalism are either briefly mentioned or ignored...
...Indeed, if economic function has been subordinated to "societal" goals, that might even imply that it is socialist...
...So, just as Kalecki predicted, he opted for a tax cut that would benefit the corporations more than anyone else...
...They want to have the existing society, but without the revolutionary, transforming elements...
...John Kennedy was forced to learn this depressing fact during his brief presidency...
...John Maynard Keynes understood this point in his own way...
...But, if the experts are thus in the process of replacing the capitalists as decision-makers, surely the outcome of those decisions, made by new men on a new calculus, must be observably different from "POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY" & THE WELFARE STATE 245 those of the old order...
...A carefully documented and even ingenious study by an academic moderate, Harold Wilensky's The Welfare State and Equality, disputes the kind of argument I have made...
...Agricultural productivity had grown enormously and was "overproductive" for a society of restricted, maldistributed income...
...It is utterly dominated by "political economy" (corporations) and not by "political philosophy" (liberal technocrats...
...The theory was that the government thereby encouraged people to save, which in turn provided investment funds for new jobs, and so on...
...The basic values of society [prior to the postindustrial shift] have been focused on business institutions, the largest rewards have been found in business, and the strongest power has been held by the business community, although today that power is to some extent shared within the factory by the trade-union, and regulated within the society by the political order...
...However, if capital gains are included, then the income inequality in the United States increases dramatically...
...This is an example of a new intellectual technology, of the rise of nonmarket forces and so on...
...Moreover, we do know that whites use Medicaid more than blacks (because of the shortage of doctors in black areas) and that the elderly with a $15,000 income get twice as much from Medicare as those with less than $5,000 a year...
...The capital gains that Pechman and Okner computed are "accrued"—that is, they include both gains that were turned into cash and those that were held as part of a continuing investment...
...The privileged treatment of the capital gains of the rich was worth $14 billion in 1971...
...tial sociological and political ideas of the times...
...That would make businessmen less grumpy about bureaucratic interference, since they would make money from it...
...By one stroke of a statistical definition, Wilensky thus biases his cases...
...The President of the United States was bowing to the power relationships of an economy dominated by private corporations...
...occupationally, there is the "pre-eminence" of the professional and technical class...
...And the top 1.2 per cent got a third more than the bottom 46.9 percent...
...First, there was the Great Depression, which forced the recognition that the direction of the economy is "a central governmental task...
...There are indeed changed structures...
...Indeed, there is a contemporary example of the theory of "bourgeois socialism," which is one of the most influenThis article is a condensation of a chapter from The Twilight of Capitalism, by Michael Harrington, copyright © by Michael Harrington...
...When, for instance, John Kennedy wanted to get the economy moving again in the early '60s, he could have done so, as Kenneth Galbraith and the AFL-CIO urged, by direct outlays for social investments...
...A tax expenditure occurs when Washington decides that some particular class of taxpayers need pay no tax, or will be forgiven a portion of their tax...
...Although Bell does not make the point explicitly (he waffles on this count), these assertions add up to the theory that the postindustrial society is also postcapitalist...
...Instead [he went on], I am dealing here with tendencies, and have sought to explore the meaning and consequences of those tendencies if the changes in social structure that I describe were to work themselves to their logical limits...
...He wrote that he had resisted the impulse to make too large a generalization...
...In theory—and in the imagination of most Americans as well as in the propaganda of big business—the tax system is progressive, if this were indeed the case, one would expect that the trend toward the concentration of wealth would be offset by the various federal, state and local levies...
...As a result of this general tendency of the political economy of a capitalist society, all of the tax reductions between 1964 and 1973 favored the rich...
...For that matter, the Pentagon's share of the Gross National Product has declined somewhat in recent years...
...the more typical multinationals are involved in Europe and Canada...
...In fact, as Benjamin Okner pointed out to the Joint Economic Committee, only a small and declining portion of corporate investment in 1971 came from external financing...
