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Text File | 1993-04-08 | 3.7 KB | 82 lines

                                                                                REVIEWS, Page 70

BOOKS

The Pursuit of Happiness?


By RICHARD LACAYO

    TITLE: THE END OF EQUALITY
    AUTHOR: Mickey Kaus
    PUBLISHER: Basicbooks; 293 pages; $25

    THE BOTTOM LINE: Let the rich get richer, says Kaus, and
the poor get respect. That's a plan for the Democrats?


    Utopias are supposed to be dreams of the future. But the
American Utopia? Lately it's a dream that was, a twilit memory
of the golden age between V-J day and OPEC, when even a
blue-collar paycheck bought a place in the middle class. The
promise of paradise regained has become a key to the Democratic
Party pitch. Mickey Kaus, a senior editor of the New Republic,
says the Democrats are wasting their time. As the U.S. enters
a world where only the highly skilled and well educated will
make a decent living, the gap between rich and poor is going to
keep growing. No fiddling with the tax code, retreat to
protectionism, or job training for jobs that aren't there is
going to stop it. Income equality, or even anything close to it,
is a hopeless cause.

    "Liberalism would be less depressing if it had a more
attainable end," Kaus writes, "a goal short of money equality."
So he wants liberal Democrats to embrace an aim that he calls
civic equality. If government can't bring everyone into the
middle class, let it expand the areas of life in which everyone,
regardless of income, receives the same treatment. National
health care, improved public schools, universal national service
and government financing of nearly all election campaigns, which
would freeze out special-interest money -- these are the
unobjectionable components of Kaus' enlarged public sphere.

    Kaus is right to fear the hardening of class lines, but
wrong to think the stresses can be relieved without a continuing
effort to boost income for the bottom half. "No, we can't tell
them they'll be rich," he admits. "Or even comfortably
well-off. But we can offer them at least a material minimum and
a good shot at climbing up the ladder. And we can offer them
respect." And what might they offer back? The Bronx had a cheer
for it. In an age when the two-candidate presidential race is
no longer something to count on, a good chunk of the Democratic
core constituency would peel off for third parties.

    At the center of Kaus' book is a thoughtful but no less
risky proposal to dynamite welfare. He rightly understands how
fear and loathing of the chronically unemployed underclass have
encouraged middle-income Americans to flee from everyone below
them on the class scale. The only way to eliminate welfare
dependency, Kaus maintains, is by cutting off checks for all
able-bodied recipients, including single mothers with children.
He would have government provide them instead with jobs that pay
slightly less than the minimum wage, earned-income tax credits
to nudge them over the poverty line, drug counseling, job
training and, if necessary, day care for their children.

    Kaus doesn't sell this as social policy on the cheap. He
expects it to cost up to $59 billion a year more than the $23
billion already spent annually by state and federal governments
on welfare. And he knows it would be politically perilous,
because he suggests paying for the plan by raiding Social
Security funds and trimming benefits for upper-income retirees,
whose knives are long and sharp. But he considers it money well
spent if it undid the knot of chronic poverty and helped foster
rapprochement among the classes. And it would be too. But one
advantage of being an author is that you only ask people to
listen to you, not to vote for you.