Pinched (29 page)

1.
On the eve of the Great Recession
Thomas H. Sander and Robert Putnam, “Still Bowling Alone?”
Journal of Democracy
21, no. 1 (January 2010): 9–16.

2.
Economic hardship clearly
National Conference on Citizenship, “2009 America’s Civic Health Index,” 5–6, August 27, 2009,
http://www.ncoc.net/index.php?tray=content&tid=top5&cid=2gp54
.

3.
Public views toward
Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Independents Take Center Stage in the Obama Era,” May 21, 2009,
http://people-press.org/report/517/political-values-and-core-attitudes
.

4.
Mistrust of all things foreign
Sara Murray and Douglas Belkin, “Americans Sour on Trade,”
Wall Street Journal
, October 12, 2010,
http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB10001424052748703466104575529753735783116.html
.

5.
the state of Arizona passed
Randal C. Archibold, “Arizona Enacts Stringent Law on Immigration,”
New York Times
, April 23, 2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/24/us/politics/24immig.html?_r=1&ref=us
.

6.
According to a poll
Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey, conducted by Hart/McInturff, May 6–10, 2010,
http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB10001424052748704247904575240812672173820.html
, cited in Peter Wallsten, Naftali Bendavid, and Jean Spencer, “Republican Party Wins Back Supporters, Poll Finds,”
Wall Street Journal
, May 13, 2010, 21.

7.
Deportations have risen
Peter Slevin, “Deportations of Illegal Immigrants Increase Under Obama Administration,”
Washington Post
, July 26, 2010; Bill Ong Hing, “Babies ‘R’ Us,”
Slate
, August 4, 2010,
http://www.slate.com/id/2262791/
.

8.
The percentage of Hispanics
Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Racial Attitudes in America II,” December 2009, 15.

9.
Anti-Muslim sentiment
Bobby Ghosh, “Does America Have a Muslim Problem?”
Time
, August 19, 2010; Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Public Remains Conflicted Over Islam,” August 24, 2010,
http://people-press.org/report/647/
.

10.
Martin Peretz, then the editor
Martin Peretz, “The New York Times Laments ‘A Sadly Wary Misunderstanding of Muslim-Americans.’ But Really Is It ‘Sadly Wary’ or a ‘Misunderstanding’ At All?”
New Republic
, September 4, 2010,
http://www.tnr.com/blog/77475/the-new-york-times-laments-sadly-wary-misunderstanding-muslim-americans-really-it-sadly-w?page=1
.

11.
an “emergency summit”
Laurie Goodstein, “Concern Is Voiced Over Religious Intolerance,”
New York Times
, September 7, 2010.

12.
Middle-class discontent
Joshua Green, “The Tea Party Takes On Washington,”
Atlantic
, November 4, 2010,
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/11/the-tea-party-takes-on-washington/66104/
; Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, “A Clear Rejection of the Status Quo,” Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, November 3, 2010,
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1789/2010-midterm-elections-exit-poll-analysis
.

13.
The Tea Party’s active supporters
“Polling the Tea Party,”
New York
Times
, April 14, 2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/04/14/us/politics/20100414-tea-party-poll-graphic.html?ref=politics
.

14.
An analysis of Tea Party events
Dante Chinni, “Has the Tea Party’s Influence Slowed?”
Rundown
(blog),
PBS NewsHour
, October 18, 2010,
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2010/10/has-tea-party-influence-crested-ahead-of-elections.html
.

15.
many of the Tea Party’s supporters
“Polling the Tea Party,”
New York Times
.

16.
At Rand Paul’s
Kate Zernike, “Paul Vows to Remain True to the Tea Party,”
New York Times
, May 19, 2010; Sarah Palin, keynote speech, National Tea Party Convention, Nashville, Tennessee, February 6, 2010,
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/
sarahpalin2010teapartykeynote.htm
.

17.
At a Utah GOP convention
Carl Hulse and David M. Herszenhorn, “Bank Bailouts Potent Issue for Fall Elections,”
New York Times
, July 10, 2010.

18.
According to a survey
Robert P. Jones and Daniel Cox, “Old Alignments, Emerging Fault Lines: Religion in the 2010 Election and Beyond,” Pew Public Religion Research Institute, November 2010, 15.

19.
Tea Party supporters generally favor
Supported by “Polling the Tea Party,”
New York Times
.

20.
The ideal of market freedom
Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Public Support for Increased Trade, Except With South Korea and China,” November 9, 2010,
http://people-press.org/report/673/
.

21.
If you squint hard enough
Lawrence Goodwyn,
The Populist Movement
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), vii.

