In his State of the Union speech, Barack Obama warned that America is becoming “a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by.” Predictably, Republicans accused him of perpetrating “class warfare” or stoking “the politics of envy.” Even the (allegedly liberal) mainstream media accused Obama of striking a “populist” tone. But Obama is correct to identify income- and wealth-inequality as the number one problem facing the United States, and perhaps even the global economy as well.

Income inequality in the United States now stands at its highest rate since the Great Depression. At Occupy protests and in activist circles, this fact usually is cast as a social justice issue, which is why too many conservatives snidely dismiss it. In fact, free market capitalists are the ones who should be most concerned about inequality. A mass market consumer economy cannot function when earners cluster at the poles: Poor people buy very little, and wealthy people spend only a small fraction of their income on retail goods and services. The income of America’s middle class — the people who fuel the retail economy — has been stagnant, in real terms, for three decades.

The big question isn’t whether this is a massive problem. It is. The big question is why so many American conservatives are in denial about it. The Republicans, in particular, are promoting many policies that would actually make the income and wealth gaps worse — such as “flat taxes,” and other schemes that effectively amount to permanent tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy. Mitt Romney’s opponents have made a big deal about his background in “vulture capitalism,” and the 13.9% tax rate he paid on his 2010 income. Yet Newt Gingrich has proposed lowering America’s capital gains tax rate to … zero. Whom, exactly, is that supposed to benefit?

Behind these schemes is a species of magical thinking: Just lower taxes on rich people and they will invest in the economy, thereby creating millions of new jobs, and lifting America’s unemployed masses out of poverty. One hears endless variations on this from the GOP and from conservative pundits. But it’s bunk. In December, when Republicans were busy protesting a 1.9% tax increase on the top 500th of income earners, Republican Senator John Thune told the media: “It’s just intuitive that, you know, if you’re somebody who’s in business and you get hit with a tax increase, it’s going to be that much harder, I think, to make investments that are going to lead to job creation.” But when NPR askedThune and his Republican congressional colleagues to find a single, real-life millionaire job creator who could back up this claim, they couldn’t find any. Which isn’t surprising: Journalists who went out and talked to the nation’s business owners heard exactly the opposite message: “It’s not in the top 20 things what we think about when we’re making a business hire,” said one business owner. It “didn’t even make it on the agenda.”

Why are Republicans and their supporters so out of touch with economic reality? The conventional explanation is class mobility: Americans, including poor Americans, refuse to soak the rich because they believe they’ll be rich one day, too. And there likely is some truth to this, despite the fact that economic mobility is now lower in the United States than it is in Canada and many European nations.

But I’d say an even better explanation is Americans’ pure, undiluted ignorance about how unequal their society has become.

In recent years, a Harvard business professor named Michael Norton has beensurveying Americans about wealth distribution in America, comparing their perceptions with fact. The reality in the United States is that the richest fifth of the population controls about 85% of the country’s wealth (while the poorest fifth controls about 0%). But when Norton’s survey respondents were asked to state the share of wealth that they believed was controlled by the richest fifth of Americans, the number they came up with was closer to 60%. Even more tellingly, when Norton asked survey respondents what would be the ideal percentage of wealth that should be controlled by the richest fifth, the average figure reported was only 35% — a full fifty points below the 85% reality.

“The closer countries to what our respondents wanted [America to look like] are countries that are amusingly dissimilar to us, such as countries like Sweden,” Nortontold an interviewer. “And I should say, the other thing that we found is not just that people think things should be fairer in some sense than they are, but that there’s wide agreement about that. So if we look at very rich people and very poor people, or if we look at Republicans and Democrats, all of these groups think that wealth should be more equally distributed when we asked them these questions than it actually is.”

Conservatives who blithely dismiss Obama’s oratory as class warfare may want to take a closer look not only at the alarming gap between between rich and poor, but also between the more equal nation Americans say they want, and the unsustainably polarized one they actually have.