...The economy of the United States was thus stimulated by pampering the rich and slighting the poor...
...First of all, there is the case of federal housing policy during the past 40 years...
...In 1971, the 21 percent of the largest farms received approximately 80 percent of the cash receipts from farming...
...In reality, it is a sector dominated by gigantic agribusinesses...
...The macroeconomic planning of the welfare state, then, follows, and must follow, capitalist priorities...
...it provided nothing for subsistence farmers and a pittance for small units...
...In theory, such policies are supposed to stimulate business and individuals to act in a way that will promote the common good...
...In computing the regressivity of the financing, he excludes capital gains and expense accounts...
...The federal tax system is thus not progressive, but proportional "and therefore has little effect on the distribution of income...
...But even with these definitions, which made the Internal Revenue code look fairer than it is, there were shocking notations...
...A second case in point is food...
...but important at this moment is that the very fact that it is made indicates that Bell's "as if' image of his thesis is an escape clause, not a description of his work...
...It thus neatly synthesizes the worst potential of both capitalism and socialism...
...Its prime function is to facilitate countercyclical policy, to expand demand when there is excess capacity and unemployment, to restrain it when the opposite is the case...
...It is financed by both Washington and by the individual states...
...If you work them into the surly, obstinate, terrified mood, of which domestic animals, wrongly handled, are so capable, the nation's burden will not get carried to market...
...And this is so because the macroeconomics of the welfare state, for all the momentous changes that have taken place, are still filled with a capitalist content...
...This thesis, it will be noted, is essentially a generalization of the Keynesian experience...
...thus, the growth in the value of the equity held by the rich in boom years is not counted...
...This is a point that deserves some attention in its own right...
...However, when one turns from the way in which taxes are collected to the manner in which tax expenditures are made, there is no need for inference...
...In such a setting, he could—particularly if he had been much more powerful in the Congress than he was at that time—have acted otherwise...
...and it would not put public money into public investments, nor would it underwrite the consumption of the masses...
...That, however, would have pitted him against the political power of business (and of reaction in general...
...Assuming yields of only two thirds of the national average for the grain best suited to the various lands held out of production," the study said, "the five-year total would have reached the equivalent of 8,609 million bushels of wheat...
...Before noting their conclusion, an important, but unfortunately abstruse, methodological point has to be made...
...It too has followed corporate priorities...
...He confronted this reality when he tried to deal with the balance-of-payments issue...
...It is much more profound than that, and one can concede Kennedy's bona fides without harm to the essential point...
...In fact, the way in which taxes are collected is only most mildly progressive (if it is progressive at all...
...That is his and their right...
...This does not, however, mean that a massive arms sector is a necessity for capitalism, a precondition for its continuing existence...
...In fact, as Senator William Proxmire pointed out when releasing a Joint Economic Committee analysis, "our studies have shown that many subsidy programs do not work well economically, they are often directed at outmoded or nonexistent objectives, they "POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY" & THE WELFARE STATE 249 redistribute income to the affluent, and in many cases their costs far exceeded their benefits to the society as a whole...
...Proudhon had proposed that the government provide cheap credit for cooperatives and small business...
...To be sure, the welfare state also contains contradictory tendencies, the seeds, not of one new order, but of two...
...The figures are difficult to pin down—this is after all the "dirty little secret" of American democracy—and some of the most reliable are more than ten years old...
...What did this government agency mean by "profitable" in this statement...
...And even social security itself refracts the basic unfairness of America's class structure...
...The tax system in the United States is one of the most important instrumentalities of corporate values...
...It would have the collateral to prove that it was a good risk and the expertise to take advantage of the cheap money...
...Considerations like these led the Brookings Institution, a center of moderate, pragmatic liberalism, to conclude that there is no redistribution of wealth from federal programs for "transferring" income—theoretically, but only theoretically—from the rich to the poor...
