Paul Krugman’s provocative columns and headlines—“RETURN OF THE BUMS ON WELFARE”; “THOSE LAZY JOBLESS”; “THE DEFLATION CAUCUS”; “THE FISCAL FIZZLE: AN IMAGINARY BUDGET AND DEBT CRISIS”; “ADDICTED TO INFLATION”; or “OBAMACARE FAILS TO FAIL”—spotlight how archaic are conservative policies and how errant are their forecasts for the economy and social policy. He presses the liberals’ advantage among social scientists and economists on the evidence, even if the debate on austerity with the public is still contested.4
The New York Times’s The Upshot, FiveThirtyEight, The Washington Post’s Wonkblog, Salon, The Guardian, and the next generation of digital sites like Quartz, Vox, and Intercept are creating a new audience for data-based stories on what is really happening in government, the economy, and society, and they are beginning to receive the attention that the investigative reforming journalists had in the progressive era. This new journalism brings an inescapable clarity and authority when they broadcast headlines such as:
“CORPORATIONS USED TO PAY ALMOST ONE-THIRD OF FEDERAL TAXES. NOW IT’S ONE-TENTH”
“BOOSTING SCHOOL FUNDING 20 PERCENT ERASED THE GRADUATION GAP BETWEEN RICH AND POOR STUDENTS”
“AMONG THE POOR, WOMEN FEEL INEQUALITY MORE DEEPLY”
“THE TYPICAL HOUSEHOLD, NOW WORTH A THIRD LESS”
“CHART: THE MINIMUM WAGE IN AMERICA IS PRETTY DAMN LOW”
“THE HEAD OF THE IMF SAYS INEQUALITY THREATENS DEMOCRACY. HERE ARE 7 CHARTS PROVING SHE’S RIGHT”
While many of these writers are not self-consciously social reforming journalists, they expose the stark realities in new and legitimate ways, and their observations begin to create an inescapable conventional wisdom.5
And when ordinary citizens began shooting and sharing cell phone videos of the deaths of Eric Garner, Walter Scott, and Freddie Gray at the hands of the police, they forced discriminatory treatment of black youth onto the public agenda.
You know who has the momentum when you consider that the median age of Fox News viewers is sixty-nine and rising, and Millennials are much more likely to tune in and get their news from The Daily Show. And when conservative talk radio hosts grumbled about Coca-Cola’s sixty-second Super Bowl commercial depicting scenes of a multicultural America with “America, the Beautiful” sung by kids in seven languages, the executives pushed back and doubled down.6
Something has changed when the Komen Foundation, the leading charity fighting breast cancer with its Race for the Cure, faced a huge public outcry and plummeting race participation when it dropped funding to Planned Parenthood to conduct mammograms. Planned Parenthood is viewed favorably by a not inconsiderable majority of the public.7
You know the tide is growing overwhelming when Justice Anthony Kennedy writes for the Supreme Court majority: “Under the Constitution, same-sex couples seek in marriage the same legal treatment as opposite-sex couples, and it would disparage their choices and diminish their personhood to deny them this right.” And in a sign of the times, Wal-Mart publicly lobbied an Arkansas governor to veto a religious freedom bill because it is at odds with their views on “diversity and inclusion.”8
It is game, set, and match when Pope Francis’s apostolic exhortation declares, “Just as the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say ‘thou shalt not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills.”9
With growing confidence in the momentum for reform, more and more leaders are taking advantage of the emerging space to advocate for change.
LEADING FROM AMERICAN CITIES AND METROPOLITAN AREAS
America’s cities and metropolitan areas play an outsized role in generating the country’s economic and cultural dynamism and a growing proportion of the citizenry wants to live and work there. Yet these metropolitan areas are also the cauldron for the deepest inequality and blocked mobility, the lowest wages and highest prices, and the poor and working-class families struggling to raise children in single-parent homes. That stark paradox is starting to move and motivate leaders to get on with addressing these deep problems.
The national government is not likely to act, so political, civic, and business leaders in the cities are moving to raise the minimum wage and improve education opportunities and begin to address the problems of working families. As I wrote earlier, many are addressing climate change in pretty dramatic and impactful ways.
As we saw in the progressive era, it was cities such as Cleveland, Toledo, and Detroit and states such as Wisconsin that advanced a package of reforms that proved successful and became a model that presidents and parties nationally ultimately embraced.
The truth is that the metropolitan level may be the right place to address many of these issues. Moving the new progressive agenda locally and in the states may allow reformers to build more public support while also making more rapid progress in a period when the national government is distrusted, corrupted, and dysfunctional.
People’s life chances are fundamentally affected by their broader metropolitan area, local community, and immediate neighborhood, as Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline, and Emmanuel Saez have demonstrated in their groundbreaking work. And just as local factors impact people’s chances for intergenerational mobility, they also reveal what kinds of initiatives would be most effective.10
And a number of cities and states are beginning to take up the challenge.