< http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/01/25/jonathan-kay-barack-obama-is-right-wealth-inequality-is-a-threat-to-capitalism/ >

The biggest problem for opponents of Bill C-10, the federal government’s omnibus tough-on-crime bill, is that criminals and prisoners have no political constituency. The sort of people who will get swept up in the mandatory minimum sentences contained in the bill are dismissed by most voters as street thugs, pedophiles and gang members. Lock ‘em up is what most of us say.

Eugene Oscapella, a veteran legal-reform advocate, knows this. And so he is careful to make his pitch in terms that respectable, middle-class Canadians — the sort of people with kids in high school or college — will appreciate.

“I teach a criminology course at the University of Ottawa,” he told a crowd at downtown Toronto’s Church of the Redeemer on Tuesday night. “Eighty percent of my students [would be] criminals under [Bill C-10]. About 10-20% of them would be liable for a mandatory minimum sentence of two years for simply passing a tablet of ecstasy at a party on the university campus. That is what this law is going to do.”

Smoking pot and taking ecstasy aren’t smart things to do. But millions of Canadians use these drugs every day. And when they’re caught, police, prosecutors and judges typically apply their discretion in order to avoid ruining their lives and careers with criminal records and jail sentences. The Tories want to change that — for reasons that can’t be explained except by the crass politics of populism.

As my colleague Chris Selley wrote in Wednesday’s edition of the National Post, the mandatory-minimum provisions for non-violent drug crimes are the least defensible aspects of Bill C-10. In fact, the government hasn’t even tried to make an intellectually serious attempt to defend them. The Canadian government’s web site points visitors to several Justice Department studies on mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes. None strongly support the idea that Bill C-10 will reduce drug use or improve public safety. “The evidence points the other way,” Mr. Oscapella noted on Tuesday night. “The only thing we’re going to do is overcrowd the system.”

Governments have to make trade-offs, of course: Sometimes, you accept sub-optimal policy for budgetary reasons. But here we get to the especially perverse aspect of the mandatory-minimum drug provisions of Bill C-10: They will cost billions in the form of police resources and new prisons. That’s why cash-strapped American states — which have long played the populist game of lock-’em-up — are moving in the other direction.

As the CBC’s Terry Milewski reported this week, Texas officials think we’re nuts for copying their discredited approach. Michigan, New York, California and other states are also doing what they can to reduce their prison populations. One of the reasons the United States is going bankrupt is that it incarcerates 2.3 million people — a quarter of all the prisoners on earth. The burden for their care has become so enormous that some states are now turning prisons into Chinese-style sweatshops to try to make a buck. A private prison industry has flourished, bringing with it a well-funded lobby for yet more prisons. This perverse political dynamic doesn’t yet exist in Canada — but Bill C-10 pushes us in that direction.

The C-10 panel discussion at the Church of the Redeemer was interesting because at least one of the speakers wasn’t the sort of bleeding heart you’d expect. Steve Sullivan, Canada’s first federal Ombudsman for Victims of Crime, has been an advocate in the field since the early 1990s, and currently directs Ottawa’s municipal Victim Services program.

Mr. Sullivan applauds a few provisions in C-10, such as the section that would let crime victims attend parole hearings, and enhanced penalties for child abusers. (There also was appreciation for provisions that would allow some offenders to be diverted to drug-treatment programs.) But he believes that one of the main priority of the government’s criminal-justice policy should be to encourage victims of domestic and sex abuse (the majority of whom suffer in silence) to report their crimes; and the bill doesn’t do anything to further than objective. In fact, the bill may be counterproductive: By forcing the hand of already-overworked crown prosecutors, it will encourage them to stay, delay or plea-bargain many of their cases.

Even as things stand, prosecutors can only prosecute about 10% of their caseload, by Mr. Sullivan’s estimate. C-10 may push that number into single digits.

When proponents of C-10 are confronted with its multi-billion-dollar cost, they respond by citing the even greater cost of crime itself — an estimated $83-billion a year in this country — the majority of which is borne by victims. “That’s a true statistic,” Mr. Sullivan acknowledged on Tuesday. “But the reality is that [C-10] doesn’t address this. It’s not going to relieve the burden on crime victims … There’s nothing in this bill that’s going to cause [victims] to come forward, or to leave abusive relationships.”

