Krugman on the "Other Death Tax"

Krugman makes a useful point about the consequences of raising the Social Security eligibility age.  The argument in favor of increasing the eligibility age is that lifespans are increasing. But, Krugman argues, lifespans at the bottom of the chart are not increasing; so, once again, we would finance middle class lives by a tax on the poor.

It's a worthwhile point.  But as I recall, the Bushies made a similar argument back in the aughties when they were trying to privatize Social Security.  Blacks, they argued, had no real stake in the status quo because they died too soon.  This was understood by right-thinking people as a scandalous abuse of a deprived underclass for political gain.

In fact, I wasn't crazy about Bush privatization but I thought that particular argument rather a good one.  Anyway, if it was scandalous then, how come it is appropriate now?  Just askin'.

Some Bowles-Simpson Stuff I Liked

Trying to ignore the shrill and predictable:

E. D. Kahn:  Simplifying the tax code, while reducing overall income tax rates makes sense. Lowering income-tax rates would not only be good in terms of stimulus, it would be good for the American economy years into the future. Meanwhile, wiping out all the pernicious deductions and loopholes would make the tax system more fair and efficient, and would make up for lost revenue from lower rates. The mortgage-rate tax deduction would go, creating a level playing field for home-owners and renters. For those of us who mourned the short life and death of Wyden/Bennett, the removal of the employer tax exemption for health insurance is most welcome. 

San Collender:  Bowles-Simpson seems to have been put together backwards.  Instead of starting with a plan about what the federal government should no longer do and then determining the savings from the smaller number of employees that would be needed to do what's left to be done, with limited exceptions the plan focuses on the reduced workforce but makes few assumptions, suggestions, or recommendations about what services the government should no longer provide.  The assumptions it does make don't appear to justify the cuts in the number of employees and contractors.

The type of proposals that are needed are whether the government should no longer be involved in education.  Should it stop prosecuting and jailing as many criminals and should the sentences be shorter for those it convicts?  Should it fund less or no research on cancer and similar diseases?  Should the FBI no longer investigate white collar crime?  Should the military not be prepared to conduct as many operations?  Should veterans health care be eliminated?

 Mark Kleiman: Why didn't Simpson and Bowles propose legalizing and taxing cannabis? That's $5-$10 billion a year.

CRFB: (a fairly detailed walk-through of the tax proposals). 

Charles Blahous:  The Simpson-Bowles proposal was clearly designed to pre-empt some of the attacks made on the commission. They make a point, for example, of saying that Social Security must be balanced for its own sake and is not being asked to contribute positively to the balance of the unified federal budget. The commission’s critics would do well to show equal concern for Social Security’s sound financing by offering their own alternatives for sustaining the program.

Saving Hayek from Kuznicki

Jason Kuznicki tries to breath new life into Hayek's suggestion that we strip the vote from government employees and welfare recipients (also convicts: or are government employees more suspect than convicts?). He's obviously onto something here although I think we need some clarification.  I assume members of Congress, e.g., count as "government employees" and thus debarred from voting for (or against?) themselves?  And employees of Halliburton, Blackwater, etc.?  I should think that contract "employees" count as "employees" for this purpose (or should we include government contractors under "welfare").

But a moment's reflection suggests that the we haven't gone far enough.  For example, I would hope Kuznicki would want to include the recipients of farm subsidies under his ban?  And those who received protection from arbitrary and highly malleable protections from government interference with the market--e.g., copyright rules (no votes for Steamboat Willy?).   And recognizing that  copyright protections normally fall into the category of "property rights," I suppose we should extend the bar to anyone who owns property?  Or, more simply, anyone who enjoys the protection of the police? 

Have I left anyone out?  Probably.  But the principle should be obvious: the idea that anyone should be denied the vote if the enjoy an advantage from the government is, in principle, quite a good idea.  It will probably have the corollary advantage of shorter polling, easier vote-counting.   We may perhaps in the end be reduced to following the example of the Italian city-states and assigning the power of governance to a candidate whose threshold qualification is that he is a total stranger.  Though exactly how we would pick him, I cannot imagine.