If the national minimum wage were gradually raised to $10.10 an hour by 2016 and then adjusted for inflation, 16.5 million people would see a pay increase and 900,000 people would be lifted out of poverty. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that about half a million jobs would be lost as a result, a 0.3 percent dip in employment, though that small downside is contested by studies that take a side-by-side look at the employment measures in neighboring states where only one has raised its minimum wage. Raising the minimum wage to $10.78 an hour would place it at 55 percent of the median full-time wage, up from the current 37 percent and back to where it stood in 1968 before the middle-class compact came undone.11
The president’s efforts to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour from the current rate of $7.25 were blocked by Republicans in Congress. In the absence of congressional action, he at least raised the minimum wage for federal employees and contractors.
Raising the minimum wage, however, is one of the tools available to cities and states in the absence of federal action, and cities and states are already realizing that there is no reason for them to wait. Cities are attracting the most educated and most affluent, though they are also drawing in more service and immigrant workers too.
Ten states and the District of Columbia raised their minimum wage in 2014, and a like number have scheduled increases starting at the beginning of 2015, with key states such as California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Mexico, and New York indexing the level to inflation to keep up with rising costs. The minimum wage is already higher than the federal level in nearly half of the states, though only one of them, Montana, is in the GOP conservative heartland.12
Minimum-wage increases were on the ballot in five states in 2014, and the voters passed all of them.13
In 2003, San Francisco and Santa Fe became the first cities to establish their own minimum wage. Today, West Coast cities are pushing the bar higher and purposefully above the proposed federal minimum wage. In 2014, Seattle passed a law increasing the minimum wage from $9.32 to $15.00 by 2018—more than twice the current federal minimum wage and approaching a living wage, which should likely be the guide if reformers are serious about addressing the fundamental issue of jobs that don’t pay enough to live on. San Jose raised its minimum wage to $10.66 an hour and Santa Fe raised its to $10.84; San Diego passed a minimum-wage increase to $11.50 by 2018 and Oakland voted for a $13.19 minimum wage by then as well.14
New York City mayor Bill de Blasio signed an executive order to immediately increase
the minimum wage for businesses contracting with the city to $13.13 per hour, and that amount is expected to increase to $15.22 by 2019. Mayor Rahm Emanuel in Chicago implemented an executive order to increase the minimum wage to $13.00 an hour for city contractors and subcontractors. After Illinois voters passed a referendum to raise the minimum wage to $10 an hour in November, Mayor Emanuel pushed the City Council to pass a law increasing the minimum wage to $13 by 2018 and then indexing future increases to inflation, as recommended by a task force of business and labor leaders.15
Niraj Chokshi, “Twenty States Raised Their Minimum Wage Today,” The Washington Post, January 1, 2015.
San Francisco decided these reforms have to lead to a living wage at the end of the day, and it voted in November 2014 to raise the minimum wage from $10.74 to $15.00 an hour by 2018. In Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti proposed to gradually increase the minimum wage to $13.25 an hour and link further increases to the Consumer Price Index, but the LA City Council studied the issue and then raised it to $15.
And to tilt the balance further, some leaders in the cities are starting to recognize organizations and movements that put pressure to raise wages from the bottom up.
Workers in fast-food restaurants such as McDonald’s and Taco Bell have made headlines with their one-day walkouts in New York, Chicago, Detroit, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., to highlight their low wages. For all of labor’s difficulties nationally, unions have backed Fight for $15 and OUR Walmart and have begun to win minimum-wage increases in major cities and states. And they have had success organizing domestic workers and taxi drivers in cities where elected leaders are supportive.16
With this growing momentum to raise the minimum wage and move toward a living wage in the metropolitan areas, businesses will soon take for granted that that is the price of entry and doing business. And that has already begun to happen. McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, Target, T.J. Maxx, and Marshall’s have announced new base wage rates above the legal minimum. “I really want to assert McDonald’s as a modern and progressive burger company,” its CEO declared, sounding like he fully identified with this new metropolitan culture.17
He has a long way to go to catch up with the CEO of a Seattle-based credit card payment processing company who announced that he would create a new minimum salary of $70,000 over three years, doubling the compensation for a quarter of the employees, while cutting his own million-dollar compensation to the new minimum. This act is unlikely to set an example, though it could help create a new norm in our cities.18
With momentum building from the bottom, congressional Democrats nationally have rallied around a $12 minimum wage, while the Congressional Progressive Caucus has committed to the Fight for $15.19
States and cities are moving ahead with other unaddressed national challenges as well. We may be looking back on this period and see Connecticut as the Wisconsin of this “new progressive era.” Connecticut was the first state to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 and the first to pass a paid sick leave bill. Connecticut now requires businesses with fifty or more employees to provide up to one hour of paid sick leave for every forty hours worked. Between 200,000 and 300,000 employees have taken leave because they were sick, needed a checkup or medical test, or needed to look after a sick child or family member. After successful implementation of the Affordable Care Act, Connecticut brought the proportion uninsured down from 8 to 4 percent, and it is now among the states closest to universal health insurance coverage.