The most interesting aspect of Tuesday night’s panel on C-10 was the inclusion of Greg Simmons, a 46-year-old university student and former cocaine dealer who spent 14 years of his life in the federal prison system. As one might predict, he was skeptical of the idea that mandatory minimums would do much to discourage crime. In some cases, he said, it might have the opposite effect: “When I was doing my thing, there were times when I thought, ‘if I’m going in [to commit a crime], I might as well go in with gusto. I’m not going back to prison. I’m never going to let them take me back.’ This bill creates that mindset.”

Does it? I’m not a criminologist, and I couldn’t say one way or the other. But I did find it odd to reflect on the fact that — despite all the punditry and propaganda about C-10 — this was the first time I had ever heard a real, live, former prisoner give his opinion on the subject. Instead, I’ve mostly heard from middle-aged, middle-class blowhards like myself who wouldn’t know cocaine from sweet ‘n low. And that disturbs me.

Putting aside my objections to the mandatory minimums contained in C-10, and the prison-happy agenda it epitomizes, the bill represents something larger and more disturbing in our country: a complete divorce between policy-making that affects millions of people, and real-life research and experiences offered by men such as Messrs. Simmons, Oscapella and Sullivan. Stephen Harper and his cabinet ministers bristle when they are accused of inflicting an “ideological” agenda on Canada. So I put the question to them: In the absence of evidence or expertise to back up your policy, what other word would you offer me?

< http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/10/19/jonathan-kay-the-tories-tough-on-crime-agenda-is-intellectually-bankrupt/ >

Have you heard about the “growing number” of eminent scientists who reject the theory that man-made greenhouse gases are increasing the earth’s temperature? It’s one of those factoids that, for years, has been casually dropped into the opening paragraphs of conservative manifestos against climate-change treaties and legislation. A web site maintained by the office of a U.S. Senator has for years instructed us that a “growing number of scientists” are becoming climate-change “skeptics.” This year, the chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation gave a speech praising the “growing number of distinguished scientists [who are] challenging the conventional wisdom with alternative theories and peer reviewed research.” In this newspaper, a columnist recently described the “growing skepticism about the theory of man-made climate change.” Surely, the conventional wisdom is on the cusp of being overthrown entirely: Another colleague proclaimed that we are approaching “the church of global warming’s Galileo moment.”

Fine-sounding rhetoric — but all of it nonsense. In a new article published in the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences, a group of scholars from Stanford University, the University of Toronto and elsewhere provide a statistical breakdown of the opinions of the world’s most prominent climate experts. Their conclusion: The group that is skeptical of the evidence of man-made global warming “comprises only 2% of the top 50 climate researchers as ranked by expertise (number of climate publications), 3% of researchers in the top 100, and 2.5% of the top 200, excluding researchers present in both groups … This result closely agrees with expert surveys, indicating that [about] 97% of self-identified actively publishing climate scientists agree with the tenets of [man-made global warming].”

How has this tiny 2-3% sliver of fringe opinion been reinvented as a perpetually “growing” share of the scientific community? Most climate-change deniers (or “skeptics,” or whatever term one prefers) tend to inhabit militantly right-wing blogs and other Internet echo chambers populated entirely by other deniers. In these electronic enclaves — where a smattering of citations to legitimate scientific authorities typically is larded up with heaps of add-on commentary from pundits, economists and YouTube jesters who haven’t any formal training in climate sciences — it becomes easy to swallow the fallacy that the whole world, including the respected scientific community, is jumping on the denier bandwagon.

This is a phenomenon that should worry not only environmentalists, but also conservatives themselves: The conviction that global warming is some sort of giant intellectual fraud now has become a leading bullet point within mainstream North American conservatism; and so has come to bathe the whole movement in its increasingly crankish, conspiratorial glow.

