Fundmentals

"We now have more income and wealth inequality than at any time in the last hundred years. In the year 2022, three multibillionaires own more wealth than the bottom half of American society – 160 million Americans. Today, 45% of all new income goes to the top 1%, and CEOs of large corporations make a record-breaking 350 times what their workers earn."

 — Bernie Sanders, The Guardian - 2 Sep 2022

* * *

It is interesting how little direct acknowledgement of those facts about our economy get in the discourse leading up to the pending mid-term elections.  The attention of voters is directed instead to symptoms rather than fundamental causes. The inadequacies of health care, education and housing dominate the conversation because they present imminent threats.  The proposed responses are really little more than symbolic gestures.

What all of that points to is the peripheral importance of the electorate in the governing process.  

Whac-A-Mole

 We went to dinner with friends on a Sunday afternoon at a restaurant beside Albuquerque's Central Avenue.  Sitting in the restaurant's outdoor patio gave us front row seats to the parade of motorcycles and cars with disabled mufflers which goes on day and night through the weekend.  At times the noise drowned out our conversation.

Of course the conversation turned briefly to the passing spectacle.  Our dinner host, who spent most of his life in law enforcement, observed that the police really could not do anything to quiet the noise given the priority to deal with the torrent of violent crime which besets the city.  I had to agree, though I suggested that making a noise check part of the yearly vehicle inspection might lower the volume a little bit.

Another source of day and night cacophony we are all subjected to now is the endless stream of political ads aimed at convincing voters who should next represent them at the local, state and national levels.  The Republican candidates in particular assure us that they will clamp down on crime by hiring more police and locking up more offenders.  Just as assuredly, close to half the voting population will forget that such promises have been made every year since the beginning of Time with no demonstrable effect on crime rates.

I think it is worthwhile to spend some time thinking about who the people are that are racing their noisy machines around the city.  It is a challenge to come up with a convincing profile of the group members, though they seem to constitute a significant portion of the population.  Newscasters occasionally show clips of the police trying to cope with congregations of street racers and bystanders to little effect.  However, I don't recall anyone trying to interview the participants with an eye toward understanding the motivations behind the behavior.  I suppose some academic researchers - perhaps a novelist - have undertaken such a project; I'll try to look for some of that.

Meanwhile, it seems safe to conclude that an adrenaline rush abetted by some substance abuse is fundamental to the perpetuation of the machine-related noise pollution, and that it is greatly facilitated by cell phones and social networks.  Beyond the organizational particulars, I suspect that the noisy drivers and their sympathizers are simultaneously enjoying a defiance of authority and proclaiming solidarity with a like-minded if rather ill defined social group.

I will speculate further that the social group in question includes many individuals left behind by our society's tolerance for an economic order that has concentrated wealth in the hands of a tiny elite at an ever increasing rate over the past half century.  Feelings of powerlessness, desperate gestures of defiance, political movements characterized by grievance, racism and xenophobia, and support for authoritarian regimes are some of the possible outcomes.  Whac-a-mole tactics are not the answer to complex antisocial behaviors.  

The Numbers Tell

 An article at FiveThirtyEight examines the issues around Biden's proposal to cancel $10,000 of student higher education debt ($20,000 for Pell Grant recipients).  Debt cancellation clearly has the potential to alleviate the disparities in wealth and income between the white and non-white populations of the U.S.  As the article points out, however, it would require a cancellation of debt five times greater than what Biden has proposed to have a real impact on the equity problem.

The most shocking revelation in the FiveThirtyEight article was the long-term outlook comparing black and white borrowers:

“Twenty years into repayment, the median black borrowers owe 95 percent of what they borrowed, while the median white person has almost fully repaid their loan,” 

So, tuition loans which saddle  some (mostly black) students with decades of crushing debt can hardly be considered a gateway to prosperity.

One bright spot not dealt with in the FiveThirtyEight article is the opportunities for intervention in the debt problem at the State level.  Amazingly, New Mexico -- usually at the bottom of most measures of well-being -- is at the forefront of higher education debt reduction as noted in a New York Times article:

A new state law approved in a rare show of bipartisanship allocates almost 1 percent of the state’s budget toward covering tuition and fees at public colleges and universities, community colleges and tribal colleges. All state residents from new high school graduates to adults enrolling part-time will be eligible regardless of family income. The program is also open to immigrants regardless of their immigration status.

Even though I came from  family with modest means I was able to leave college with no debt at all, thanks to a WWII death benefit from my father, and my family's determination to hold onto the $10,000 until I needed it.  As the numbers show,  the families of KIA black soldiers seldom enjoyed the option of postponing the use of death benefits far down the line toward higher education.

-------------------------

Update:

An article in The Intercept by Jon Schwarz provides some historical perspective on the educational debt dilemma kicked off by Ronald Reagan in 1970.

John Filo's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling over the dead body of Jeffrey Miller minutes after the unarmed student was fatally shot by an Ohio National Guardsman. (from Wikipedia)