A poll commissioned by Bloomberg finds that the reality is beginning to sink in for Americans:

The widening gap between rich and poor is eroding faith in the American dream.

By almost two to one — 64 percent to 33 percent — Americans say the U.S. no longer offers everyone an equal chance to get ahead, according to a Bloomberg National Poll. And some say the government isn’t doing much to help.

“There’s a lot of policies that make it easier for the rich to get richer and the poor to go nowhere,” says Ryan Sekac, 26, a mechanical engineer in Westerly, Rhode Island.

and the poorer you are the more desperate you’re likely to feel:

The lack of faith is especially pronounced among those making less than $50,000 a year: By a 73 percent to 24 percent margin, they say the economy is unfair. Even 60 percent of those whose annual income is $100,000 or more bemoan the absence of a fair deal while 39 percent say everyone has an equal shot to advance.

There is a bit of what I presume is unintended humor in the article:

Before taking into account government policies, U.S. inequality isn’t much different than countries such as Denmark and Sweden, she says.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?

If there’s one, single thing this blog is about, it’s that policies have consequences, many of them unforeseen. Even if the consequences of a policy are unforeseen or unintended those consequences can be very damaging. I believe that we are now suffering the consequences of four decades or more of bad policies which work synergistically to boost the incomes of the top 10% of income earners, boosting the incomes of the top .1% of income earners most of all, while holding back the incomes of the rest of us. That Americans are only now realizing this just proves the truth of the remark attributed to Lincoln: you can fool some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

It’s not just one policy. That would be bad enough. It’s practically all of our policies and, especially, our domestic policies. Our trade policy has reduced the job growth in jobs that can be performed by average people. Our immigration policy has increased our population by at least 10% over what it otherwise might be and most of those new Americans are unskilled or semi-skilled. That has tended to put downwards pressure on the wages of ordinary people. The Internet (a creature of defense spending) has put similar pressure on the incomes of workers in the next tier up. Americans with college educations are no longer in competition for jobs with other Americans with college educations; they’re in competition for jobs with a world full of people with college educations, many of whom earn pennies on the dollar by comparison with wages here.

Agricultural policy intended to help poor farmers has largely gone to the richest farmers. Tax breaks, also called “tax expenditures” go overwhelmingly to the highest income earners. Intellectual property law makes it possible for the owners of patents, copyrights, etc. to live off rents and increases the prices of many goods in the United States but goes unenforced in most of the rest of the world, meaning that Americans are paying much, much more for the same goods than the Chinese, the Indians, and so on. Healthcare policy has resulted in physicians’ and other providers’ incomes rising at a multiple of the non-healthcare rate of inflation. In 1970 physicians earned approximately the median income. Now they earn a multiple of that.

Our policies with respect to the financial sector has resulted in the number of banks shrinking from 13,000 in 1960 to just a couple of thousand today. The bankers in the megabanks have grown very, very rich.

All of these things are the consequences of policy. They might have been unintended but they’re the consequences of policy just the same. None of this has happened all at once. It’s happened a percentage point or two at a time.

The most obvious way of correcting the present situation is change the policies. Sadly, there’s no way this situation can be remedied in the foreseeable future within the confines of the present political system: there’s a bipartisan consensus protecting each of these policies and the two major parties work very hard at preventing anyone who doesn’t subscribe to that consensus from joining the club. It doesn’t matter whether you elect the Republican candidate or the Democratic candidate. They both subscribe to the same consensus of views on bad policies.

There are only a handful of ways this situation can play out and none of the most likely are very pretty.

This morning the Department of Health and Human Services announced that to date 364,682 people have enrolled for healthcare insurance via the healthcare exchanges. Of those 137,000 enrolled via the federal PPACA portal, Healthcare.gov. The balance enrolled through the state exchanges.

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced today that nearly 365,000 individuals have selected plans from the state and federal Marketplaces by the end of November. November alone added more than a quarter million enrollees in state and federal Marketplaces. Enrollment in the federal Marketplace in November was more than four times greater than October’s reported federal enrollment number.

Since October 1, 1.9 million have made it through another critical step, the eligibility process, by applying and receiving an eligibility determination, but have not yet selected a plan. An additional 803,077 were determined or assessed eligible for Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) in October and November by the Health Insurance Marketplace.

