Word: kuttner
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ALREADY, the economic policies of the Reagan era have redistributed $129 billion in income from the poorest 90 percent of the nation's families to the wealthiest 10 percent, as Robert Kuttner points out in The New Republic. Although the stock market has more than doubled in real value since 1981, the wealthiest 10 percent of people own 90 percent of all stock, 88 percent of all bonds, and 95.4 percent of all trusts. At the same time, the amount of revenue brought in from corporate and income taxes on the top incomes has actually dropped. America's poorest have...
...home ownership, especially for first timers, but has encouraged people to make disproportionately large investments in housing instead of putting their money into the savings pool. Most other industrial countries impose limits on the mortgage interest that can be deducted. The U.S. mortgage-deductibility provision, contends Economic Commentator Robert Kuttner, is not only antisaving, but inflationary and inequitable as well. Wrote Kuttner in his 1984 book The Economic Illusion: "The effect is to fuel ; housing speculation, drive up prices, and to disproportionately help rich people lower their tax bills. This has the perverse consequence of pricing housing beyond the means...
...this democracy is run by the people who compose it. The University of Michigan's "American Voter" study, completed in 1960, showed that low income and fewer than eight years of schooling decrease the probability that a citizen will vote. A recent article in The New Republic by Robert Kuttner reported that 75 percent of upper middle class people vote while less than 40 percent of low income citizens...
...true that the government either cannot or should not do more to encourage the reluctant to go to the polls. As it stands now, volunteers who organize registration drives in public streets a week before elections carry most of society's burden for tapping popular wisdom. Why not, as Kuttner suggests in his article, include automatic voter registration whenever a driver's license is issued? Or how about making welfare centers registration offices...
...Kuttner concludes with an almost mournful plea to learn from our mistakes; the problem is that so far only the Right has transformed the failures of the Great Society into an agenda for the '80s. Americans committed to social justice mow face the future leaderless, devoid of new ideas and without a working-class base of support. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, a man conspicuous in his absense from Kuttner's book is fond of saying, "the flame may flicker, but the danger dream will never die." Yet the flame is in danger without the fuel of new ideas and vision...