Dobra recenzija nove knjige Edwarda Kleinbarda “We Are Better Than This” v Washington Postu:
The strength of “We Are Better Than This” comes from Kleinbard’s background as an academic (University of Southern California law school), tax lawyer (Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton) and congressional aide (staff director of the Joint Committee on Taxation). His lawyerly precision, thorough research and restrained conclusions provide the credible underpinnings for the moral passion discernible just below the surface. “The nature of life is that we do not control it,” Kleinbard writes in response to those who argue that markets generate the incomes people deserve. “Both our native talents and our good fortune are distributed through processes that we cannot fathom and do not ‘earn.’ Our loud proclamations that what we take from the market is our just deserts is just noise made against the darkness, trying to still the voice inside that asks, why me and not them?”
Elsewhere, he draws from his experience on Wall Street in rejecting the widely held liberal belief that there’s no limit on how high you can tax the rich since they’ll never miss their last million. “The affluent clients with whom I worked largely share the view that they sincerely loved money, that money was attracted to them because it sensed their love, that they knew how to take care of money and give it a good home, and that other less affluent individuals would horribly mistreat that money. . . . If there is such a thing as the declining marginal utility of income, someone forgot to tell these folks.”
Kleinbard’s targets are what he calls the “the market triumphalists” who stubbornly ignore the market failures all around us; rationalize inequality in the name of economic growth that no longer is widely shared; and undervalue the economic worth of public investments in infrastructure, education and a social safety net that nourishes our economy, our politics and our souls.
“The United States has the highest poverty rate [and] the greatest . . . wealth inequality of any major developed economy in the world. Our parents’ incomes play a larger role in our personal economic fortunes than is true for other peer countries. Our long-term unemployment rate, once the envy of the world, has now sagged badly. Our education system is mediocre, and our healthcare is unaffordable. . . . And what, in turn, have we bought in exchange for all of this? Not growth, at least over the last generation. The first refuge of the economist when this question is asked is to claim that inequality is a necessary consequence of free markets. . . . This is true, but only to a point; inequality is not the nectar of the economic gods. Some is necessary, but more is not necessarily better. No other developed country is as addicted to poverty and inequality as we are, and yet somehow they prosper.”
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But Kleinbard is no bleeding heart given to easy moralizing. He is at his best when he reviews the unambiguous research on the degree of cognitive impairment that results from malnutrition in pregnant mothers and infants, and juxtaposes it with the paltry savings from recent budget cuts in those programs. Or when he compares what wealthy American school districts spend per pupil ($19,000) with what the poorest spend ($7,400) — an unusual policy choice that we share only with Turkey and Slovenia. Or when he marshals the most recent and reliable data to demolish the most cherished nostrum of free-marketeers: that higher taxes and bigger government strangle job creation and economic growth.
DAMIJAN blog 