...both are only the different sides of the same golden coin...
...In the '30s, when the Depression wreaked havoc on the farm, Washington embarked upon a program of planned, socialized scarcity, even though people were (and still are) hungry...
...And second, the benefits of the public expenditures are assigned in inverse proportion to need, with the corporations and the rich getting most and the poor least...
...This is perhaps the most obvious single case of how the business pursuit of profit is institutionalized in welfarestate policy and takes precedence over the most basic of all economic processes, the production of food...
...Thus, the trend toward agricultural concentration—the destruction of that sturdy, independent yeoman of the Jeffersonian myth and his replacement by a corporation—was expedited at enormous federal expense...
...And yet it turns out that, even under a liberal Administration like Kennedy's, those new men are forced, willy-nilly, to follow corporate priorities when they elaborate the government's program...
...This is the only form of income that is not taxed when it is made, and this fact, along with the weakness of the inheritance laws, allows the rich to evade billions in taxes...
...A part of the bourgeoisie [they wrote] wants to remedy social grievances in order to ensure the stability of bourgeois society...
...it was, for instance, admitted by Richard Nixon's Council of Economic Advisers in 1974...
...in the United States was $18,000 in 1964...
...If the adjusted figures are used, and if the reasonable assumption is made that corporation taxes are shifted, in whole or in part, to consumers, then the effective rate of taxation on the very rich is only 5 percent more than that paid by most families...
...the 46.9 percent of the taxpayers whose incomes ranged up to $10,000 that year, got a mere 16.6 percent...
...the crucial decisions regarding the growth of the economy and its balance will come from government, but they will be based on the government's sponsorship of research and development...
...Kalecki's reading of the political dimensions of Keynesian policy in a capitalist economy proved prophetic, above all, in the United States...
...So, in many cases the argument for a given deduction was clearly fallacious...
...Thus I am writing what Hans Vahinger called an "as if," a fiction, a logical construction of what could be, against which the future social reality 244 can be compared in order to see what intervened to change society in the direction it did take...
...Some 16.1 percent of the tax returns in that period came from people with incomes under $3,000...
...It would be equally silly to ignore the fact that it provides a remarkable organizing insight for the analysis of some of the events of the past century...
...One of the ways to deal with this corporate hostility to government intervention, Kalecki argued, was to have the state stimulate and subsidize private investment...
...the top I percent have 10.5 percent of the income, but the top 0.5 percent have 25.8 percent of the wealth...
...Businessmen, he said, must be treated more gently than politicians...
...He continually makes assertions about facts, not tendencies, i.e., that the welfare state seeks "to redress the impact of all economic and social inequalities...
...The government and the "societal goals" that it articulates are subordinated to private purpose—not the other way around, as Bell thinks...
...When one thinks of American agriculture, one usually envisions a mythic image of the yeoman farmer...
...and the way in which tax expenditures are allocated favors the rich with billions and even tens of billions in subsidies a year...
...That claim, as will be seen, is simply not true...
...This did not mean, as many on the left would probably assume, that Kennedy had "sold out...
...and fear of the undisciplined work force that would result from a fullemployment economy...
...These big businesses on the land have been the prime recipients of tens of billions of dollars in federal subsidy...
...So, the total cost in 1970 to the people of the United States was $10 billion to keep crops from being planted...
...lower rates than any other form of income...
...And finally, Wilensky is much too optimistic about the progressiveness of the welfare state "pay out...
...First, it stimulates private investment and thereby allows the executives to determine the actual form that the public expenditure will take...
...Among the "farmers" in America, one finds I.T.T., the John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Co., Tenneco (which used to be the Tennessee Gas and Transmission Co...
...It was, after all, "sensible"—without a capitalist definition of the term—to orient policy toward the most successful, and politically powerful, producers...
...while those with incomes of $1 million get $640,000 a year from it...