San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Denver, Seattle, New York City, Portland, Oregon, and Newark have all introduced paid sick leave, and California recently passed a law requiring small and large employers to provide three days of paid sick leave a year, which will benefit 6.5 million workers.20
A grab bag of states have also expanded preschool education, including red states such as Oklahoma, Georgia, and West Virginia, and more recently Alabama, Michigan, Minnesota, and Montana. The number of children in preschool has doubled since 2002, though still just 30 percent of four-year olds are in preschool.21
Some cities are moving to make universal pre-K the norm. In one of his earliest actions, the mayor of Chicago introduced full-day kindergarten in all the public schools. In the 2014 school year, the city expanded pre-K to allow 44,000 three- and four-year-olds to start classes. The mayor of New York City made universal pre-K his signature policy for addressing inequality and increasing upward mobility. Amazingly, at the beginning of the 2014–2015 school year, 51,500 kids enrolled in New York City preschool centers for the first time, only 1,500 short of the goal.22
Mayors are prioritizing social mobility because it is the cities where America is most unequal. As we discussed earlier, the metropolitan areas are attracting the most dynamic industries, the best-educated and the most affluent, though they are also growing lower-paid service sector jobs and attracting many new immigrants.
Local leaders are struggling to address the paradox of inequality and learn from the vast differences in upward mobility in different metropolitan areas, as outlined by Raj Chetty and his colleagues. Someone born in the lowest quarter of income earners has the best chance to reach the top of the ladder if they live in San Jose, Seattle, Boston, New York, or Los Angeles. They have the least chance if they live in Detroit or Atlanta. A child born in Atlanta has one-third the chance of one born in San Jose. Moreover, a fairly poor child in Seattle has as much chance of reaching the top as a middle-class child in Atlanta.23
This research teaches us that the state of the family and marriage in these cities—including whether children are raised by a single parent—are the biggest predictors of upward mobility. We also know that there is much greater opportunity in cities that are less physically divided by income and race, and where low-income families are less isolated and workers have shorter commute times to reach work. Transportation and segregation matter.24
These are huge challenges, and many of today’s mayors lead in cities where the family is under stress and neighborhoods are highly segregated. With so much history of class and racial segregation and some mass transit systems built a century ago, creating linkages that bring the city closer together will be a daunting challenge. That means expanding mass transit that links poorer and low-income neighborhoods to their work opportunities and the expansion of affordable housing.
In Chicago, Mayor Emmanuel fulfilled a campaign promise to modernize and expand the Red Line to the mainly African American South Side. In the Seattle metropolitan area, the county mass transit system began giving discounts to its low-wage commuters whose income did not exceed 200 percent of the federal poverty level.25
New York mayor de Blasio has committed to expand affordable housing by 200,000 units over the next ten years, as The New York Times keeps reminding him in its editorials. A year later, they applauded his “timely and exciting mission,” which is premised on extensive building in more densely populated areas, making more units permanently affordable. The task the mayor has set out is daunting, though this is where all these mayors will struggle to keep these cities affordable for their diverse populations.26
The cities and states are pushing ahead with reforms to raise incomes, provide new kinds of support for working women and working men, create a real safety net, and address the challenges facing families. These are the critical contradictions in this period, and the cities and states are setting the new policy agenda for the country.
THE CHURCHES
America is a diverse country undergoing huge changes that can enrich our communities and the nation broadly. America’s potential is threatened by the concentration of wealth at the top, though it is threatened just as much by the changes in the family, marriage, and the vast number of children being raised by single parents. The new leaders in cities and states are moving ahead in impressive ways, yet few have highlighted their rescue plans for the family. Reformers need ideas and allies to really begin to tackle what is happening in these communities.
In earlier times, the churches and r
eligious charities were progressive allies in caring for the poor, defending the immigrants, and advocating for change. Progressives could turn to the major churches for inspiration, organization, or as allies in the battle for reform and rights. That changed when the Evangelicals joined the counterrevolution against the sexual revolution and against the demands of blacks, women, and immigrants for equal rights. Since 2004, they have been closely allied with the social conservatives and the Republican Party. The Catholic Church gave such primacy to abortion and innocent life and battling against marriage equality that observant Catholics became an important part of the Republican base. So it has been difficult for Democrats to turn instinctively to the churches as allies in bringing progressive change.
Pope Francis’s apostolic exhortation in “The Proclamation of the Gospel in Today’s World,” however, signaled a marked departure in the Catholic Church’s focus and tone. He called on the faithful “to embark on a new chapter of evangelization” as a “Church whose doors are open,” like a “mother with an open heart.” It should avoid a style that is “obsessed” with a “multitude of doctrines to be insistently imposed.”27
That was simply his point of entry, however.
The pope thinks that an “economy of exclusion and inequality” kills, as I quoted earlier. He explicitly rejected the economic philosophy that is at the heart of today’s conservative Republican thinking. He challenged those who “continue to defend trickle-down theories, which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world.” He dismissed that proposition empirically, saying that it “has never been confirmed by the facts.”28
He also attacked the “crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power” and the lack of charitable feeling inherent in this worldview: “Almost without being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own.” The values associated with such an economic policy lead conservatives precisely to the outcome the pope fears: “its emphasis on success and self-reliance does not appear to favor an investment in effort to help the slow, the weak or the less talented to find opportunities in life.”29
America Ascendant Page 39