Conservatives often pride themselves on their hard-headed approach to public-policy — in contradistinction to liberals, who generally are typecast as fuzzy-headed utopians. Yet when it comes to climate change, many conservatives I know will assign credibility to any stray piece of junk science that lands in their inbox … so long as it happens to support their own desired conclusion. (One conservative columnist I know formed her skeptical views on global warming based on testimonials she heard from novelist Michael Crichton.) The result is farcical: Impressionable conservatives who lack the numeracy skills to perform long division or balance their checkbooks feel entitled to spew elaborate proofs purporting to demonstrate how global warming is in fact caused by sunspots or flatulent farm animals. Or they will go on at great length about how “climategate” has exposed the whole global-warming phenomenon as a charade — despite the fact that a subsequent investigation exculpated research investigators from the charge that they had suppressed temperature data. (In fact, “climategate” was overhyped from the beginning, since the scientific community always had other historical temperature data sets at its disposal — that maintained by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, most notably — entirely independent of the Climactic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, where the controversy emerged.)

Let me be clear: Climate-change denialism does not comprise a conspiracy theory, per se: Those aforementioned 2% of eminent scientists prove as much. I personally know several denialists whom I generally consider to be intelligent and thoughtful. But the most militant denialists do share with conspiracists many of the same habits of mind. Oxford University scholar Steve Clarke and Brian Keeley of Washington University have defined conspiracy theories as those worldviews that trace important events to a secretive, nefarious cabal; and whose proponents consistently respond to contrary facts not by modifying their hypothesis, but instead by insisting on the existence of ever-wider circles of high-level conspirators controlling most or all parts of society. This describes, more or less, how radicalized warming deniers treat the subject of their obsession: They see global warming as a Luddite plot hatched by Greenpeace, the Sierra Club and Al Gore to destroy industrial society. And whenever some politician, celebrity or international organization expresses support for the all-but-unanimous view of the world’s scientific community, they inevitably will respond with a variation of “Ah, so they’ve gotten to them, too.”

In support of this paranoid approach, the denialists typically will rely on stray bits of discordant information — an incorrect reference in a UN report, a suspicious-seeming “climategate” email, some hypocrisy or other from a bien-pensant NGO type — to argue that the whole theory is an intellectual house of cards. In these cases, one can’t help but be reminded of the folks who point out the fluttering American flag in the moon-landing photos, or the “umbrella man” from the Zapruder film of JFK’s assassination.

In part, blame for all this lies with the Internet, whose blog-from-the-hip ethos has convinced legions of pundits that their view on highly technical matters counts as much as peer-reviewed scientific literature. But there is something deeper at play, too — a basic psychological instinct that public-policy scholars refer to as the “cultural cognition thesis,” described in a recently published academic paper as the observed principle that “individuals tend to form perceptions of risk that reflect and reinforce one or another idealized vision of how society should be organized … Thus, generally speaking, persons who subscribe to individualistic values tend to dismiss claims of environmental risks, because acceptance of such claims implies the need to regulate markets, commerce and other outlets for individual strivings.”

In simpler words, too many of us treat science as subjective — something we customize to reduce cognitive dissonance between what we think and how we live.

In the case of global warming, this dissonance is especially traumatic for many conservatives, because they have based their whole worldview on the idea that unfettered capitalism — and the asphalt-paved, gas-guzzling consumer culture it has spawned — is synonymous with both personal fulfillment and human advancement. The global-warming hypothesis challenges that fundamental dogma, perhaps fatally.

The appropriate intellectual response to that challenge — finding a way to balance human consumption with responsible environmental stewardship — is complicated and difficult. It will require developing new technologies, balancing carbon-abatement programs against other (more cost-effective) life-saving projects such as disease-prevention, and — yes — possibly increasing the economic cost of carbon-fuel usage through some form of direct or indirect taxation. It is one of the most important debates of our time. Yet many conservatives have made themselves irrelevant in it by simply cupping their hands over their ears and screaming out imprecations against Al Gore.

Rants and slogans may help conservatives deal with the emotional problem of cognitive dissonance. But they aren’t the building blocks of a serious ideological movement. And the impulse toward denialism must be fought if conservatism is to prosper in a century when environmental issues will assume an ever greater profile on this increasingly hot, parched, crowded planet. Otherwise, the movement will come to be defined — and discredited — by its noisiest cranks and conspiracists.