22.
David Frum has noted
David Frum, “Post-Tea-Party Nation,”
New York Times Magazine
, November 12, 2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/magazine/14FOB-idealab-t.html
.

23.
In his 1951 book
Eric Hoffer,
The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements
(New York: Harper & Row, 1951; Perennial Classics, 2002), xi, 26. Citations refer to the Perennial edition.

24.
a Penn Schoen Berland poll
Andy Barr, “Poll: D.C. Elites a World Apart,”
Politico
, July 18, 2010,
http://www.politico.com/polls/power-and-the-people
. (Full results available as a PDF at this URL.)

25.
Washington’s political elites
Francesca Levy, “America’s 25 Richest Counties,”
Forbes
, March 4, 2010,
http://www.forbes.com/2010/03/04/america-richest-counties-lifestyle-real-estate-wealthy-suburbs.html
.

26.
In his 2005 paper
Martin Gilens, “Inequality and Democratic Responsiveness,”
Public Opinion Quarterly
69, no. 5 (special issue, 2005): 778–896; Martin Gilens, conversation with author, 2010.

27.
A new free-trade agreement
“U.S.–South Korea Trade Deal Largest Since NAFTA,” Associated Press, December 3, 2010.

28.
the state of the economy
Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia, “George Herbert Walker Bush, American President: An Online Reference Resource,”
http://millercenter.org/president/bush/essays/biography/3
.
Democrats who decided not to run against George Bush in 1996 included Senator Bill Bradley and Governor Mario Cuomo.

29.
But economic conditions
Larry Bartels,
Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 100–104; John B. Judis, “Job One,”
New Republic
, September 22, 2009,
http://www.tnr.com/article/job-one
.

30.
unemployment doesn’t matter
Bartels,
Unequal Democracy
, 100–120; Seth Masket, conversation with author, December 2010.

31.
polling in early 2011
“Romney, Huckabee Even With Obama, Other GOP Hopefuls Trail,” Rasmussen Reports, February 6, 2011; Lydia Saad, “Nameless Republican Ties Obama in 2010 Election Preferences,” Gallup, February 16, 2011.

32.
After the 2010 midterms
David M. Kennedy, “Throwing the Bums Out for 140 Years,”
New York Times
, November 6, 2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/opinion/07kennedy.html
.

33.
Japan’s economy since
John B. Judis, “A Lost Generation,”
New Republic
, November 13, 2010,
http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/78890/a-lost-generation
.

1.
In 1937, as Franklin
U.S. Census Bureau, “Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1957,” 1960, 70; Robert McElvaine,
The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941
(New York: New York Times Books, 1984), 298.

2.
after years of deficits
Jodie T. Allen, “How a Different America Responded to the Great Depression,” Pew Research Center, December 14, 2010,
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1810/public-opinion-great-depression-compared-with-now
.

3.
And so, in 1937
Ibid.; McElvaine,
The Great Depression
, 297–98, 307.

4.
Deficit spending intuitively
U.S. Office of Management and Budget, Historical Tables, “Federal Debt at the End of the Year: 1940–2016,”
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals
.

5.
Debt kept rising
Richard Auxier, “Reagan’s Recession,” Pew Research Center, December 14, 2010,
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1818/reagan-recession-public-opinion-very-negative
.

6.
The size of the debt
U.S. Office of Management and Budget, Historical Tables, “Federal Debt at the End of the Year: 1940-2016.”

7.
Many observers believe
Debt Reduction Task Force, “Restoring America’s Future,” Bipartisan Policy Center, November 2010.

8.
Yet concerns over
Data and analysis provided to author by Marc Goldwein, Policy Director, Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, by e-mail on March 24, 2011.

9.
Jobs are scarce
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey,” accessed March 2011,
http://www.bls.gov/cps/
.

10.
The unemployment rate
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, data provided to the author.

11.
fears are driven
See, for instance, Congressional Budget Office, “The Budget and Economic Outlook: Fiscal Years 2008 to 2018,” January 2008, figure 1-4 (“Projected Federal Spending Over the Long Term”), showing rapid increases in federal spending over the next several decades, driven exclusively by growth in Medicare and Medicaid spending,
http://cbo.gov/ftpdocs/89xx/doc8917/Chapter1.5.1.shtml#1070080
.

12.
we should also focus
The economists Ezekiel J. Emanuel and Victor R. Fuchs have described a much broader version of such a plan. See, for example, “Health Care Vouchers—A Proposal for Universal Coverage,”
New England Journal of Medicine
352, no. 12 (March 24, 2005),
http://www.robert-h-frank.com/PDFs/Emanuel-Fuchs.NEJM.3-24-05.pdf
.

