ROBERT ROBB

Robb: Is the economy rigged to keep us down?

Robert Robb
opinion columnist
Individual initiative still matters more than the political nostrums of either the left or the right.

Bernie Sanders says that the political economy of the United States is rigged against average Jacks and Jills.

Hillary Clinton, not wanting to be outflanked from the left, echoes the contention.

Republicans limn a different kind of economic despair, but make a similar claim: the economic progress of Americans is no longer in their hands.

Now, the pace of economic change has accelerated, creating more uncertainty and less security. Anxiety over such is accentuated by a sluggish economy.

Still, much of this is nonsense.

How to get ahead in life hasn't changed

In the United States, the path to at least a lower middle-class standard of living remains remarkably straightforward. Get a high school diploma. Don’t have a child out of wedlock. Don’t abuse booze or drugs. Get a job, any job. Be punctual and do assigned tasks diligently.

A lower middle-class standard of living in the United States today is probably better than that of 99 percent of the people who have ever lived, and 90 percent of those living on the globe today.

Education remains a universally available path to even better. Regardless of how rotten the overall performance of any school, a student who pays attention to what is being taught and does school work diligently can go to college and get a degree. And that’s a ticket to the American upper middle-class and an enviable standard of living in historical and relative terms.

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Regardless of what the income statistics purport to say, the average American today lives in a larger space than ever before. He shares it with fewer people than ever before. He has more stuff, and his stuff does more stuff, than ever before.

In studying the causes of lower class stagnation, what stands out isn’t Citizens United but out-of-wedlock births. For all Americans, it is now over 40 percent of all births. For Latinos, it is over 50 percent. For Blacks, it’s over 70 percent.

A 20 percent reduction in out-of-wedlock births would do more for lower-class mobility than all the redistributionist and welfare schemes Sanders could possibly concoct.

If the system was rigged, we'd see different results

Sanders incessantly recites statistics about income and wealth concentration in the United States. There is much missing in the figures Sanders deploys. But rather than parse them, let’s accept, for purposes of argument, that income and wealth in the United States is concentrated at the top and becoming more so.

An egalitarian could argue that this is unfair. But it is not proof, in and of itself, that the system is rigged. A rigged system, if the contention is to have any meaning, has to involve illegitimate factors that, if absent, would produce a different result.

The introduction of illegitimate factors doesn’t explain much of the disruption in the American economy.

The rewards of specialization and education have increased. Automation, much more than trade deals, has reduced manufacturing jobs. Immigrant labor has undercut construction wages.

Now, much of that immigrant labor in construction was illegal. So, that could be considered an illegitimate factor. But that’s not the kind of rigging Sanders is wailing about.

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The government bailed out the banks. I agree with Sanders that it shouldn’t have. And I agree with Sanders that, if we are unwilling to let big banks fail, we should shrink them to the point that we are willing to let them fail.

But that wasn’t really rigging the system. And the banks have paid back more than they were given. So, the bailout didn’t ultimately come at anyone else’s expense.

There is a lot of favoritism in the tax code and government programs. But if there is a big government dispensing discretionary favors, is there any surprise that the rich and influential get more than their fair share? No amount of political reform in the world is going to change that.

There is plenty of room to argue that government should do more to provide economic security given the accelerated pace of economic change and its direction. And there is plenty of room to argue that better monetary, fiscal and regulatory policies would produce more robust growth and opportunity.

But in the American political economy, individual initiative still matters. In fact, it is still more important than the political nostrums of either the left or the right.

Somehow, someway, those wanting to improve their lot in life need to get that message.

Reach Robb at robert.robb@arizonarepublic.com.

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