Down & Out of the Market

[from 9/1/10]

A lot of people think the United States is a collapsing empire. For example, Chris Hedges, some guy I heard of, said recently, “Our empire is imploding. Our children will never have the standard of living we had. And poverty and despair will sweep across the landscape like a plague.” Gee, Chris, try to look at the bright side. The Empire is imploding! Yay! Cue the dancing Ewoks!

I was poking some facts the other day and made an interesting discovery, relating to the disparity of income in the US and the cost of living. I have to explain a bit before I can get to the discovery. Please hang on.

That the cost of living in this country for poor people is high is only partly due to inflation. Much of it is due instead to the loss of affordable goods and services. Faced with a choice between marketing to the rich or to the poor, with fewer and fewer people in-between, corporations looking at the bottom line naturally choose marketing to the rich. So poor people can’t find Piggly Wigglies. JC Pennies vanish, to be replaced by JC Benjamins. Pay phones disappear. Dollar stores soon sell actual dollars, and nothing else.

The result is an economy in which poor people can no longer scrape by on the scraps they can buy, because there are no scraps that cheap available. This is not true yet with regard to clothing, but will be if the trend continues. It is true with regard to decent food, that’s why there are food banks, food stamps, soup kitchens, and indecent food like Chicken McNuggets. And it’s true big time in regard to housing and health care.

There are three ways out of this mess. Two of them require the rich to make sacrifices: Either accept higher taxes and let the state subsidize the poor, something that’s not politically popular, or correct the wage and salary disparities that got us here. That last approach would be the logical and moral thing to do. Unfortunately, it takes more from the rich to pay themselves what they are really, truly, worth, than it does to tax them enough to enable poor people to merely survive.

What’s the third way out? Well, you could put underpaid poor people who can’t pay their own way in a ruined economy into work-prisons.

This last solution has been trotted out lately by a Tea Party candidate for governor of New York, Carl Paladino. His idea involves making the imprisonment “voluntary”, but, you understand that as prison becomes a voluntary option, decent wages and/or state subsidies (the other two solutions) will not be happening. So the choice will really be, go voluntarily, or when you break the law just surviving because no other option was left to you, you can go involuntarily.

Paladino’s approach has been used before in this country. The last time it was used it was called Jim Crow.

So, anyway, here’s what I discovered, crunching the numbers. My first thought was that Carl Paladino’s idea could be shot down by a simple cost-benefit analysis. I thought it would cost more, marginally, to the rich, to imprison the poorest of the poor, than to either fix the economic disparity or pay the taxes to correct the harm the economic disparity cause. So we could stop the rich and the corporations they rule us with from using this approach, because it would not further enrich them.

Instead, I found, today’s modern prisons are relatively efficient, and imprisoning everybody in the country who makes less than 50% median income would save the rich money. They can be more rich!

Well, you know what they say. Corporate boards have fiduciary obligations. They may not want to do a thing, because it’s wrong, but you know, their hands are tied, they have to look out for the stock holders.

So let’s celebrate the imploding Empire! If we’re lucky it will implode before we have to volunteer for prison.