The Tyranny of the Contented

...Similarly, public hospitals and other health services at public cost are essential for those of lesser income...

...In the latter case, the fortunate have to pay twice, and one of their more plausible reactions is the recurrent suggestion that they should be remitted the equivalent of the taxes they pay for public education in a voucher usable for private schools of their choice...

...Yet the reaction of members of the contented majority to the costs and purposes of government is also highly selective...

...Whereas the poor have no alternative to public schools, the more fortunate pay separately, in effect, for their own...

...These are either the better-financed public schools of the affluent suburbs or private schools...

...For those at yet higher levels of income, there are private security guards, the number of whom now exceeds the number of publicly employed policemen in the United States...

...in the suburbs such protection is of less urgency and, in any case, is specific in its services to those who comfortably reside there...

...Selective service From the foregoing comes the broad attitude toward taxes in our time and, in great measure, toward government in general...

...In less marked manner, the same is true of education...

...Both, it is clear, were responding not, as some thought, to a personal political view...

...Thanks in no small part to the new power of the contented, our collective view of what government can and should do for its people is being continually narrowed...

...Defense is the clearest case, serving in the past as the obvious antidote to their deep, even paranoiac fear of communism...

...Similarly, support to failing financial institutions-first the: great savings and loan rescue and later that of the ccmmercial banksis a fully defended function of government, however evident the financial extravagance and larceny that made it necessary...

...It would be an exercise in improbable charity were the fortunate to respond warmly to expenditures that are...

...And Bush was no less specific: His pre-election promise not to raise taxes was the best publicized of his policy commitments...

...Now in the United States, the favored are numerousgreatly influential of voice and a majority of those who vote...

...There follows a highly understandable resistance to all taxation...

...The political damage was so severe that he actually apologized for the decision two years later...

...And politicians are justified in fearing that running for office promising better service to those most in need is an exercise in political self-destruction...

...The perverse relationship between taxes and public services goes further...

...freedom of choice, liberty, the wise privatization of public activity-these are the most frequently heard justifications...

...There are some ]public services and functions that have their approval...

...Now, with the collapse of that presumed enemy, the industries involved still draw on their own indigenous political power...

...they were correctly interpreting the highly evident preference of the contented electoral majority...

...Thus any proposed increase in tax revenues is not seen as going to necessary and legitimate purposes of the state...

...Many of the poor live in the inner cities, where police presence is necessary every day...

...By Social Security pensions or their prospect, no one is thought damaged, nor, as a depositor, by being rescued from a failed bank...

...In the United States, as in other industrial lands, the poorest people must rely on the government for publicly subsidized shelter...

...the more fortunate can buy books or have libraries of their own...

...The comfortably situated provide their own shelter and food as a matter of course...

...not so the poor...

...In no economically advanced country-a sadly neglected matter-does the market system build houses the poor can afford...

...The fortunate have political voice, the less fortunate do not...

...for the benefit of others...

...The Reagan administration made opposition to tax increases and, in fact, a substantial reduction in income taxes a centerpiece of its agenda...

...the comfortable have access to private hospitals and health insurance...

...This, however, is not true of government support to the comparatively well-off...

...That is surely why all recent presidential elections have been fought between exponents of the broad position of the contented majority...

...It is not coincidental, of course, that many of these expenditures-like Social Security-exist largely to preserve the incomes of the contented...

...Liberals, as they are known, are especially warned: Whatever their personal opinion as to the larger well-being or the longer future, they must be practical...

...when Bush seemed even marginally to defect from its interests by accepting a small tax increase in 1990, he was excoriated...

...This constituency warmly supported Reagan...

...Accordingly, in a dominant Democratic view, reference to such efforts must be downplayed or, if necessary, avoided...

...Thus, until the disenfranchised vote or revolt, the tyranny of the contented is ensured-and the grim implications are ours to live with...

...Those pursuing aid-therich, hurt-the-poor policies have been reacting faithfully to the will of their constituency: the majority of voting Americans who are economically and socially contented...

