Prose Before Hos

True Affection Sinks Like A Stone

Posted on October 19, 2011 in Videos

True Affection by The Blow off of Paper Television.

The Price Of Property And Progress

Posted on October 18, 2011 in Articles

The Article: Income Disparity And The ‘Price Of Civilization’ by NPR and Jeffrey Sachs.

The Text: The Occupy Wall Street movement has been criticized for lacking focus — but its main slogan seems to be resonating. That slogan, “We are the 99 percent,” highlights the issue of income disparity. It’s something economist Jeffrey Sachs has been tracking for a long time.

The top 1 percent of U.S. households now take about a quarter of all income, according to Sachs. And wages for the average American male peaked in 1973, he says.

“It means that for the typical young person right now who is a high school graduate — but on average will not get a bachelor’s degree — life is extremely challenging to find a foothold,” Sachs tells NPR’s Steve Inskeep, “with a stable job, with an opportunity to have a reliable income, health and other benefits and a chance to have the kind of middle-class life that we once took for granted.”

Sachs explores the result of the widening income gap in his new book, The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity. The book’s title was inspired by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who once said, “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”

Sachs says middle-class growth suffered in the 1980s when taxes were reduced and programs like energy research were scaled back — programs that he says would have made the United States more competitive in the face of globalization.

And he says current government policies, including President Obama’s jobs plan, are short-term fixes that still leave the country vulnerable.

On The Price Of Civilization

“If we’re going to have a society that is fair between rich and poor, we can’t leave vast parts of our society to suffer in a poverty trap, where young people grow up poor and then don’t have the means to make it into the middle class because they can’t meet college tuition, for example.