Color Blind

We live in an age of ignorance or bad faith. I can't decide which. George Bush and his disciples say they dream of a color blind society. I accept that, if you drop the word color.

New Orleans showed us the face of poverty. It is a face we are ordinarily blind to. At long last a society that seems to know no shame was shamed, not by the suffering of a third world country but by our own. The proper way to describe such places in America is third world county. Afterward, polls were taken. (Polls must always be taken!) Something like 60% of white Americans said race had nothing to do with the slow response to Katrina. Something like 80% of black Americans said, The hell you say! Can two groups holding such diametrically opposed views possibly be citizens of the same country? In a sense, no. My own view is that if there had been 100,000 white folks stranded in New Orleans, the government would have built the world's largest hurricane-proof gated community in the same time it took them to get bottled water and buses to the Superdome and Convention Center. At the same time, the real crime of Katrina's victims wasn't being black but being poor.

Is our mutual misundertanding a result of ignorance or bad faith? Maybe both. We are ignorant because the poor eke out an existence far below our country's high-flying cultural radar. We are in bad faith because we don't really want to know about it. Understanding would mean coming to terms with the grinding poverty that is a fact of life for too many Americans and accepting the unpleasant truth that economic policies that benefit us hurt them.

I have a simple fix. Repeal the Bush tax cuts in their entirety and replace them with a kind of Earned Income Tax Credit Plus for the working poor. Most poor Americans work. I hate that, and I hate the phrase coined to describe them. The category "working poor" should not exist in a country as rich as ours, but it does and we have to eliminate it, because a family of four earning $14,000 a year isn't living in poverty. It's living in hell. The credit would work like this: every family that works but earns less than the poverty level will receive a credit from the IRS equal to the difference between their salary and the median salary, which was $30,000 the last time I checked. For example, a family of four that earned $14,000 would receive a $16,000 check from the federal government - about a fifth of the average cut millionaires received under the Bush plan - instantly rendering them middle-class. Call it the Poverty Penalty, or if you prefer, the Jesus Credit (see "The last shall be first"). The difference is that this tax penalty is imposed on the society that would leave its working families indigent, rather than on the workers themselves. A bold reversal of historical trends! It may mean fewer yachts for billionaires, but that is a price we can pay! The beauty part is, this tax credit will encourage the unemployed to take any job no matter how low the pay (hell, it encourages workers to invade the service industries, housekeeping, Wal-Mart, etc.) and it will sunset the second the last American worker is lifted out of poverty, either via the credit itself, or more likely through American companies choosing to pre-empt the Penalty by paying their workers a living wage.

One last suggestion. Every year we get a little closer to Brazil, as the distance between rich and poor grows, and as those who govern from on high - at a safe remove from the floodwaters - have less and less in common with the governed, who are in them up to their neck. If we want policy that does the most good for the most people, our public servants should live as most citizens do. In short, we must eliminate that distance that separates those who govern from the governed. The easiest way to do so is to peg the salary of Senators and House members to the minimum wage. When our leaders have to live on the same pay as the majority of our citizens, a miracle may occur. A new Golden Age of enlightened policy will sweep like floodwaters through the corridors of power, and this flood, unlike the one caused by Katrina, can only benefit the citizens of New Orleans (and other third world counties) as they struggle to keep their heads above water.