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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/02/opinion/krugman-love-for-labor-lost.html?ref=paulkrugman&_r=0
It wasn’t always about the hot dogs. Originally, believe it or not, Labor Day actually had something to do with showing respect for labor.
Here’s how it happened: In 1894 Pullman workers,
facing wage cuts in the wake of a financial crisis, went on strike —
and Grover Cleveland deployed 12,000 soldiers to break the union. He
succeeded, but using armed force to protect the interests of property
was so blatant that even the Gilded Age was shocked. So Congress, in a
lame attempt at appeasement, unanimously passed legislation symbolically
honoring the nation’s workers.
It’s all hard to imagine now. Not the bit about financial crisis and
wage cuts — that’s going on all around us. Not the bit about the state
serving the interests of the wealthy — look at who got bailed out, and
who didn’t, after our latter-day version of the Panic of 1893. No,
what’s unimaginable now is that Congress would unanimously offer even an
empty gesture of support for workers’ dignity. For the fact is that
many of today’s politicians can’t even bring themselves to fake respect
for ordinary working Americans.
Consider, for example, how Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, marked Labor Day last year: with a Twitter post declaring
“Today, we celebrate those who have taken a risk, worked hard, built a
business and earned their own success.” Yep, he saw Labor Day as an
occasion to honor business owners.
More broadly, consider the ever-widening definition of those whom
conservatives consider parasites. Time was when their ire was directed
at bums on welfare. But even at the program’s peak, the number of
Americans on “welfare” — Aid to Families With Dependent Children — never exceeded about 5 percent of the population. And that program’s far less generous successor, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, reaches less than 2 percent of Americans.
Yet even as the number of Americans on what we used to consider welfare
has declined, the number of citizens the right considers “takers” rather
than “makers” — people of whom Mitt Romney complained,
“I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and
care for their lives” — has exploded, to encompass almost half the
population. And the great majority of this newly defined army of
moochers consists of working families that don’t pay income taxes but do pay payroll taxes (most of the rest are elderly).
How can someone who works for a living be considered the moral
equivalent of a bum on welfare? Well, part of the answer is that many
people on the right engage in word games: they talk about how someone
doesn’t pay income taxes, and hope that their listeners fail to notice
the word “income” and forget about all the other taxes lower-income
working Americans pay.
But it is also true that modern America, while it has pretty much
eliminated traditional welfare, does have other programs designed to
help the less well-off — notably the earned-income tax credit, food stamps and Medicaid.
The majority of these programs’ beneficiaries are either children, the
elderly or working adults — this is true by definition for the tax
credit, which only supplements earned income, and turns out in practice
to be true of the other programs. So if you consider someone who works
hard trying to make ends meet, but also gets some help from the
government, a “taker,” you’re going to have contempt for a very large
number of American workers and their families.
Oh, and just wait until Obamacare kicks in, and millions more working
Americans start receiving subsidies to help them purchase health
insurance.
You might ask why we should provide any aid to working Americans — after
all, they aren’t completely destitute. But the fact is that economic
inequality has soared over the past few decades, and while a handful of
people have stratospheric incomes, a far larger number of Americans find
that no matter how hard they work, they can’t afford the basics of a
middle-class existence — health insurance in particular, but even
putting food on the table can be a problem. Saying that they can use
some help shouldn’t make us think any less of them, and it certainly
shouldn’t reduce the respect we grant to anyone who works hard and plays
by the rules.
But obviously that’s not the way everyone sees it. In particular, there
are evidently a lot of wealthy people in America who consider anyone who
isn’t wealthy a loser — an attitude that has clearly gotten stronger as
the gap between the 1 percent and everyone else has widened. And such
people have a lot of friends in Washington.
So, this time around will we be hearing anything from Mr. Cantor and his
colleagues suggesting that they actually do respect people who work for
a living? Maybe. But the one thing we’ll know for sure is that they
don’t mean it.
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