...This article is adapted from The Culture of Contentment, just published by the Houghton Mifflin Company...

...By and large, then, the contented majority views government expenditures with distrust-such distrust that raising taxes to pay for them has become a political taboo...

...For a considerable, though by no means the entire, range of public services, the supporting John Kenneth Galbraith is the Paul M. Warburg professor of economics emeritus at Harvard...

...Thus they would escape the burden of the double educational cost...

...In particular, the fortunate in the polity find themselves paying through their taxes the public cost of the functional underclass, and this, in the most predictable of economic responses, they resist...

...the benefits accrue to others...

...There is also reliance on the government in the United States for food stamps and the welfare and child support that prevent starvation...

...Many decades ago, President Truman observed that when there was a choice between true conservatives and those in pragmatic approximation thereto, the voters would always opt for the real thing...

...The comparatively affluent can withstand the adverse moral effect of being subsidized and supported by the government...

...To opponents, these fiscal policies seem to betray a deficiency in compassion: a cruel diffidence toward the needy and oversolicitousness toward the privileged that will soon prove the Republican Party’s political undoing...

...The Tyranny of the Contented Don’t blame BUSb and Reagan for that screw-tbe-pooy ethic, Blame youyself by John Kenneth Galbraith Since the advent of the current recession, the Reagan and Bush administrations have endured a fair amount of criticism for cutting welfare and similar expenditures while lowering taxes to the special benefit of the rich...

...In 1988, for example, Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis largely abandoned the issues that might be adverse to the culture of contentment and made “competence” a central theme...

...the less fortunate receive...

...Where the impoverished are concerned, government support and subsidy are seriously questioned as to need and effectiveness of adrninistration and as to their adverse effect on morals and working morale...

...The poor need public parks and recreational facilities...

...By convention, however, this is not put so rudely...

...The rationale for the fiscal policies of the past decade lies not in “indifference” or political error, but in a current truth of American taxation -the marked asymmetry between who pays and who receives...

...In short, voters are correct to perceive that the difference between the two parties on the immediately affecting issues is inconsequential...

...The fortunate pay...

...The poor need public libraries...

...If they want to win, they must not threaten the community of contentment...

...This, and not the division of voters between political parties, is what defines modern American political behavior...

...taxes fall on the contented...

...in the suburbs these become of diminished importance, and the very affluent have and enjoy private clubs, golf courses, and tennis courts...

...rather, it is viewed as an appropriation by those whose commitment is to expenditure per se...

...Both men saw a restriction on taxes as a design for restraining government activity as a whole, their favored exceptions apart...

...This, and not the much celebrated circumstance of charismatic political leaders and leadership, is what shapes-and limits-modern politics...

...And the substantial role of the government in subsidizing the well-being of the majority deserves more notice than it gets...

...Not surprisingly, the traditional and seemingly more reliable exponent of comfort won...

...So government, with all its costs, is pictured as a functionless burden-which for the fortunate, to a considerable extent, it is...

...The big shill Because the contented are a majority, Democratic presidential candidates must be no less acquiescent to their desires than the Republicans...

...Yet, unfortunately, the services these taxes pay for are elemental to the lives of the poor-and increasingly, the poor alone...

...Yet as critics probe Republican psyches, they miss a political point...

...It will be squandered by the dedicated “big spenders...

...No action on behalf of the poor-improved welfare payments, more low-income housing, general health care, better schools, drug rehabilitation-can be taken without feeling the backlash of those comfortable Democrats opposed to higher taxation...

...In past times, the economically and socially fortunate were, as we know, a small minority...

...As with the schools, they must, in the end, pay for both public and their own private health care...

...Thus homelessness, hunger, inadequate education, drug affliction, and poverty in general are being continually sanctioned by active democracy...

...Less ostentatiously there are doormen and alarm systems to protect the occupants of the better urban apartment buildings...