If experience to date is an gauge of those qualifying for Medicaid roughly a third would have qualified under the old rules. That means they’re on the states’ tabs. Relative to the 58 million people Medicaid is already serving that’s not a particularly large number. When you take into account how many states have financial problems, it’s more than one might like.

In order for the people who’ve enrolled via the exchanges actually to be covered by January 1, they’ll need to have made their first payment by, roughly, the end of this week. 7 million people, CBO’s original estimate for how many would enroll via the exchanges, is starting to look like wishful thinking. The number of people formerly insured in the individual policy market now numbers in the millions.

Do you remember the legion of 8,000 terracotta warriors that was discovered in central China nearly 40 years ago? These warriors. There’s a fascinating article at LiveScience suggesting that the creation of these statues was inspired by contact with Europe, specifically with ancient Greeks:

Nickel translated ancient Chinese records that tell a tale of 12 giant statues, clad in “foreign robes” that “appeared” in Lintao in what was the westernmost part of China. (The word “Lintao” can also mean any place far to the west.)

The records do not say how this appearance happened, who brought them there, or who exactly the statues depicted; they do reveal the statues werelarger than life, risingabout 38 feet (11.55 meters) high, with feet that were 4.5 feet long (1.38 m). They so impressed the First Emperor that he decided to build 12 duplicates in front of his palace by melting down bronze weapons that had been used for war.

On each duplicate an inscription was created telling of the “giants” (the original statues) that appeared in Lintao. The inscriptions, recorded by Yan Shigu, who lived around 1,400 years agoand used an earlier written source, said that in the “26th Year of the Emperor, when he first brought together all-under-heaven, divided the principalities into provinces and districts, and unified the weights and measures, [these] giants appeared in Lintao …”

The First Emperor duplicated these statues despite a “heavenly taboo” that “he who recklessly follows foreign models will encounter disaster,” wrote Ban Gu, a historian who lived almost 2,000 years ago. Ban worked for the dynasty that had overthrown the First Emperor’s dynasty and, as such, tried to cast him in a negative light. [Photos: China’s Forbidden City Revealed]

These giant duplicates no longer exist, having been destroyed in the centuries after the First Emperor’s death. Because the duplicates were displayed publicly in front of the First Emperor’s palace ancient writers left records of them behind, Nickel told LiveScience. Meanwhile, the Terracotta Warriors, though they survive to present day, were buried in pits out of sight and, as such, no record of them survives today.

and the Chinese stopped making them because they represented an unwanted foreign influence.

There’s an awful lot being written in the major online news media and the blogosphere about the high deductibles in the insurance plans being offered under the new healthcare exchanges. I wonder what in the world people thought? How did they think that the insurance companies would conserve when they were being required to cover all comers with policies with specified contents regardless of previously existing conditions at constrained rates? How did they think that the PPACA would “bend the cost curve downward”, as we were repeatedly assured by Peter Orszag, if not by exposing consumers to more of the costs of their own healthcare (read: higher deductibles)?

My conclusion about our healthcare system, as it has been for some time, is that, since the federal government is not willing to control healthcare costs directly, it will be done indirectly or not at all. I wonder if the press will have the heart to cover that?

A few years back the actor William H. Macy starred in a movie about a chap with cerebral palsy who made his living as a door-to-door salesman. The real life man on whose life the movie was based, Bill Porter, has died:

Bill Porter has died.

If you’ve lived around Portland long enough, the name means something. If not, then let me get the details of his death out of the way before I tell you about the man.

The end came Tuesday night when Porter was rushed to a hospital with severe stomach pain. By night’s end, he was gone. An infection had spread through his body. A memorial of some kind will be scheduled in the next week or so. I’ll let you know when and where.

Newspaper style requires me to use the man’s last name. But it doesn’t seem right here.

He was always Bill.

Forget the rules.

Bill was 81 and had lived in an assisted living center in Gresham. He moved there in September, finally giving up the fiercely independent life he fought so hard to maintain.

He’d lived alone in a small one-level Gresham home. But he continued to fall.

One night, his friend told me, Bill had to spend the entire night on the floor because he couldn’t reach the phone. The falls convinced him it was time to get help.

If you want to take any solace in this story, figure that Bill had to spend less than four months that way.

You see, asking for help was never his way.

Read the whole thing. Tom Hallman, Jr.’s original article in The Oregonian which brought Bill story to the attention of the public is here.

