Word: underclasses
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...multicultural debate are all familiar. Immigration has reached levels higher than at any other time since the turn of the century. Majorities or near majorities of students in some big-city school systems speak English as a second language, if they speak it at all. An urban underclass seems cut off from any culture, much less mainstream American culture. What is new, however, is not the facts but our attitudes toward them. Once upon a time, Americans knew what to do with people who seemed different: obliterate the differences. Today increasing numbers of nominal Americans refuse to see America...
...real innovation of The End of Equality is that it follows time-honored civic liberalism to its logical ends. Kaus maintains that the first problem civic liberals must eliminate is the persistence of underclass. If the United States can somehow raise its poorest citizens' standard of living, other Americans won't be able to justify their flight from the public sphere. The perceived threat that the poorly-educated, crime-ridden underclass poses to the children of the wealthy and the middle class will disappear, and Americans will find their way back into public parks, public schools, public transportation...
...rehabilitate the underclass? According to The End of Equality, you give up on welfare and instead guarantee subsistence-level jobs. Sidestepping economic issues entirely, the author mentions only the benefits of increased social equality. Everyone who wants to live will have to work. Without middle-class derision of "welfare mothers" and "welfare cheats," the ubiquity of work will bind Americans together...
...center of Kaus' book is a thoughtful but no less risky proposal to dynamite welfare. He rightly understands how fear and loathing of the chronically unemployed underclass have encouraged middle-income Americans to flee from everyone below them on the class scale. The only way to eliminate welfare dependency, Kaus maintains, is by cutting off checks for all able- bodied recipients, including single mothers with children. He would have government provide them instead with jobs that pay slightly less than the minimum wage, earned-income tax credits to nudge them over the poverty line, drug counseling, job training...
Pronin's grim quarters are all too typical of the scores of derelict apartment buildings peppering the capital, where he and others live in squalor. They are members of the fast-growing underclass, made more visible by the demise of the Soviet Union and forced by Russia's economic revolution to live down-and-out in Moscow. Though many of today's losers would have difficulty surviving under any regime, the painful shift to a market system has pushed thousands of citizens, once able to maintain an acceptable living standard with the help of government subsidies and benefits, below...