Rattner on Rattner, and the Campaign to Save Big Auto

Steve Rattner's Overhaul,  his surprisingly cheerful account of his campaign to save the American auto industry, may be the best book I've ever read about what actually happens in a Chapter 11 bankruptcy.  Does this strike you as odd?  It surprises me.  Rattner's case--two cases actually,Chrysler and GM--was not remotely typical in so many ways: it was a Chapter 11 ultimately run by and in some sense also for the President of the United States.

Still it is surprising, once you get down to the mud and the blood and the gore, how much the case was animated by the kind of constraints you'd see in Chapter 11 every day.  Is this dog's breakfast worth saving at all?  In trying to save it, are we throwing good money after bad?  Can we change the tires while the vehicle is charging forward?  Above all, can we get the stakeholders on board--and in particular, how much money will it take to get them on board, and can we scrape it together?

It's that last that gives the narrative its dramatic tension and that will be most recognizable to anyone who ever spent time hanging around the bankruptcy court.   Ratner had to cope, first of all, with the unions: couldn't live with 'em, couldn't live without 'em.  They've had fat pay packets and gold-plated fringe benefits (GM pensions: the largest single buyer of Viagra).  Much as you love 'em, you have to cut them back to somewhere near competitive with the overseas Japanese.

This first job may have been easier than the reader might have guessed.  One, on close scrutiny it turns out that Detroit pay was not that-all out of line with overseas Japanese pay--a little ripe, but not jaw-dropping. And two: the unions seem to have seen this one coming.  They'd been taking casualties from all quarters for years and they seem to have come round to the view that the best thing they could do was to try to negotiate a soft landing.

The senior institutional creditors were another story.  Chrysler's senior debt, aggressively represented by the seniorest sort of lender, held IOUs totting up to $6.9 billion.  They made noises about wanting every cent. but Rattner believes that in straight liquidation, they would have collected no more than a single billion.  The plan gave them two; some creditors squawked and very nearly brought down the curtain on the whole show.

In the end, both Chrysler and GM survive (at least for the moment) and the reader is a bit surprised that they do--perhaps because Rattner himself is a bit surprised.  To hear him tell it, everything had to come together perfectly, and in the end (nearly) everything does.

Rattner caps it off with an apparently well-justified rant about the potential obstructiveness of Congress--not that he suffered much from it, but that he so narrowly and fortuitously escaped.  It was really more good luck than good planning that the whole operation went forward under the TARP umbrella, impervious to the death by a thousand cuts that Congressional nit-picking could have inflicted on them.

Rattmer left his government post after the confirmation of the two plans, more or less half a year after he had begun.  By his account, he left under his own steam--"my job on this planet is done," as it were.  But by the spring of 2009, Rattner himself was caught up in a pay-to-play scandal about the New York State pension funds.  I've read a bit of the news coverage; I'm still on the fence as to whether Rattner was out of line here or not, though my guess is that had he been willing to roll the dice with a jury, he might have walked.  So even if he did leave Washington under his own power, still it is likely that the Obama administration was not sorry to see him go.  And aside from the current job: for the moment, it appears that the pay-to-play case on any higher ambitions Rattner may have harbored like, for example, to be Secretary of  Treasury

Rattmer talks a bit in the book about the charges against him and it's pretty clear that he is feeling put upon.  If he is innocent as he seems to believe he is, one can hardly blame him.  Even if his hands are as dirty as his adversaries want us to believe, he might still be at least confused.  For even a guy with dirty hands might know how to reorganize a couple of car companies.

Bromwhich on Obama: Teaser, with an Afterthought

Here's the most telling single in David Bromwich's comprehensive takedown of our President:

Obama wants credit for the highest intentions even when conceding that he lacks the will to fulfill them.

