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How Washington Made the Rich Richer--and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class
Simon and Schuster
September 2010
On Sale: September 14, 2010
368 pages
ISBN: 1416588698
EAN: 9781416588696
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
A groundbreaking work that identifies the real culprit
behind one of the great economic crimes of our time— the
growing inequality of incomes between the vast majority of
Americans and the richest of the rich. We all know
that the very rich have gotten a lot richer these past few
decades while most Americans haven't. In fact, the
exorbitantly paid have continued to thrive during the
current economic crisis, even as the rest of Americans have
continued to fall behind. Why do the "haveit- alls" have so
much more? And how have they managed to restructure the
economy to reap the lion's share of the gains and shift the
costs of their new economic playground downward, tearing new
holes in the safety net and saddling all of us with
increased debt and risk? Lots of so-called experts claim to
have solved this great mystery, but no one has really gotten
to the bottom of it—until now. In their lively and
provocative Winner-Take-All Politics, renowned
political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson
demonstrate convincingly that the usual suspects—foreign
trade and financial globalization, technological changes in
the workplace, increased education at the top—are largely
innocent of the charges against them. Instead, they indict
an unlikely suspect and take us on an entertaining tour of
the mountain of evidence against the culprit. The guilty
party is American politics. Runaway inequality and the
present economic crisis reflect what government has done to
aid the rich and what it has not done to safeguard the
interests of the middle class. The winner-take-all economy
is primarily a result of winner-take-all politics. In
an innovative historical departure, Hacker and Pierson trace
the rise of the winner-take-all economy back to the late
1970s when, under a Democratic president and a Democratic
Congress, a major transformation of American politics
occurred. With big business and conservative ideologues
organizing themselves to undo the regulations and
progressive tax policies that had helped ensure a fair
distribution of economic rewards, deregulation got under
way, taxes were cut for the wealthiest, and business
decisively defeated labor in Washington. And this
transformation continued under Reagan and the Bushes as well
as under Clinton, with both parties catering to the
interests of those at the very top. Hacker and Pierson's
gripping narration of the epic battles waged during
President Obama's first two years in office reveals an
unpleasant but catalyzing truth: winner-take-all politics,
while under challenge, is still very much with us.
Winner-Take-All Politics—part revelatory
history, part political analysis, part intellectual journey—
shows how a political system that traditionally has been
responsive to the interests of the middle class has been
hijacked by the superrich. In doing so, it not only changes
how we think about American politics, but also points the
way to rebuilding a democracy that serves the interests of
the many rather than just those of the wealthy few.
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