Class Matters

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Sick of Poverty: New studies suggest that the stress of being poor has a staggeringly harmful influence on health

Psychosocial stressors are not evenly distributed across society. Just as the poor have a disproportionate share of physical stressors (hunger, manual labor, chronic sleep deprivation with a second job, the bad mattress that can’t be replaced), they have a disproportionate share of psychosocial ones. Numbing assembly-line work and an occupational lifetime spent taking orders erode workers’ sense of control. Unreliable cars that may not start in the morning and paychecks that may not last the month inflict unpredictability. Poverty rarely allows stress-relieving options such as health club memberships, costly but relaxing hobbies, or sabbaticals for rethinking one’s priorities."
-- Robert Sapolsky, Scientific American, Dec 2005.

The Shape of Taxes to Come

"The House took the opposite tack from the Senate: its version includes the two-year extension of the investor tax breaks and omits relief from the alternative tax. In other words, it has tax cuts for the rich and no protection for middle class taxpayers, wrapped up in a budget that cuts deeply into programs for the poor."
-- Editorial, New York Times, 11/18/05

Class Matters
"The president's congressional allies now propose to cut Medicaid, food stamps, free school lunches and child-care subsides… This is a scandal, and not because every liberal spending program deserves protection. It's a scandal because, whether you support this program or that, inequality is growing poisonous…."
-- Sebastian Mallaby. Washingtonpost.com, 11/14/05

Our Society's Middle Is Shrinking from View
With a shrinking or stagnant upper class, a disappearing middle class and an ever-increasing low-wage service sector, income distribution now resembles not so much an hourglass as an old-fashioned Victorian gown: small on top, cinched down to nearly nothing in the middle, and ballooning out at the bottom."
-- Louise Auerhahn, San Jose Mercury News, 7/26/05

Minding About the Gap.
"America worries that it is becoming a class society. With reason."
-- The Economist, 6/15/05

The Mobility Myth
"Put the myth of the American Dream aside. The bottom line is that it's becoming increasingly difficult for working Americans to move up in class. The rich are freezing nearly everybody else in place, and sprinting off with the nation's bounty."
-- Bob Herbert, New York Times, 6/6/05

Mobility vs. Nobility
"In recent decades, financial inequality has been increasing, not shrinking. That didn't matter, many said, because studies show a constant shuffling of the deck… But it turns out these studies were flawed. Where you are is the best predictor of where your children will be. And immobility over generations is what congeals financial differences into old-fashioned, European-style social class."
-- Michael Kinsley, Washington Post, 6/5/05