 Link.  Oooh, that's gotta hurt.  But in the context of the Bromwich essay, it calls attention to an odd or unexpected truth about Obama: considering his resume, he is surprisingly lacking in street wisdom.  Read about his background (at least hastily) and you'd think you were looking at a kind who knew how to take those khaki neck-wallets off tourists in the souq.  Nothing of the sort: this is a kid whose forebears wanted the very best for him, and who lived a good deal of his life among people who wanted desperately for him to succeed.  Here's a guy who would have been so much better off with a round of Prince and the pauper, or hanging out for a bit at Mistress Quickly's tavern in cheapside.  He's full of the best intentions and we do remember, yes, what the road to hell is paved with?

No Kidding?

Vegetarians don't eat sugar.  No way.

--Overheard

Something I Didn't Know about Loretta Lynn

That she had nine pregnancies.  Six kids, but three more that didn't make it.  Listening to her chat with Terry Gross, I was marveling over just what a career she's had.   Forget the movie with Sissie Spacek, which is pleasant, but still a movie: Lynn has got to be one of the great figures in country music, and also in 20th Century feminism.  This is, after all, the lady who gave us "Don't Come Home a-Drinkin' with Lovin' on Your Mind," and "You Ain't Woman Enough to Take My Man" and "Fist City" ("The man I love when he picks up trash, he puts it in a garbage can")--but also "The Pill": "You've set this chicken your last time cos now I've got the pill."   She told Terry she'd never heard of the pill in her youth; "If I'd a-had it, I'd a-used it," she said.  Apparently there's a new tribute album, though why anyone would want to listen to an imitation when you can have the real thing is beyond me; also a new edition of her autobiography.  There's a pretty good Wiki.

Here's a clip of Loretta Lynn singing "Your Squaw is On the Warpath."

For Charles, It Just Might Work

Terry Eagleton gazes with muted admiration on the new book by Prince Charles about, well, about everything; the subtitle, it seems, should be "Can't we all just get along?". Nice smell, Eagleton reports, and it includes a picture of "the prince sitting on his sofa gazing benignly at a frog."

Query, if the prince kisses the frog, does the frog turn into a handsome prince?

Health Insurers and the Meaning of "Best of Both Worlds"

I see that Cigna is now saying that well, maybe repealing Obamacare would not  be such a great idea after all (I think I heard something along the same lines from another insurer on Public Radio as I was getting out of the car).

Boy, can I ever  believe that.  Seems to me the insurers have got themselves in the perfect position on this one--a direct line to our pockets via the public purse with the power of the sovereign to help them collect their money.  In short, a "private" system, rigged with every advantage a public system can provide  but so presented that if anything goes wrong they can blame it on the pin-headed socialists in Washington.  It's been the program all along.  Whenever we get anything close to "socialism" in America, some private party or parties gets very, very rich.

Ron Rand Paul: Not So Hypocritical, but Not Very Bright

I saw that Wall Street Journal story where Ron* Rand Paul seems to back away from his harsh words on earmarks:

In a bigger shift from his campaign pledge to end earmarks, he tells me that they are a bad "symbol" of easy spending but that he will fight for Kentucky's share of earmarks and federal pork, as long as it's doled out transparently at the committee level and not parachuted in in the dead of night. "I will advocate for Kentucky's interests," he says.

I thereupon joined the multitude who read this as Paul going for the gold in the hypocrisy sweepstakes: against earmarks until I win, and until it's me.

Paul evidently cried foul.  The reporter now says "I stand by the story as written," but offers the full transcript.  The reader can make up her own mind but on this one, I'd say advantage Paul.  Seems to me that he says he won't do "earmarks"--that he will fight to bring home the bacon, but he'll do in committee.

