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Neal Gabler And How Not To Make It

Neal Gabler And How Not To Make It

Call me unpatriotic, but whenever I hear people prating about the “American Dream” it sets my teeth on edge. The thing about dreams, see, is that they’re imaginary. A figment of your imagination.

So you have a dream. Good for you.

I had a dream too. When I was twelve. I was going to be major league pitcher. Over the ensuing years, however, it became gradually apparent that the fastball that wowed them in Little League might not carry me to World Series stardom.

To me, that’s one of the big lessons of sports: realism. How good you are, how good you’re not. How to deal with it.

It’s when people bring unfettered illusions into the economic and political realm, however, that the trouble starts. One such example is a provocative essay in the May issue of The Atlantic by Neal Gabler.

Despite five well-received books and hundreds of magazine articles in all the prestigious places, Gabler finds himself at age 66 dead broke — ducking creditors, driving a 19 year-old junker, in thrall to the IRS and having to borrow money from his adult daughters to pay the heating bill.

“Financial impotence,” he calls it.

While he says he’s not looking for sympathy, Gabler identifies with economically-squeezed Americans who told pollsters for the Federal Reserve Board that they would have to meet a $400 emergency by either borrowing, selling something, or worse.

“Four hundred dollars!” Gabler writes. “Who knew?…Well, I knew. I knew because I am in that 47 percent.”

Well, Mitt Romney knew, if you recall. He expected GOP voters to be angry that a near-majority of Americans didn’t earn enough to pay Federal income taxes (although many end up remitting a greater proportion of their wealth to the government than Romney himself.)

However, Gabler’s point isn’t really political in the electoral sense. He professes concern about the aforementioned “American Dream.” He thinks it’s a pity that only 64 percent in a 2014 New York Times poll professed belief in this phantasm, defined as “that great, glowing, irresistible American promise that has been drummed into our heads since birth: Just work hard and you can have it all.”

Actually, no you can’t. And you never could. Respectfully, Gabler appears to have spent too much time on planet Hollywood. He worries that people’s money problems have “perhaps begun to diminish our national spirit. People want to feel, need to feel, that they are advancing in this world. It is what sustains them.”

Some would say that defining the national spirit entirely in material terms can only lead to sorrow. But let’s not get metaphysical in a newspaper column, shall we?

The author of biographies of Walt Disney, Walter Winchell, and Barbra Streisand, Gabler appears to have fallen into what my friend Gwen Moritz aptly defines as “the fatal trap of believing that [he] deserved a lifestyle [he] simply couldn’t afford.”

To somebody like me whose professional career roughly parallels Gabler’s, the man’s personal choices are mind-boggling. As he correctly points out, “writer…is a financially perilous profession.” To keep your head above water, it’s important to keep your wits about you. Without my wife’s steadfastness and hard work, I’d never have made a go of it. But if wealth and status are your primary goals, you’re probably in the wrong game.

Gabler appears to have made one financially ruinous decision after another—hiding the truth from himself and his family with equal facility. Even his confession sometimes conceals as much as it reveals. Moritz says she actually screamed when Gabler mentioned cashing out his retirement account to pay for his daughter’s wedding—this after spending his father’s savings sending his children to costly private colleges. He wanted them to be “winners.”

Me, I was flabbergasted when he mentioned buying a house in East Hampton, L.I. the most exclusive CEO- and celebrity-enclave on the east coast. A visit to the yacht club there could make an ordinary peasant nostalgic for the age of piracy. This two years before selling his family’s Brooklyn co-op. His combined mortgage payments must have rivaled Portugal’s national debt.

Then there was Gabler’s stretching out a lump-sum book advance by failing to pay taxes. Slate’s Helaine Olen says “I don’t believe there are 10 people in the United States who couldn’t tell you that would end badly.”

Equally bewildering is the personal angle. See, when they left the city, Gabler’s wife gave up her career as a film executive. “[W]ith my antediluvian masculine pride at stake, I told her that I could provide for us without her help—another instance of hiding my financial impotence, even from my wife. I kept the books; I kept her in the dark.”

It’s a fascinating confession, but few will find it ultimately persuasive.

American Dream, indeed.

Photo: BillMoyers.com.

GOP Thinks The 47 Percent Aren’t Trying Hard Enough

GOP Thinks The 47 Percent Aren’t Trying Hard Enough

Remember the “47 percent”?

During his 2012 campaign for the presidency, Mitt Romney was caught on tape describing nearly half the country in disparaging terms, labeling them moochers who want handouts. They are voters “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it,” he said.

