Bernie Sanders, the origins of envy, and the question of whether immigrants should live as well as the native-born
“The Populist Prophet” is a New Yorker puff piece on Bernie Sanders. There are some interesting nuggets, however.
Sanders’s father was a Polish Jew who, at the age of seventeen, came to America shortly after his brother, and struggled through the Depression in Brooklyn. By the time Sanders was born, in 1941, his father was working as a paint salesman. Sanders had an older brother, Larry, and their mother stayed home, like most of the women in their lower-middle-class corner of Flatbush. … “There was tension about money,” Sanders said of his family. They lived in a three-and-a-half-room rent-controlled apartment, and his mother pined for a house. “It wasn’t a question of putting food on the table. It was a question of arguing about whether you buy this or whether you buy that. You know, families do this. I remember a great argument about drapes—whether we could afford them … ”
I spoke with a few of Sanders’s contemporaries who had grown up in the same neighborhood, and their memories were rosier: they recalled kids playing stickball on safe, familiar streets until their parents called them home for dinner.
In other words, there was just one wage earner in the household. This person was an immigrant. The family was receiving one of the few forms of government handout available at the time, an apartment at below-market rent. But at least one member of the family felt that a recent immigrant should be entitled to own a house.
Sanders’s childhood thus involved the same conflict that Americans face today. A large amount of the measured inequality of income in the U.S. stems from the large number of immigrants and children of immigrants among the general population (chart). People who didn’t grow up here, don’t speak English, and weren’t educated in a developed country tend not to be highly valued by employers. If someone freshly arrived cannot get a middle-class American lifestyle from the market, to what extent should taxpayers step in and provide that person with a comfortable house, food, health care in the world’s least efficient system, etc.? Everyone seems to agree that a legal resident of the U.S. gets the basics for free (thus making them pretty rich by global standards), but we argue, as apparently did Sanders’s parents, about whether or not it is fair for some families (typically native-born) to have way more than the basics.
A person’s position on this issue would seem to drive a lot of the political debate in the 2016 election. If you want to level the playing field so that a freshly arrived immigrant is at parity with a native-born citizen you would advocate for a 100-percent estate tax rate. You might also advocate for higher tax rates for those with high incomes (since it is rare for an immigrant to achieve a very high income).
[Separately, one of my most liberal friends in Cambridge supports virtually every redistributive idea put forth by Democrats. She has essentially never worked and will soon reach normal retirement age, thus there is no personal cost to her in advocating for higher income tax rates. However, she stands to inherit what a lot of people would consider to be a huge amount of money from her father, a self-made founder and manager of a small engineering and manufacturing business. As it happens, she opposes estate taxes and agrees with George W. Bush that money on which income tax has already been paid should not be taxed a second time when the earner dies (i.e., she wants an estate tax rate of 0 percent).]
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