Still, if Paul wins on two-faced, I'd have to say he loses on stupid.  He evidently thinks that he and Roy Blount (say) can sit down and have a heart-to-heart over which district deserves its bridge more, on some set of independent criteria.    From reading the text, I get the impression that he actually believes this malarky which belief, for my money, shows just how out of touch with the process he is.  My stars does he really think that he is the first person to think of "negotiations" as a solution  conflicts public resouces?  Doesn't he realize that that the reason why we've drifted into earmarks is that Congressmen long ago recognized that it was pointless to try to sort these conflicts by Marquis of Queensbury Rules, and much cheaper and more convenient just to go sort it out in the ally?  Does he really think that all Republicans are just good friends?   Indeed, if he is a good libertarian, wouldn't it be an article of faith with him that "negotiation" is in principle a terrible way to solve conflicts of this sort?

I admit, he might not be stupid; he might just be venal.   But I'm more and more seeing Paul as (riffing Joel for a moment) the smart alecky kind who gets himself elected high school class president and then discovers that he hasn't any idea what to do with the office once he gets it.

*Sorry, can't keep my Pauls straight.

Rattner Explains Why He Is a Democrat

In his brisk, entertaining and highly informative account of his work as don't-call-him-a "Car Czar," Steve Rattner has kind words for Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, whom Rattner found hard-working, conscientious and constructive--unlike others on Capitol Hill, not of all whom Rattner names.  Making piece after a tiff over a sangria-fueled dinner one night,

Corker asked me, "You seem like such a sensible fellow, why are you a Democrat?"  "Three main reasons," I said, ticking off my views that Republicans had favored the rich at a time of growing ine3quality, abandoned fiscal responsibility, and held unfortunate positions on social issues such as woman's right to choose abortion.

It's an interesting list and I'd take it for starters.  I wonder how he feels about Guantanamo, torture and wars of choice.  

Walter Russell Mead has Obama's Number (No, Not the Blackberry)

I sometimes think I am the only person in America who (a) voted for Obama; and (b) probably would voted for him again; and (c) is  not disappointed in him because (d) I never expected that much from him in the first place.    So I can sign on to almost every word that Walter Russell Mead says here.   I particularly like his send-up of "smart, well-credentialed liberal wonks."

  Give us more power because we understand the world better than you do, was the message.  We are so smart, so well-credentialed, so careful to read all the best papers by all the certified experts that the recommendations we make and the regulations we write, however outlandish and burdensome they look to all you non-experts out there, are certain to work.  Trust us because we are always right, and only fools and charlatans would be so stupid as to disagree.

Buce and Mead, populist yahoos together; at least I am in good company.

Afterthought: This is as good a place as any to reference Kip's Law:

“Every advocate of central planning always — always — envisions himself as the central planner.”

Update:  Spelled his name wrong three times in the original.  Sorry.

Bankrutpcy Language Note

We in the bankruptcy customarily distinguish between "consumer"and "business" bankruptcy.  You can pretty much surmise with the distinction means: "consumers" are individuals who file for Chapter 7 to get a discharge, or maybe for Chapter 13 to pay off some of their debts.  "Businesses" are, well, General Motors, who use Chapter 11 to "reorganize" (itself a term of near-infinite malleability).

Today I get an e-flyer for a continuing education program in "Consumer and Residential Bankruptcy."  Residential?  Well to be fair, once again, I'm pretty sure I understand what is being said: we're talking about debtors who are concerned not so much with the discharge per se, but with the tools that bankruptcy might offer to help them fight off the mortgage lender, and to stay in their home.  What with the 2005 amendments to our bankruptcy laws, plus the subprime meltdown, it certainly is the case that bankruptcy practice has morphed quickly and dramatically into a different system than the one I grew up with.

Still, taking a longer view, this is just one more incident of a process that has gone on, well, forever.  Bankruptcy began as a creditor collection device--still is, sometimes.  It developed into a quasi-punitive weapon--still is, in some places (though hardly the US).  Only in the 20th Century did it become a device for an easy off-the-rack discharge.  I can think of other examples but I'll save them for a learned paper (which I almost certainly will not bother to write).  

He Always Was Such a Kidder

We keep a Wichita Bureau so we can get stuff  like this:

Celebrations ad for serial killer was a mistake

The Wichita Eagle on Sunday published a photo and laudatory birthday wish for a convicted serial killer, Richard Grissom, who turns 50 on Wednesday.

