Republican Thinks Diversity is Good... In Income
Trey Garrison, on his own blog, finds disturbing a study by the Institute of Urban Policy Research at UT-Dallas that takes as a premise that it's a good thing for a city to have similarity of economic opportunity, self-sufficiency and involvement in civic life across the city.
I am not surprised if Garrison argues that diversity in culture, religion, entertainment, politics, etc., is not of interest. After all, he's boasted before of his joy in living in his Plano neighborhood where everyone goes to Home Depot on Saturday mornings, just like him. There are plenty of people like him for whom "diversity" is a dirty word.
What surprises me (but, in hindsight, I realize it shouldn't have) is that Garrison does value diversity in at least one respect. He values diversity in income. He is all in favor of the kind of diversity that ensures we always have poor people (as long the poor people are restricted to their own neighborhoods, not his).
Jesus famously said, "For you always have the poor with you." Garrison's corollary is: "There is always going to be [an income] gap, and that gap widens even if everyone makes exactly the same percentage gain in income." The problem with Garrison's corollary is that everyone isn't making exactly the same percentage gain in income. The rich are making bigger percentage gains. In fact, the middle class isn't gaining at all. Their incomes are stagnant or even shrinking while the incomes of the rich continue to rack up bigger and bigger gains (even in percentage terms). The gap is getting wider.
For a generation after FDR's New Deal, the income gap shrank. It corresponded to the rise of the middle class in the United States. Education, home ownership, cars, televisions and vacations to the beach or mountains became affordable for the first time to the middle class, not just the rich. Many Americans look on the period as a golden age in American history.
But for the last generation, the income gap has been widening again. Today, in the America of George W. Bush, income distribution is again statistically closer to the Great Gatsby levels of inequality of the 1920s. Maybe Garrison looks back fondly on that era. Maybe he's willfully ignorant of the contrast between the luxury and poverty that defined the era. That era ended badly with a stock market crash and a great depression. The Institute of Urban Policy Research's "Dallas Wholeness Index" can help tell us whether our own era is at risk of recreating those long-ago mistakes.
World Opinion Favors Obama For President
Michael Landauer, in The Dallas Morning News Opinion blog, cites a new Gallup poll of world opinion that supposedly shows the globe favoring Obama over McCain by a margin of 4-to-1. Landauer considers the poll to be of little importance. He says, "He's not running for president of the world. Besides, the world is stupid. The world favors soccer to football. I mean, c'mon."
But if the poll is going to matter, Landauer thinks having world opinion on your side might be a distinct advantage in case of a world crisis. I think it's dangerous to American national security that Republicans consider the world having a favorable opinion of you is a negative. It's like they now want their candidates to go out of their way to insult the rest of the world, adversaries and allies alike. How did a major political party go so far astray from America's strategic interest?
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