13.
the city of Camden, New Jersey
Christopher Beam, “Officers Down,”
Slate
, January 19, 2011,
http://www.slate.com/id/2281694/
.

14.
One of the best targets
Michael Mandel, “Our Aging Capital Stock,”
Mandel on Innovation and Growth
(blog), December 14, 2010,
http://innovationandgrowth.wordpress.com/2010/12/14/our-aging-capital-stock/
.

15.
The American Society of Civil Engineers
American Society of Civil Engineers, “Report Card for America’s Infrastructure,” 2009,
http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/
.

16.
Over the past decade
McKinsey Global Institute, “Growth and Competitiveness in the United States: The Role of Its Multinational Companies,” June 2010, 45,
http://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/publications/
role_of_us_multinational_companies/index.asp
.

17.
China spends about 9 percent
“The Cracks Are Showing,”
Economist
, June 26, 2008,
http://www.economist.com/node/11636517
.

18.
Not all of this investment
Christopher Leinberger, “Here Comes the Neighborhood,”
Atlantic
, June 2010,
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/06/here-comes-the-neighborhood/8093/
.

19.
And targeted expansion
The CBO estimates full-time equivalent job savings of between 1.8 and 5 million, and a boost to real GDP of between 1.1 and 3.5 percent. See Congressional Budget Office, “Estimated Impact of ARRA on Employment and Economic Output from October 2010 Through December 2010,”
Director’s Blog
, Congressional Budget Office, February, 2011,
http://cboblog.cbo.gov/?p=1852
; Adam Posen,
Restoring Japan’s Economic Growth
(Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics, 1998).

20.
Economic woes are not
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Local Area Unemployment Statistics: Unemployment Rates for Metropolitan Areas,” December 2010,
http://www.bls.gov/web/metro/laummtrk.htm
.

21.
the ratio of unemployed people
Juju.com
, “Job Search Difficulty Index,” February 2011,
http://www.job-search-engine.com/press/Juju-Releases-Job-Search-Difficulty-Index-for-Major-Cities-February-2011
.

22.
the rate of migration
William Frey, “Migration Declines Further: Stalling Brain Gains and Ambitions,” Brookings Institution, January 2011,
http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2011/0112_migration_frey.aspx
.

23.
a 2010 Rutgers University survey
Debbie Borie-Holtz, Carl Van Horn, and Cliff Zukin, “No End in Sight: The Agony of Prolonged Unemployment” (paper, Rutgers University, May 2010), available at
http://www.scribd.com/doc/32165839/Work-Trends-May-2010-No-End-in-Sight-The-Agony-of-Prolonged-Unemployment
.

24.
The Internet has made it much easier
Jens Ludwig and Steven Raphael, “The Mobility Bank: Increasing Residential Mobility to Boost Economic Mobility,” Hamilton Project, October 2010.

25.
Under the Trade Adjustment Assistance Program
Howard Rosen, conversation with author, 2010; see also U.S. Department of Labor, “Trade Adjustment Assistance Fact Sheet,”
http://www.doleta.gov/programs/factsht/taa.htm
.

26.
As a lower-cost alternative
Ludwig and Raphael, “The Mobility Bank.”

27.
In a 2010 survey by the National Association of Manufacturers
Motoko Rich, “Factory Jobs Return, but Employers Find Skills Shortage,”
New York Times
, July 2, 2010.

28.
In some places, what employers need
Ibid.

29.
many people who lost their job
Borie-Holtz, Van Horn, and Zukin, “No End in Sight.”

30.
time limits on unemployment benefits
Mai Dao and Prakash Loungani, “The Human Cost of Recessions: Assessing It, Reducing It” (IMF Staff Position Note, November 11, 2010),
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/spn/2010/spn1017.pdf
, see p. 18 in particular;
http://www.politiquessociales.net/IMG/pdf/dp3667.pdf
.

31.
the comparatively short duration
Walter Nicholson and Karen Needels, “Optimal Extended Unemployment Benefits,” Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., October 2004,
www3.amherst.edu/~wenicholson/Optimal_UI.APPAM.pdf
.

32.
Wage insurance wouldn’t
Lael Brainard, “Meeting the Challenge of Income Instability,” Testimony to the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, February 28, 2007,
http://www.brookings.edu/testimony/2007/0228labor_brainard.aspx
.

33.
the McKinsey Global Institute
McKinsey Global Institute, “Growth and Competitiveness.”

34.
Yet for all their outsized presence Hearing on the Current Federal Income Tax and the Need for Reform Before the Committee on Ways and Means
, U.S. House of Representatives (January 20, 2011; testimony of Martin Sullivan),
http://waysandmeans.house.gov/UploadedFiles/
sullivan_written_testimony_WM_Jan_20.pdf
.

