Word: socialism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Reagan's tax cuts only worsened the skew. Though income tax rates were reduced in all brackets, the cuts were tilted heavily toward the upper end of the scale. In addition, Social Security taxes about tripled, to a top of $3,379.50 this year. The blow fell most heavily on the middle and lower classes, since the Social Security tax exempts the portion of wage and salary incomes above $45,000 a year and all income from interest, dividends and rent. The result: according to a Congressional Budget Office study, only the top 10% of the population received a significant...
Over the longer run, however, the trend toward inequality is rife with the potential for social and political conflict -- not just between classes but within the middle class. The differing prospects between its college-educated members and those who go no further than high school is one potential source of antagonism. Another is the growing cleavage between young and old. While young couples wonder if they can ever buy their dream house -- or any house -- people of their parents' generation are sitting on a gold mine. Many have paid off low-interest mortgages on houses bought a quarter-century...
...Social Security incomes of the elderly, unlike the salaries of their children, are indexed against inflation. And while Medicare pays many bills for those over 65, some 37 million younger Americans have no health insurance...
...most sensible, though politically explosive, step would be to tax Social Security payments like ordinary income, as is done with private pensions. The low-income elderly would still be lightly taxed; those with higher incomes would pay enough more to provide money that could be used to invest in basic medical care for children and to provide larger earned-income tax credits for the working poor who receive few welfare benefits. When the time comes to increase taxes to balance the budget -- and come it will, however much politicians shrink in horror from the "T" word -- consideration must be given...
Ironically, the success of the civil rights movement contributed to the continuance of the Underclass. The removal of many racial barriers allowed blacks who had made it to get out of the ghetto. This out-migration gutted the social structures of inner-city society, leaving neighborhoods bereft of a functioning middle class -- a middle class that once provided the neighborhood with shops and businesses and, more important, offered a model of workaday values that bound the society together...