...In this post-Keynesian era, the tax system is not conceived of as a mechanism for collecting and disbursing public revenues...
...That was not "life," but life under capitalist conditions, and the argument Kennedy faced—that government must sacrifice its priorities to profit in order to provide for investment—is still very much with us in the '70s...
...At the same time, the corporations got bonanzas in the form of investment tax credits...
...In the post-industrial society, production and business decisions will be subordinated to, or will derive from, other forces in society...
...It was an almost classic acting-out of the scenario described by Marx in Volume I of Das Kapital...
...Farm animals were killed, farmers were paid for not growing crops...
...Acritical point that allows one to check the worth of the postindustrial categories of analysis concerns the ruling class in contemporary society...
...But, 250 MICHAEL HARRINGTON then, even when the system adopts pacific measures of government intervention—and does so under liberal auspices—it has the same point of maintaining, and extending, the status quo...
...In a speech defending his policy before the Economic Club of New York, he waxed so conservative that Galbraith said that he had given "the most Republican speech since McKinley," and Time Magazine noted that he sounded like the National Association of Manufacturers...
...the axial principle of the society is "the centrality of theoretical knowledge as the source of innovation and of policy formulation for the society...
...All of these facts are at odds with Bell's theory of a postindustrial society...
...So macroeconomic policy is procorporate in two basic ways...
...Indeed, this point helps to explain the function of the warfare state within the welfare state...
...Second, there was state subsidy of the new sciencebased technology, which became a decisive factor in the 1950s...
...But then, Bell would argue that the very terms "capitalist" and "socialist" have become, if not meaningless, not very useful and that he, and his colleagues, are inventing a new vocabulary to deal with a new reality...
...The relative shares of wealth are at least as maldistributed today as they were at the end of the Great Depression...
...Since this condition usually is fulfilled only in exceptional crisis circumstances, the normal tendency of the welfare state—even with the "new men" admittedly much more in evidence and conscious planning taking on a greater importance— is to follow the old capitalist priorities in a new, sophisticated way...
...And the average investment in reproducible farm capital (machinery, livestock, etc...
...there is technological forecasting...
...during those five years...
...Between 1960 and 1974, the number of farms in America decreased by 25 percent, but the larger units (with more than $20,000 a year in sales) went up by 80 percent...
...Medicaid is the federal program designed to bring health care to the poor...
...The function of this "socialism," they went on to say, was not the abolition of bourgeois relations of production, which is possible only in a revolutionary way, but administrative improvements, which can go forward on the basis of this mode of production, which thus alter nothing in the relationship of capital and labor, but in the best case lessen the cost of bourgeois domination and reduce its public budget...
...It informs all of macroeconomic governmental policy in the United States...
...in part, it expressed the knowledge (or, at the time, the intuition) that military "socialism" is profoundly antisocialist...
...That did not happen...
...they received 7.9 percent of the tax cuts...
...First of all, there has been no trend toward equality in the United States during the past generation (i.e., since 1945) and it is questionable whether there was any equality trend at all during the twentieth century...
...For Bell, three events led to the emergence of the postindustrial society...
...Moreover, oil is the only instance in which there has been a dramatic increase in American overseas investment in the Third World...
...All of this made good commercial sense even though it helped perpetrate the social disaster of the disintegration of the central cities, the consequent isolation of the racial and ethnic minorities, the subversion of the passenger rail system, and so forth...
...As Seymour Melman has pointed out, Germany and Japan did quite well after World War II, even though defeat deprived them of the right and duty of wasting a good portion of their substance on the means of destruction...
...They were only 4.7 percent of the returns in the $20,000-to$50,000 category, but they received 10.3 percent of the benefits...
...Therefore, "what the traditional classes fought out in the economic realm . . . is now transferred to the political realm...
...In fact, this is not the case...
...In the course of empirically challenging Bell's theory by showing that the results it predicts do not take place, not even incipiently, a basic proposition will begin to emerge...
