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Brooks: It’s 100% our fault

Gotta say that as ticked off as I am that the political and economic arrangements we’ve settled into lets the big economic players get away without much of a reckoning for their role in the crash, David Brooks is more correct than any of the OWS protesters. Excerpt: A group that divides the world between […]

Gotta say that as ticked off as I am that the political and economic arrangements we’ve settled into lets the big economic players get away without much of a reckoning for their role in the crash, David Brooks is more correct than any of the OWS protesters. Excerpt:

A group that divides the world between the pure 99 percent and the evil 1 percent will have nothing to say about education reform, Medicare reform, tax reform, wage stagnation or polarization. They will have nothing to say about the way Americans have overconsumed and overborrowed. These are problems that implicate a much broader swath of society than the top 1 percent.

They will have no realistic proposal to reduce the debt or sustain the welfare state. Even if you tax away 50 percent of the income of those making between $1 million and $10 million, you only reduce the national debt by 1 percent, according to the Tax Foundation. If you confiscate all the income of those making more than $10 million, you reduce the debt by 2 percent. You would still be nibbling only meekly around the edges.

The 99-versus-1 frame is also extremely self-limiting. If you think all problems flow from a small sliver of American society, then all your solutions are going to be small, too. The policy proposals that have been floating around the Occupy Wall Street movement — a financial transfer tax, forgiveness for student loans — are marginal.

I heard Brooks on the radio the other day asking, rhetorically, if it’s Wall Street’s fault that Americans spent the last decade on a binge of debt-fueled consumption. The point, obviously, is that we all got into this mess because our politicians, our financial gurus, and me and thee, believed that we could have something for nothing. Many of us still do. Slash spending — but not on my favorite social programs. Raise taxes — but not on me. Et cetera.

If it’s going to get fixed, it’s going to hurt all of us. I really do believe that those whose wealth puts them in a position to weather the pain better than most should have to bear a greater share of the burden. But let’s get real: occupying Wall Street isn’t going to pay off one’s credit card, or obviate the spendthriftiness that may have led one to run it up. And so forth. Not saying that to let Wall Street off the hook, but only to underscore Brooks’s depressing and unromantic point that the true nature of the problem is radical and widespread, not simply concentrated in the top one percent.

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