What Trickles Down Today: Underpaid, No-Benefits Jobs

By: Richard Reeves

The newest thing in the "Park" cities around Dallas, Vice President Cheney's old neighborhood, is "wrapping rooms". Friends tell me that some people are glassing-in small porches or even building small additions for permanent space filled with worktables, rolls of wrapping paper, cutters, ribbons, and all that. It seems that social seasons never end anymore among the rich. Folks in plush enclaves of Dallas, particularly Highland Park (that's where the Cheneys lived in his oil days), are well beyond killer kitchens and Roman baths. Now entertainment, gifts and one-upsmanship are an everyday thing, and strivers judge each other by how they wrap little things from Neiman Marcus or Saks.

This is no small thing. The rich are doing their duty in this era of trickle-down economics. In the days leading up to Christmas, the news, print, and electronic, was full of patriotic messages chiding us all, rich and poor alike, to spend all we could earn or borrow from Visa or Mastercard (at Mafia rates of 20%-and-more interest).

Suddenly, it seems, the American economy is not about production, ingenuity, and trade. Consumption above all is our new charge. Remember the good old days when they used to yell at us that we weren't saving enough - and the Japanese were - to give American industry and banks and such enough money to invest in research and the future? Our betters were concerned that we would be reduced to a nation flipping hamburgers for each other.

Now all we have to do is spend - and then everything will be OK. Easy.

Investment now, at least in the reign of Bush, is about cutting taxes on the rich, who will, presumably, then hire us as wrappers, trainers, secretaries, drivers, nannies, and dog-washers and -walkers. The money to pay us - which we must spend immediately - will come from eliminating or cutting the taxes on high incomes, investments, dividends, and the estates of what the President's father liked to call the "investing classes".

The rest of us can be a nation of servants. Actually, in this new age, we will be less than servants. The code of old-time servitude meant that the more marginal classes were sort of adopted by the rich, provided with some security in terms of medical care and old age. That has changed. You're on your own, buddy! The new servers are, more often than not, independent contractors - "independent contractors" is usually a euphemism for "no benefits" - who are, more often than not, paid in cash. Many in the investing classes hate government interference in the workplace, but demand government responsibility for the health and maintenance of the serving class.

So, the way it works is this: Lower taxes on the rich free up the money to hire the poor to run their errands and tone their bodies, and the marginal classes have second and third serving-job opportunities. And if the serving classes spend and spend and borrow and borrow - which, of course, is exactly what the new Bush administration is doing - the whole thing looks pretty good for a while. A while, however, ends when the new servants become old folks with health problems and personal debts they can't pay.

A happy and prosperous New Year to one and all!