The central question in Paul Pierson and Jacob S. Hacker’s Winner-Take-All Politics is why Americans so often seem to oppose programs or ideas that would directly benefit them. In the view of the authors, the American people should be overjoyed at things like the Affordable Care Act and increased regulation of the banking industry, but they are not. In the book, these two political scientists consider the reasons for this being the case. Moreover, they contend that Americans reason to be concerned about the fact that the wealth of the nation is becoming ever more concentrated in the hands of a few.
As the book makes clear, since the 70s income expansion in the US has principally occurred for those who were already well to do. They wonder why (in the decades after WWII) the widely distributed prosperity the general public enjoyed shifted to a situation in which the growth in wealth was primarily among the upper class (Hacker and Pierson 11). With considerable anger, they look at the vast increases on the income going to one percent of the nation. Their statements concerning “income inequality” are quite similar to those of Senator John Edwards when he was running for President.
However, the authors contradict themselves on certain points and don’t clearly explain some of their contentions. For instance, they don’t make it clear just how the higher earnings of Bill Gates or Warren Buffett harmed the average American. In fact, they actually acknowledge that when one looks at after-tax earnings, (which includes not only wages, but also job benefits and government transfers) most people are a good deal better off than they were three decades ago (Hacker and Pierson 55). Nevertheless, the authors believe that the average American is worse off now because of greater personal debt, poor health insurance and reduced job security. However, these contentions are thrown out without any real evidence to support them.
Perhaps the most effective aspect of Winner-Take-All Politics is how it examines the 1970s, particularly in regard to the oddity of Nixon’s liberalism and Carter’s conservatism. As the authors point out, it was during the Carter administration that the Democratically controlled Congress slashed capital gains taxes, declined to establish a consumer protection federal agency and rejected a bill which would have increased labor union’s power (Hacker and Pierson 130). The authors contend that this was a direct result of the increasing influence of lobbyists from industry and business (as well as think tanks). While they don’t make clear just what the thing was going on in these lobbying efforts, the implication is clear that something underhanded had to be going happening. One of their concerns is that they simply don’t understand why "increased concern among homeowners whose property values had climbed or middle class Americans thrust into higher tax brackets due to inflation" should have sparked "a frenzy of tax-cutting for corporations and the wealthy" (Hacker and Pierson 133).
However, the authors don’t seem to consider the possibility that middle-class Americans were worried that the federal government was slowly destroying the private sector, which they felt would have a very negative effect on them and their families. In turn, their elected representatives in the federal government would’ve simply acted based on these concerns. This scenario never seems to occur to Pierson and Hacker. Instead, the authors seem to believe that the government programs and policies are automatically good for the people and should be supported by them.
Similar assumptions are assigned to the three decades of political history that followed the Carter administration. In the author’s views, business lobbyists exerted an unhealthy influence on both Democrats and conservative Republicans, since these politicians were always eager for the campaign funding these lobbyists could provide (Hacker and Pierson 184). I can though, the authors feel to make clear why they view it as immoral or unethical for businesses to lobby government officials concerning bills that might damage their businesses. Conversely, they do not explain how a redistribution of wealth by government would result in higher productivity than can be seen by the successful growth of the private sector.
While Pierson and Hacker approve of Pres. Obama’s Affordable Care Act (Hacker and Pierson 106), they do regret that it wasn’t more all-encompassing. Moreover, the authors do take note of the impact that the tea party movement has had on the political climate in the United States, recognizing that at this time the right is in the ascendancy. As a response to this, they call for greater voter involvement and turnout, as well as greater support for labor unions as a means for resisting the decline of the middle class.
In conclusion, it should be said that the utopian United States that the authors long for in Winner-Take-All Politics has always been a bit of a pipe dream. While in their view the generation following World War II enjoyed tremendous prosperity because of the distribution of wealth through Keynesian economic policy, in fact this prosperity largely resulted from a cooperative effort between business, government and the public that (on the one hand) won WWII and (on the other hand) allowed for postwar expansion of both the private sector and government. Thus, the authors may be mistaken in their contention that the American people fail to understand and support what is in their best interest, since it may be that the public understands their own interest better than the authors do.
Works Cited
Hacker, Jacob S, and Paul Pierson. Winner-take-all Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer-and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. , 2010. Print.