35.
“The value of knowledge capital”
Michael Mandel, “A Massive Writedown of U.S. Knowledge Capital,”
Mandel on Innovation and Growth
(blog), December
13, 2010,
http://innovationandgrowth.wordpress.com/2010/12/13/a-massive-writedown-of-u-s-knowledge-capital/
.

36.
The product cycle
Michael Mandel, “Why Isn’t the Innovation Economy Creating More Jobs? Part I,”
Mandel on Innovation and Growth
(blog), February 22, 2010,
http://innovationandgrowth.wordpress.com/2010/02/22/why-isnt-the-innovation-economy-creating-more-jobs-part-i/
.

37.
Yet in the aughts
See, for example, Michael Mandel, “The Failed Promise of Innovation in the U.S.,”
Bloomberg Businessweek
, June 3, 2009; Edmund Phelps and Leo Tilman, “Wanted: A First National Bank of Innovation,”
Harvard Business Review
, January/February 2010; Tyler Cowen,
The Great Stagnation
(New York: Penguin, 2010).

38.
Foreign students still flock
McKinsey Global Institute, “Growth and Competitiveness,” 40, 41.

39.
the Sarbanes-Oxley accounting reforms
Phelps and Tilman, “Wanted.”

40.
The growth of the Internet
Michael Mandel, “The Coming Communications Boom? Jobs, Innovation and Countercyclical Regulatory Policy” (policy memo, Progressive Policy Institute, July 20, 2010),
http://www.progressivefix.com/the-coming-communications-boom-jobs-innovation-and-countercyclical-regulatory-policy
.

41.
In periods of strong growth
Ibid.

42.
Only about 65,000 H-1B visas
McKinsey Global Institute, “Growth and Competitiveness,” 56.

43.
One group of venture
The StartUp Visa Act is available to view at
www.startupvisa.com
.

44.
A special focus on improving
Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill,
Creating an Opportunity Society
(Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2009), 149.

45.
In
The Race Between Education and Technology Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz,
The Race Between Education and Technology
(Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2008), 5, 27, 43, 244, 324.

46.
Meanwhile, with remarkable speed
Ibid., 43.

47.
Over the past thirty years
CPS Historical Time Series Tables, “Percent of People 25 Years and Over Who Have Completed High School or College, by Race, Hispanic Origin, and Sex, Selected Years: 1940 to 2009,” U.S. Census Bureau, September 22, 2010.

48.
Grants, loans, and tax credits
Haskins and Sawhill,
Creating an Opportunity Society
, 186–87.

49.
One recent major study
Ibid., 188.

50.
Analysis by David Autor
David Autor, “The Polarization of Job Opportunities in the U.S. Labor Market,” Center for American Progress, the Hamilton Project, April 2010.

51.
While the lion’s share of jobs
National Employment Law Project cited by Harold Meyerson in “Business Is Booming,”
American Prospect
, January 28, 2011,
http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=business_is_booming
.

52.
As Richard Florida writes
Richard Florida,
The Great Reset
(New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 121–22.

53.
Whole Foods Markets
Elizabeth Flock, “Whole Foods’ Organic Capitalism,”
Forbes
, October 20, 2010.

54.
American economists on both
Edmund S. Phelps,
Rewarding Work
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Robert Reich,
Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future
(New York: Knopf, 2010); among others.

55.
The Earned Income Tax Credit
U.S. Internal Revenue Service, Earned Income Tax Credit Home Page,
http://www.irs.gov/individuals/article/0,,id=96406,00.html
; Tax Policy Center, “Earned Income Tax Credit Parameters, 1975–2011,” Tax Policy Center,
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?DocID=36&Topic2id=40&Topic3id=42
.

56.
The panic of 1893
Louise Story, “Income Inequality and Financial Crises,”
New York Times
, August 21, 2010; David Moss, “Chart: Bank Failures, Regulation, and Inequality in the United States,” Harvard Business School,
http://www.tobinproject.org/conference_economic/papers/
BankFailures_ChartwithComments_Moss.pdf
.

57.
Over time, the United States
Tax Foundation, “U.S. Federal Individual Income Tax Rates History, 1913–2011,” January 1, 2011,
http://www.taxfoundation.org/publications/show/151.html
.

58.
Soaking the rich
Rosanne Altshuler, Katherine Lim, and Roberton Williams, “Desperately Seeking Revenue” (Tax Policy Center; paper presented January 15, 2010).

59.
The former labor secretary
Reich,
Aftershock
, 140.

60.
The journalist James Fallows
James Fallows, “How America Can Rise Again,”
Atlantic
, January/February 2010.