The Betrayal of the American Dream

July 9, 2012
The ostensibly willful destruction of the American middle class is laid bare in this villains and underdogs story from the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting duo, Barlett and Steele (coauthors, America: What Went Wrong?). The authors describe economic policy changes in the decades since WWII, and demonstrate how fiscal rejiggering at the governmental level has produced a powerful and unchecked economic elite in America. Addressing issues like outsourcing, "the skewing of the tax code in favor of the rich," and the deregulation of major industries, and investigating case studies like Boeing, Apple, and PricewaterhouseCoopers, the authors paint a sobering picture of collusion between a money-hungry Congress, big business, and the "financial cowboys" of Wall Street, who have dismantled the opportunities and hopes of the American middle class in order to increase the rate of cash flow to the rich. Stories of hard-working employees and business owners watching their jobs and retirement accounts vanish will pull on readers' heartstrings, while inflammatory language accompanies descriptions of the "charlatans" and "financial bandits" engineering Joe Mainstreet's downfall. The book is simplistic in its depiction of the good guys versus the bad, and policy wonks will be disappointed with the surface-level analysis of complex economic theory and history. But for folks bowled over by the recent financial meltdown, Barlett and Steele's book will resonate.

July 1, 2012
An angry attack on Washington and the wealthy, asserting that their alliance has distorted the economy, shrunk the middle class and enriched the already rich. Competing polemics rely on predictions of a dire future, but veteran investigative reporters Barlett and Steele point out that they delivered identical warnings in America: What Went Wrong (1992)--all of which came true. They maintain that the deficit is less the result of government programs than plummeting tax revenue from the rich, who paid 51.2 percent of their income in 1955 versus 16.6 percent today. Congress once assumed that salaried workers shouldn't pay more than the rich, who lived on dividends. They reversed this in 2003, capping the dividend rate at 15 percent. More than half of large American corporations pay no tax. Since the 1970s, advocates of deregulation and free trade persistently proclaim that it increases jobs and reduces the trade deficit, apparently unaware that the exact opposite almost always happens. The authors' solutions include: Revise the tax code so corporations and the rich pay more than the middle class instead of less, discard the clueless ideology of free trade (no other nation believes it), re-regulate disastrously unregulated areas, and enforce current laws equally instead of giving the influential a free pass. The authors describe genuine problems, but their solutions would produce outrage among congressional Republicans (obscenities such as "tax increase," "government regulation," "protectionism" and "class warfare" would fill the air) and no enthusiasm from Democrats. Reforms since the 2008 crash have been easily defeated or watered down. Readers must cling to the hope that things are not as bad as the authors claim.

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Starred review from July 1, 2012
Billionaire Warren Buffet famously observed that class warfare has been going on for decades, and my class is winning. Pulitzer Prize and National Magazine Award winners Barlett and Steele scored a best-seller decrying such class warfare with America: What Went Wrong? (1992). Betrayal carries their powerful critique forward into the present. For Barlett and Steele, middle class working households earned $35,000$85,000 in 2009; that's 34 million households, with 58 million earning less and 24 million more. The ruling class betraying middle Americans is a mix of politicians and special interests who've gamed the system on behalf of the richest Americans. The authors trace the process of that betrayal from early deregulation fever (airlines and trucking) in the 1970s through today's warnings of debt infernos, unaffordable entitlements, and the need for austerity. Working in collaboration with American University's Investigation Reporting Workshop, Barlett and Steele address key elements of this betrayal (globalization, outsourcing, taxes, pensions, financial-sector dominance), then offer suggestions for reversing it, including progressive tax reform, fair trade, infrastructure investment, focused retraining, and criminal prosecution of white-collar criminals. Expect demand.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)