Romney’s remarks — and he stood by them immediately after his election defeat — didn’t just damage him; they also sullied the entire Republican Party, reinforcing its image as the lapdog of the very rich. Even now, as some of its strategists push hard for the GOP to reach out to ordinary working folks, its congressional leaders continue to protect the 1 percent.

If President Obama has no hope for passage of his ambitious program of “middle-class economics,” as he called it during last week’s State of the Union speech, at least he has a plan. His proposals for free community college, increasing the minimum wage and providing tax cuts to families in the middle of the economic spectrum have the advantage of recognizing the reality of income inequality.

So far, his GOP critics continue to resist that reality, sticking to the old Reagan-era bromide that a “rising tide lifts all boats.” Perhaps that’s true, but those middle-class rowboats are taking on water even as the rich float along comfortably in their yachts.

The growing gap between the haves and the have-nots is one of the most critical issues of our time, a dispiriting trend that has struck most Western economies. Because of complex forces, especially globalization and technology, the incomes of ordinary workers are falling further and further behind, even as the rich get, well, richer.

That’s not the fault of Democrats or Republicans, Libertarians or Socialists. Nor did this growing inequality start with the Great Recession. It started way back in the 1970s, as the factories that had powered the middle class started to shut down. American steel mills closed; textile mills went away; automotive plants moved out. The trends have simply accelerated since then, as robots power assembly lines and low-wage workers in places like Bangladesh sew garments once made in Maine and North Carolina.

Even now, in a resurgent economy, many families haven’t regained their footing. Their savings accounts have evaporated. They can’t replace the house they lost to foreclosure. They work two or three part-time jobs without benefits. And even those with full-time jobs aren’t living it up. According to The New York Times, the median weekly wage for full-time workers at the end of 2014 was $796, below the levels in 2009, when the expansion began.

Those workers are hardly moochers. They are struggling to find their way in a world where their skills have less value. They need help from a government that knows its role is to lend a hand, to steady the ladder, to help them find a toehold.

Even Romney, who is making noises about running again, has finally gotten the message. He has at least called for an increase in the minimum wage.

But most Republicans can’t get over the notion that those who haven’t made it simply aren’t trying hard enough, that if you’re stuck on the economic margins, it’s your own fault. Their allegiance to the very rich — people like the billionaire Koch brothers — overrides any concern for the vast middle.

Take their insistence on resisting tax increases for the 1 percent — a plan proposed by Obama to pay for tax cuts for the middle and working classes. Republicans claim any tax hikes would kill the recovery. But that’s not so. George W. Bush’s tax cuts led to no new job growth, while Bill Clinton, who raised taxes, presided over a period of widespread prosperity.

So what do Republicans propose? So far, they’ve pushed building the Keystone pipeline, which would create about 42,000 jobs over a period of two years, but only about 35 permanent jobs. And, of course, the GOP still wants to kill Obamacare, a strategy that would create zero jobs.

That’s not much better than dismissing the 47 percent.

Cynthia Tucker won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.

Photo: monkeyz_uncle via Flickr

Paul Ryan Breaks The Silence Surrounding Poverty In America

Paul Ryan Breaks The Silence Surrounding Poverty In America

Cover your eyes and hide the kids: A Republican is talking poverty.

This has not been a pretty picture in the recent past. Who can forget then-South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer likening poor people to animals one feeds from the back door and Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning calling them stray raccoons? And let’s not even get into Mitt Romney’s wholesale slander of the so-called “47 percent.”

So one receives with a certain trepidation the news that Romney’s running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan, has issued a proposal aimed at curbing poverty. But Expanding Opportunity in America, produced by the House Budget Committee Ryan chairs, is a surprise — serious, substantive and sprinkled with interesting ideas. Not that you should take that as a blanket endorsement.

We lack the space to analyze it in detail, but in a nutshell, Ryan proposes an “Opportunity Grant,” consolidating federal anti-poverty programs into 50 chunks of money to be administered by each state as it sees fit. The states would be encouraged to experiment and find creative ways of providing the necessary services to their citizens.

This is in keeping with GOP orthodoxy which holds that anything crafted by Washington will lack flexibility to meet the needs in local municipalities and thus it makes more sense to empower states to create programs tailored to their specific conditions.

Some of us are skeptical of the idea that giving states more power is a panacea. Some of us fear all that does is take one problem and turn it into 50. But to his credit, Ryan’s proposal imposes performance standards and requires accountability. It is a blank check, but with strings attached.

