RALEIGH – Until Ronald Reagan came along, the meteorology of political discourse in America looked something like this: the Right intoned about dark clouds and gathering storms, while the Left exuded bright, sunny confidence. It was Kennedy vs. Nixon, one smiling and shiny, the other scowling (or smiling forcedly) and stubbly.
Reagan’s optimistic vision transformed the rhetorical map. He talked about a dynamic, rapidly growing economy. He talked about vanquishing, not containing, foreign tyrannies. And he talked about a resurgence of personal responsibility and virtuous behavior, not simply surrendering to self-destructive societal trends. It was Reagan’s opponents – first the mid-1970s Republican establishment, then Jimmy Carter, then the protestors and activists of the 1980s and 1990s – who adopted a politics of pessimism.
It continues. Look across the left wing of the political spectrum, nationally and here in North Carolina, and you will see an apocalyptic vision of modern life that bears only a scant relationship to reality. You will hear that the poverty rate is large, growing, and underestimated. You will hear that the middle class is disappearing, that the wealthy pay lower taxes than they did in “the good old days” while the poor get less in subsidies that they did back then. You will see and hear, in other words, quite a lot of twaddle.
Out in the real world, where folks are forming families and buying homes and enjoying their lives, the story of the past quarter-century has overwhelmingly been one of progress worth celebration, not regress worth condemnation. Homeownership has risen so high that nearly half of households called “poor” by federal statisticians live in homes they own. Medical care is far more valuable than ever before in human history (one reason why its share of gross domestic product is rising, by the way, which is good news) and despite claims to the contrary is more widely accessible than ever before. Pollution levels are lower than they were decades ago, not higher. Even social indicators such as crime and out-of-wedlock births have improved in recent years. The list goes on and on.
A couple of data sets are deserving of careful examination on this point. First, Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation has put together a useful compendium of information about trends in federal spending and taxes. One finding is that the share of all federal taxes (income, payroll, and other) paid by the top-earning 20 percent of American households was 66 percent in 2003, up from 56 percent in 1979. They earn 52 percent of all income, by the way. On the other hand, federal spending on anti-poverty programs accounted for more than 16 percent of the federal budget in 2004, up from 9 percent in 1990. Since the early 1980s, critics have accused first Reagan and then the second Bush of cutting programs for the poor while shifting the tax burden away from the wealthy. Didn’t happen that way (and, no, this is not due to the Clinton interregnum, according to the data). I’m not saying I’m delighted with these trends, particularly the latter one. But I know who should be.
Second, federal officials have finally begun to experiment with more accurate measurements of poverty – accounting for more forms of income, assets owned, and other factors. A new report, summarized ably by the American Enterprise Institute’s Doug Besharov, found that an improved measurement of “market-income poverty”(not including government assistance) yielded a rate of about 8 percent in 2004, vs. the officially reported rate of nearly 13 percent. Moreover, adding in most government programs – with the important exception of Medicaid, which would improve the picture still more – yielded a poverty rate of 5 percent. That’s much closer to the actual experience of American families and communities, I would submit.
Have a bright, bright, sunshiny day.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.