Income Inequality

IN 1983, I wrote an article for the Atlantic Monthly titled "The Declining Middle." My subject was the increasing evidence that America's middle class was fragmenting into a society of the rich and the poor.There was no single cause. Rather, the reasons included everything from the new global economy -- which put American factory workers under pressure from cheap foreign labor -- to the rise of a poorly paid service economy, demographic changes in the work force, deregulation, anti-unionism and shifts in federal taxing and spending policies.

A report funded by a variety of "family values" groups made splashy headlines recently: "Single Parenthood Costs Taxpayers $112 Billion." The report lists two big reasons for these costs. One is increased welfare expenditures on poor families ($70 billion). The other is increased government spending to deal with the social problems caused by poor kids when they grow up ($42 billion). The report is only partially correct; it vastly overstates the cost to society of single parenthood and fails to point out that social inequality is at the root of those costs.

Better access to care will count for kids I take a different message from the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Kids Count report than The Sun does ("A report on Maryland kids," editorial, June 12). Perhaps because I am a Johns Hopkins-trained obstetrician, I view things from the perspective of the fetus and newborn. And to paraphrase a political cliche, "It's the poverty, stupid." What I take from the report is that the fact that Maryland is a wealthy state does not ensure that the have-nots will have easy access to the kinds of preconception and prenatal care that will lessen the occurrence of low-birthweight babies.

OF ALL HIS Democratic contemporaries, Bill Clinton understood most clearly the paradox of the Reagan boom. While new jobs multiplied and overall income rose, the real wages of the average American lagged, and the gap grew not only between the bottom and the top, but between what Mr. Clinton called ''the forgotten middle class'' and the top. In 1992, he made this paradox the focus of his economic program and his case against George Bush.Four years later, running for re-election, the president has declared the problem solved.

GENEVA -- U.S. President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair are a source of danger for similar reasons.They are riding high. They look good. They smile a lot and they owe much of their success to the remarkably prolonged era of economic expansion and renewed sense of prosperity over which they preside.And, since they dominate the ubiquitous Anglo-Saxon press, they are spreading their globalization message with enormous effect.MisleadingBut they mislead us into a state of complacency.

There was much economic news last week, almost all of it bad, making it a rough September to be president of the United States - or on the unemployment line. At this rate, Barack Obama may get an opportunity to see both sides of that particular circumstance in about 16 months. Most troubling of all were the latest statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau showing that the number of people living in poverty in this country grew to 46.2 million in 2010, the most in the 52 years such numbers have been tracked.

All good: About 200,000 more jobs added in December, the lowest monthly unemployment rate (8.5 percent) in nearly three years, a front-page declaration that the economy has "gained steam" and the assertion by some employers that "the worst is over. " The most noteworthy job gains were in transportation and warehousing, retail, manufacturing, health care and mining, according to the Department of Labor. All good: Except you have to wonder how much these new jobs pay and what kind of benefits they provide.

Steve Williams' letter slamming Thomas F. Schaller ("Raising taxes not the answer to the deficit," April 7) is so full of distortions that it demands a rebuttal. First, he claims that wealthy folks are paying too much taxes and cites the fact that the top 1 percent of wage earners share of taxes rose compared to the rest of the earners and are now paying 38 percent of income taxes. The explanation is simple and does not support his position: Wealthy earners pay a higher share of taxes because their income in the past decade has increased dramatically while earnings of the rest of the country have languished.

It should be a national scandal that students from privileged families are 25 times more likely than their less-advantaged peers to attend the nation's top colleges and universities. Little noticed amid the torrent of coverage about the disaster in New Orleans has been the approach of the 40th anniversary tomorrow of a major event in the history of American race relations. President Lyndon B. Johnson, in an act that recognized the deep racial fault lines most recently thrust to the surface by Hurricane Katrina, signed Executive Order 11246, which required federal contractors to take "affirmative action" to ensure equal opportunity.

Chanting "We are the 99 percent," more than 200 protesters affiliated with Occupy Baltimore, unions and an activist group called Good Jobs Better Bmore marched across the Howard Street bridge during rush hour Thursday evening. The protesters, who threw a large banner over the side of the bridge urging society to "Bridge the gap" between rich and poor, said they were there to oppose economic inequality in the United States and call for more infrastructure projects, such as repairing bridges.