Dear Editor
Dear Editor 'Charting America's Future' Gus Tyler concludes the eighth installment of "Charting America's Future" ("Farewell to Fairness," NL, June 28) by warning that continued inequality "sooner...
...Louis...
...The evidence suggests that there is a tradeoff between social equality and economic equality, that both cannot be had in full measure...
...Indeed, we have sacrificed one to the other...
...This is a consequence of rising North American agricultural productivity, coupled with a stagnant industrial picture...
...The result was unemployment and deindustrialization...
...There is little to prevent this process from continuing, since any gain of the lowest quintile would have to come at the expense of classes that are more capable politically of defending the status quo than the poor are of effecting a transfer of wealth...
...James McKnight...
...When 1 listen to music 1 like to hear a nice melody...
...To begin with, it must be recognized that those who would benefit most from this possess hardly any resources for effective political action, whether measured by organizational affiliation or electoral participation...
...If so, it may not be possible to raise the income levels of the lower class by any kind of public policy...
...During the "dollar shortage" period of U.S...
...Dear Editor 'Charting America's Future' Gus Tyler concludes the eighth installment of "Charting America's Future" ("Farewell to Fairness," NL, June 28) by warning that continued inequality "sooner or later...
...Unable to win strikes under New Deal labor legislation, industry played paper tiger at home and lost one strike after another...
...As for "Flattening the Progressive Tax" by James K. Galbraith and Greg Davidson, the authors are only correct in part...
...These and other important aspects of the problem have to be con fronted i f we are ever to come closer to the goal of equality...
...Their inability to mobilize in the past has fatally weakened attempts to move toward economic equality...
...labor movement...
...domestic profit margins-well above the point that could support full employment and production in the face of our eroding monopoly in world markets...
...Durham...
...Yet he omits one point that may be as important as any he includes—theroleoftheU.S...
...If wishes were horses, beggars could ride...
...It is also uncertain, given existing technologies, whether the real comparative advantage of the Third World remains in staple crop agriculture, as Tyler suggests, rather than industrialization...
...And Galbraith-Davidson do not prove to us that the existing degree of progressivity is ideal (or that it is too low) when the unobserved disincentive effects of high marginal rates are taken into account...
...Capital flight is an aspect of the same problem...
...They are quite right in implying that for a flatter rate tax to retain the present degree of measured progressivity, either personal exemptions would have to be so generous as to involve substantial revenue loss, or the flat rates would have to be so high as to drain the middle classes...
...But I take substantial exception to the Administration's handling of many "safety net" problems on the expenditure side (which is not the topic of the Galbraith-Davidson essay...
...Moreover, the fact is that what Americans have embraced since the beginnings of the Republic has been social, not economic equality...
...Yet he offers neither a criterion for determining when inequality becomes excessive, nor a strategy for achieving equality through our political system...
...domestic wages—along with real U.S...
...For if the poor are to receive a larger slice of the pie—say, an increase in the share of income from 5 per cent to 10 per cent—then some other group has to sacrifice...
...My personal opinion on this: 1 agree with the Reagan Administration thai progressivity has gone too far, "dipping deeply into large fortunes with a sieve" and diverting much of the country's best legal, economic and accounting brains into tax enforcement and avoidance...
...Still, all the "flattening" proposals retain some positive degree of progressivity...
...It is very well to assume that "appropriate technology" in agriculture will shift the comparative advantage back to where Tyler thinks it should be, even with "living wages" on Third World farms: Unfortunately, we do not know what and where this technology is, nor can we be sure in advance that it will exist...
...In sum, it may be possible to secure equality of opportunity through programs that end discrimination and create educational and career possibilities for all, because such measures are compatible with the ideal of social equality...
...Equality of income will be much harder to achieve, because the costs are difficult to allocate and the consequences are powerfully disruptive to everyone except the poor...
...In addition, there is good reason to believe thai the fundamental obstacle to the advance of the lower class has been its distinctively present-oriented lifestyle—its inability to defer gratification and its lack of discipline...
...It does not profit the poor to be nearly exempt from a progressive income tax in a jurisdiction that raises most of its revenue from sales and excise taxes...
...His analysis also neglects the tradeoff between liberty and equality—the likelihood that freedoms would have to be surrendered to attain greater economic fairness...
...economic hegemony, our well-organized labor aristocracy in mining, steel, autos, and electrical equipment came in for its share of the swag, and raised U.S...
...Nor do the poor really suffer when approximately proportional taxes are combined with expenditures going largely for social services...
...Meanwhile, being smart people, they multinationalized behind the backs of the unions and went overseas...
...Gus Tyler's subject in the ninth installment of his series is "The Deindustrialization of America...
...must turn to fury*' as "the most vulnerable" and "most volatile" express discontent...
...Countries where citizens enjoy greater economic equality have, in the main, more rigid social class systems than we do...
...These need to be taken into account because what now masks them are the loopholes that Galbraith and Davidson desire to close...
...Missoula, Montana Thomas Pavne Professor of Political Science University of Montana I would like to comment on two economic articles in your August 9-23 issue...
...Perhaps more important, we should realize that what matters is less the progressivity of any one major tax, or of taxes in toto, than the final result of the entire fiscal system, expenditures included...
...Martin Bronfenbrenner Kenan Professor of Economics Duke University Melody Perhaps it's me, but I fail to appreciate Hal Goodman's fascination with atonality in his recent columns...
...Over the past 50 years the proportion going to the wealthiest has declined, but the beneficiaries have been the middle and working classes who occupy the intermediate quintiles...
Vol. 65 • November 1982 • No. 20