One critic, Washington Post blogger (and former Obama administration economic adviser) Jared Bernstein, thinks the proposal reflects the GOP’s “pervasive assumption that all you have to do to get a job is want a job.” In that context, it’s worth noting that Ryan was chastised in March for essentially blaming poverty on the laziness of black and brown men. In a radio interview he lamented “this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work…”

This, of course, ignores the fact that most poverty is neither black nor brown, but white. What “tailspin of culture” keeps Appalachia poor? Somehow that question is never addressed. The thing Ryan apparently does not know, but should, is that urban poverty is driven not by a lack of people wanting to work, but by a lack of work — and skills and transportation.

Worse, Ryan cited as an authority Charles Murray, the infamous social scientist (he co-authored The Bell Curve), who argues the intellectual and moral inferiority of black and brown people. Which suggests Ryan, like too many in his party, still needs to wean himself from the noxious notion of poverty as a defect of character or heritage.

All that said, give him credit for what he’s done here.

It is a national disgrace that the problem of poverty has been all but invisible in our culture and politics since the era of Lyndon Johnson. The only politician over that half-century who lifted it to the level of national discourse was John Edwards — and then he went and got his career caught in his zipper.

Thus, one welcomes even this flawed proposal. One hopes it presages renewed GOP interest in an issue the party has largely ceded to the Democrats and spurs us all to reconsider what we can — and should — do to erase the specter of want in a land of plenty. For too long, we have responded to that urgent need only with silence.

So the best thing about Paul Ryan’s proposal is the simple fact that it exists.

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, FL, 33132. Readers may contact him via email at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)

Photo: Speaker Boehner via Flickr

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WATCH: Another Republican Attacks The ’47 Percent’

WATCH: Another Republican Attacks The ’47 Percent’

When former U.S. Representative Bob Beauprez won the GOP nomination for governor of Colorado, many Republicans breathed a sigh of relief. Beauprez edged extreme anti-immigration candidate Tom Tancredo in the primary, and was viewed as much less likely to be hurt by a controversial gaffe in the general election.

So much for that.

On Wednesday, video emerged of Beauprez criticizing the 47 percent of Americans who don’t pay federal income taxes. The video, which was recorded in 2010, was obtained by The Denver Post after a tip from the Colorado Democratic Party.

“I see something that frankly doesn’t surprise me, having been on Ways and Means Committee: 47 percent of all Americans pay no federal income tax,” Beauprez tells an audience at the Denver Rotary Club in the video. “I’m guessing that most of you in this room are not in that 47 percent — God bless you — but what that tells me is that we’ve got almost half the population perfectly happy that somebody else is paying the bill, and most of that half is you all.”

“I submit to you that there is a political strategy to get slightly over half and have a permanent ruling majority by keeping over half of the population dependent on the largesse of government that somebody else is paying for,” Beauprez added.

The remarks are almost identical to the infamous speech that dragged down Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign (incidentally, Romney endorsed Beauprez during the Republican primary). Despite the damage done by Romney’s remarks, several other Republicans have since reprised them.

None of them noted that the overwhelming majority of the “47 percent” do pay other taxes, and benefit from tax credits that Republicans have traditionally supported. Additionally, if Democrats have crafted a strategy to turn non-taxpayers into a “permant majority,” it’s not working; most “47 percenters” are Republicans.

Colorado Democratic Party Chairman Rick Palacio noted the irony that Beauprez is currently traveling the state on a “Unity Tour” with his former Republican rivals for the nomination.

“If he’s talking about unity, this is a funny way to show unity with Coloradans,” Palacio told the Post. “He must be talking about unity with other Republicans, because he didn’t say anything about anybody else.”

Beauprez’s speech raises an obvious question: Does he think that Congress should raise the income tax on 47 percent of the country? And if not, how does he suggest preventing the half of the population represented at the Denver Rotary Club from “paying the bill?”

Polls suggest that Beauprez is locked in a dead heat with incumbent governor John Hickenlooper (D); these remarks seem unlikely to help. If Beauprez fades in the polls, it could also affect Colorado’s closely contested Senate race between incumbent Democrat Mark Udall and U.S. Rep. Cory Gardner. A Gardner win would go a long way toward helping Republicans secure the net six seats they need to claim a Senate majority.

Video of Beauprez’s remarks can be seen below:

Screenshot: Bob Beauprez/YouTube

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