Here are a few words to think about:

Bill reminds us of what we were when we set out in life. He fights the war we call life every day, without complaining. Whatever the internal truth of Bill Porter, we perceive him, in his perseverance, as pure, untouched by the ills of society. He isn’t greedy. He doesn’t take handouts. He — of all of us — could produce a hundred excuses. But he never makes excuses.

His determination challenges us. When we see past Bill’s disabilities, we see the disabilities in ourselves.

I didn’t catch the Battlestar Galactica reboot on the Syfy Channel when it was first shown a number of years ago but I’m catching it now streaming via Netflix. My general impression is that they had about a mini-series’s worth of ideas that they expanded into four seasons. I’m now in the middle of the second season and I’m beginning to lose interest. The show, a sort of mash-up of science fiction, political intrigue, and primetime soap, seems to have lost focus. I’d like to hear an explanation from an advocate of why I should keep watching.

The best idea the creators (broadly construed) of the show had was, pretty clearly, the slinky red spagetti strap halter number that Tricia Helfer wore through much of the first season. It has apparently become sort of the emblem of the program. Something only a supermodel could wear.

Over at Time Brad Tuttle notes that the problem with electric vehicles is that they’re not selling. Turns out that golf carts just aren’t that appealing as a general family vehicle:

Hopefully, the price cut will help Mitsubishi sell more than a dozen EVs per month. But even at that price, it’s not clear if all that many drivers will bite. The reviewers at Consumer Reports say the i-MiEV is “not a car in which anyone will be happy spending time,” and that the newly discounted price is “still a lot of money for a car that feels like little more than an enclosed golf cart. The appeal lies solely in providing attainable access into the world of pure-electric cars. At this price, it becomes more feasible as a second, occasional-use car.”

It’s probably indelicate of me to point this out but manufacturers will need to sell two orders of magnitude (that’s one hundred times) as many EVs as they are now to turn over the entire fleet over a period of twenty years. Doesn’t sounds like the EV experiment is doing much to solve either the manufacturers’ problems or environmental problems.

This post by economist Jeffrey Dorfman at RealClearMarkets is sure to raise some hackles. To give you the Readers Digest Version of Dr. Dorfman’s post, he finds that from an empirical standpoint the idea that increased government spending leads to faster growth is a pretty hard case to make. And the incentives may work the other way:

Politicians have an obvious interest in larger government. More spending means more power, through the ability to direct the spending to the politicians’ chosen priorities and often supporters. Regardless of the impact of government spending on economic growth, government will inherently want to be large and to spend as much money as possible. However, this look at data from around the world suggests that government spending comes with a cost. If a country wants to get richer, it should reduce its government spending.

Sounds like he’s poking a bull in the eye with a sharp stick to me. Let the feces flinging begin! I’d really like to see an empirical challenge to Dr. Dorfman’s position.

In Mickey Kaus’s analysis of President Obama’s speech on inequality last week his primary conclusion appears to be there’s a lot less there than meets the eye. Mickey’s solution to social inequality would be social levelers like a universal draft or a universal health care system like the BNH (although he confuses Medicare, a system of insurance, with universal care). He doesn’t miss the great irony of the Obama Administration:

That’s why it’s unfortunate that at every turn the Obamans seem to have opted for a cheaper, more stratified health insurance system–with poor people actually banned from the exchanges like an inferior caste and the less-rich generally relegated to crappier hospitals and crappier doctors–instead of an inclusive, socially equalizing system good enough for both poor and affluent. (Some governors, fortunately, are moving to remove some of Obamacare’s more vicious class divisions by merging Medicaid into the exchanges, which should help … if the exchanges survive.)

That’s been my complaint about the Obama Administration. Every proposed solution is drawn solely from the Democratic congressional caucus’s Box of Approved Solutions. Raise the minimum wage! Even though it would affect only a relatively small number of workers and, at the levels that might tenuously make it through Congress, wouldn’t do much about income inequality and might even reduce the number of minimum wage workers while increasing the size of the black market in labor. Provide more services! Even though somehow, mysteriously that always means paying more to people who are already in the top quintile of income earners, aggravating the problem it’s purported to solve.

The greatest mystery is why income inequality is always looked at from the point of view of those in the top 1% of income earners gazing jealously at the top .1% rather than from the point of view of the bottom 80% looking at the top 20%.

O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!