Thursday Afternoon Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Frances Russell wonders what happened to the concept of the public good:

Our political language about taxes has changed. Gone is "ability to pay." The new catchphrases are "user pay" and "pay as you go." The bottom-line message to citizens is "if you can't pay, you don't go." You don't get to drive into our congested cities without a toll; you don't get your garbage collected without a fee; and who knows, soon you won't get to visit a doctor without a charge.

So pervasive is everyone-for-himself that there is hardly anyone talking about concepts such as "the public good" and "a rising tide lifts all boats."

There's no more community, just individuals and their self-interest.

- But then, Jeffrey Simpson recognizes that a huge part of the political conversation that's been missing for far too long has been reintroduced thanks to the Occupy movement (even if he's rather quick to write off its future impact):

The souls who camped out were a disparate lot, with rather inchoate ideas about how to change society, let alone challenge seriously the capitalist system. Their camps are now being dismantled, sometimes by court order.

They did point, however, to a challenge few politicians want to address: growing income inequality and the verifiable fact that, within that growing inequality, the very, very rich are pulling away from the rest of society. You can see this at work within the upper reaches of the corporate sector, where the gap between what bosses and employees make has widened. No longer do compensation committees look at this metric; instead, they compare CEOs’ compensation with that of other CEOs’, so that the vortex of higher pay continues within the narrow confines of cozy cross-comparisons.

The Occupy movement began in the United States, where the recession started, courtesy of the major financial institutions – a collapse that plunged the country into a nightmarish combination of large deficits, swelling debt and high unemployment.

Long before the recession, however, the U.S. was becoming a significantly more unequal society, as the Congressional Budget Office explained in a recent report. The CBO looked at the years 1979 to 2007. It found that, whereas average household income after inflation grew by 62 per cent, the top 1 per cent of the population had enjoyed income growth of 275 per cent. The bottom 20-per-cent’s after-tax income had grown 18 per cent. Said the CBO: “As a result of uneven income growth, the distribution of after-tax household income in the United States was substantially more unequal in 2007 than in 1979.”

Market income was increasingly concentrated in fewer hands, said the CBO. Government transfer programs, combined with weaker redistribution of income through the tax system, could not counterbalance the fact that the market was putting more and more income in fewer and fewer hands.

- Which is why it's especially important to listen to the Occupy movement - as Murray Dobbin exhorts us to do.

- Meanwhile, CBC reports on Campaign 2000's observation that Canada has seen painfully little progress in fighting child poverty since the House of Commons unanimously agreed to eliminate it 22 years ago.

- Finally, I'm not sure the stance can really be described as a change based on the Fraser Institute's normal distaste for democratic institutions compared to the whims of the corporate sector. But Sixth Estate is right to point out a particularly egregious example.