...Gulf and Western, Boeing Aircraft, and other giant corporations...
...The businessmen who refused to let Roosevelt engage in social spending at a rate that would have ended the Great Depression became patriotic "dollar a year" men as soon as war broke out...
...But this systematic bias does not operate simply in this or that case...
...In Latin America it is less than $500...
...But capital gains, as we have seen, are the most inequitable and massively subsidized source of the privilege of the wealthy...
...The only problem with this humble agnosticism is that Bell does not act upon it...
...If that were done, Engels wrote to Marx, the workers' societies and small producers would not be able to qualify for credit at the state bank, but big business would...
...When the government intervenes into an economy dominated by private corporations to promote the common good, those corporations will normally be the prime beneficiaries of that intervention...
...It would be nonsense to suggest that this passing apercu of Marx and Engels (which appears in a rich, but often unread, section of the Manifesto) anticipated all the developments of the welfare state...
...It could not possibly have been referring to a social conception of increased benefits, since the process it was describing had exacted a high public cost in crime, welfare expenses and, above all, wrecked human lives...
...Military spending is only one instrument of capitalist survival, albeit an important and fearful one...
...The planners may be liberals, or even socialists, but they will not be able to carry out policies that run counter to the crucial institutions of the society unless they have the support of a determined mass movement willing to fight for structural change...
...More generally, the deductions—or tax expenditures— in the Internal Revenue Code provide 10 percent of the benefits for the 50 percent of the people at the bottom of the society and 15 percent of them for the 3 percent at the top...
...Bell writes, "A post-industrial society . . . is increasingly a communal society wherein public mechanisms rather than the market become the allocators of goods, and public choice, rather than individual demand, becomes the arbiter of services...
...Bell introduced his analysis of this evolution in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society with a modest disclaimer...
...The migration of the middle class and the rich to the suburbs, as I documented in Socialism, has been subsidized by Washington...
...o 252...
...2 People with incomes of $20,000 to $25,000 a year, a Congressional Committee reported in 1972, receive $100 in benefits from this provision...
...But there is no guarantee that they will...
...The tragic, unconscionable American intervention in Vietnam, to take but one case in point, was also senseless from a rationally calculated capitalist (or imperialist) point of view...
...Between 1968 and 1973—that is, in the five years immediately prior to an incredible inflation of food costs in America and the emergence of starvation as a reality in the poor countries— Washington paid $15.5 billion to farmers in return for their idling 233 million acres of land that would have produced an estimated grain crop of 23 million metric tons...
...Distribution of Family Wealth 1962 % of Total Families % of Total Family by Wealth Wealth Lowest 25.4 0.0 Next 31.5 6.6 Next 24.4 17.2 Top 18.7 76.2 (Top 7.5) (59.1) (Top 2.4) (44.4) (Top .5) (25.8) So, the wealthiest Americans-0.5 percent of the families—own more (25.8 percent of the total) than the bottom 81.3 percent (who own 23.8 percent of the country...
...Indeed the most profitable investment is often one that demolishes homes of low-income families to make room for business and high-income families...
...and decison-making takes place by means of a new "intellectual technology...
...Instead of direct outlays for health, mass transportation, education, and the like, there are tax cuts that allow the private sector to build and sell whatever it pleases without any reference to social usefulness...
...If, however, the factual assertions that underpin the new definition—say, that economic function has been subordinated to "societal goals"—are inaccurate, then Bell's linguistic innovation is invalid too...
...but all of the institutional, structural pressures in American society urged him to act as he did...
...using the adjusted figures, their take goes up to 10.5 percent.' Pechman's and Okner's point is recognized even by the conservatives in government, although they prefer, for obviously political reasons, to publish statistics that play down the maldistribution of income...
...In part their reaction was sincere...
...I t might be argued that oil is an exceptional case...
Vol. 23 • July 1976 • No. 3