Publishing this on Page 7C of the Celebrations section was a mistake, Eagle publisher William C. Hidlay said Monday....

"We sincerely apologize for the grief and heartache this has caused the families of his victims." ...

[Grissom is] serving time in the state prison system, sentenced to four life terms, [Police Lt. Ken] Landwehr said. Landwehr didn't like seeing the Celebrations item, but sneaking it into the paper fits with Grissom's profile, he said. "He's quite the little con man." 

Wichita adds: "I’ve always thought that the Eagle was edited by 7th graders."  Technically, my guess is that this particular outrage never saw an editor.  I'm guessing it went straight through the the classifieds desk--the people who used to take your ads before Craigslist.  But he's got a good general point.  Part of the job of a good copy reader is to know stuff.  You want people with a deep institutional and community memory so they can say--hey, wait a minute, I remember that guy.

Wheels Within Wheels

I'm tucked away at my hidey hole in Cycletown USA, so I have to salute this, from a District of Columbia cyclists' blog:

The Church of Sit-Up Cycling

Interesting Canadian biking blog to pass your way, this from their FB page:

The Church of Sit-Up Cycling was established to allow believers in safe, leisurely cycling to practice their wholly rational faith without fear of a fine.

In Vancouver, BC, it is illegal to sit on a bicycle without a plastic hat. An exception is made if the wearing would interfere with an essential religious practice.

[Editor's note - Ahh, I see where this is going]

 ...and so do you, dear reader, so do you.   H.T:  LOOG.

Politicians and the Elevator Test

I guess I've said that my test for politicians is: would you rather spend 10 minutes in an elevator with this guy or commit suicide? Not many people pass: it's a profession that rewards manipulative narcissism, and so not much fun for anybody in the penumbra. I have said I can think of only two: Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Abba Eban--both by all appearances so smart, cultivated and funny that you'd just have to forgive them. Even Eban qualifies as a politician perhaps only by courtesy: virtually his first grownup job was as Israeli Ambassador to the UN--where he single handedly presented the new state to an unsympathetic world in a way that told made it a compelling story (now there is somebody Nancy Pelosi could have used...). And his attempt at "real politics" back in his "homeland" (heh!) was pretty much of a fizzle. Moynihan you could say was more interested in wonkery and perhaps th'drink than he was in politics. But he was Irish, and so he got yanked into politics virtually by force of gravity.

I suppose there are others, but I don't think many. Bill Clinton? As they say, the first ten minutes might be fun--fact is it might have been Clinton who made me think of my example in the first place. My friend Ivan, who spent more time with Kentucky pols than I, suggests the late governor Bert T. Combs. He's got a point: Combs had a lightening quick mind and a bends-inducing knack for cutting to the heart of the matter--all the more startling because he looked and talked like Snuffy smith's not-quite-right kid brother. But Combs drifted away into the world of personal wealth.

Joel asks: Nelson Mandela? Interesting, I really don't know enough to say.
Jack Kennedy? Nah, too busy with assertions of dominance, subtle or otherwise. Besides, his best lines came from Ted Sorenson. A courtier, Sorenson, sniffed Joel. Yes, but a very shrewd, funny man, probably good company. Aren't you changing the rules of the game?--asked Joel. Yes, and that's the point--you have to get away from the real politicians in order to find human beings.

But Joel did prompt me to a further insight. There are the showcase narcissists like Clinton and Kennedy. But there are the guys that make the wheels go 'round: the deal makers who really aren't all that interested in the limelight, just as long as they get to shape the performance. I always suspected Sam Rayburn might have been a really interesting guy to talk to. And Bob Dole. Yep, if I had to be stuck in an elevator with anyone, I might settle for Bob Dole. I wonder what John Boehner is like? Nah, I guess I don't.

Finishing Madame Bovary: A Bad End, but a Good Ending

[Aside: I suppose I could call this a "spoiler note"--but I suspect that anybody who actually reads this bit will already know what becomes of her.]

Anyway--we've finished our readaloud of Madame Bovary, and here's something I hadn't noticed before: it comes to a good ending.  No, not her, silly--I mean the novel.  That is--have you ever noticed how many novels really don't  end well?  For good and sufficient reason, I think; novels end but life does not, and a novelistic ending on an imitation of life is more than likely to sound forced or artificial.   Often they are artificial in the sense that the author knows he has a page limit, or that it's time for a payday.   More often than they would admit, I suspect, authors simply get bored with their characters and hustle them off stage out of exasperation (a milder form, perhaps, of the common affliction among biographers: yoked to their subjects, they grow to hate them).

But that's perhaps one of the odd or distinctive points about Bovary--Flaubert really cares about his heroine* and even, in a perhaps surprising way, respects her.  He won't let her go until we get the story in all its dimensions.  I suspect that the defining characteristic of Bovary the novel is Flaubert's remorselessness--Flaubert's heroic insistence on looking his subject straight in the eye and telling her story with more truth than either she or he would really want to bear.  And so he won't let her go until her story is well and truly done.

A word about translation: yes,  we were prompted by news of the new Lydia Davis translation, but no, that wasn't the one we read.  We spent most of our time with the Margaret Mauldon rendering from Oxford World Classics, with asides at an older version by Paul de Man and semi-frequent peeks at the original French.  Nothing personal against Davis; just that we had the others around the house and felt no strong urge to spring an extra $11.    Wholly ignorant of Davis, I can't say we made the "right" choice, but we certainly made a good one: Mauldon's language flows easily and plausibly with no hint at the  kind of artificiality that you sometimes get in inferior translations.  At any point of comparison with de Man and the French, she seemed to win out.  Flaubert's French is, of course, insidiously slippery and the best of translators is going to admit (defensively?) that there's nothing like the original.  In the short range, though, while I can hardly declare Oxford a winner, it certainly does do its job.  The brief but elegant intro by  Malcome Bowie is a pleasure in its own right;  the notes, by Mark Overstall are less helpful but you can't really call them a detriment.
---
^I first wrote "heroin."  Michael Gilleland, correcting, comments: "le mot juste."  Maybe it would be better just to call her a "protagonist."

Twelfth Night: I think I Get it Now

I've fussed and fussed about Twelfth Night, and how I can never see so much in it as all those others who put it at the head of their master list.  I think I get it now, thanks to a movie version filmed for the BBC back in 1969, directed by John Dexter and John Sichel.    And here is the secret: it's a dance, or an elaborately-worked out poem, with body work.  Play it fast enough, get the pace right, with the right kind of delicacy in expression and you simply forget about all the absurdities that drive you--here even more than in most Shakespeare so nuts in the reading.  Then you get the feel of love as a great whoosh of divine madness that sweeps along from tableau to tableau.    The first ten minutes or so, you tear your hair out and wonder how you will abide all this Victoran scenery-chewing.   But stick around and you give up to it: you recognize that anything more "real" would just expose all the warts and spoil all the fun.  It's not perfect: you wonder why poor Joan Plowright has only one facial expression, start to finish.  And to set Feste up in the guise of a 33 year old rocker is an inspired risk that comes crashing to earth (his music was nice though).  It's the kind of production you couldn't possibly do today--for one thing, nobody would know how.  But it shows an aspect of Twelfth Night that I never understood before and I am so glad I took the time to give it a shot.

I Used to Think that the Chinese Had it Right

...about time zones.  Everybody on one time zone.  Let the locals adjust to the sun however they like. But then I went to Kashgar, way out on the Central Asian border and found they have two time zones--Peking time and Kashgar time.  So if you leave a call for 6 am, you may get one at 1 or 11. 

Meanwhile, nobody has ever figured out a good reason for Daylight Savings Time.

Samwick Admires the Tall Trees and Misses the Forest

Andrew Samwick is as intellectually honest and fair-minded as your going to find among right-of-center economists these days (or come to that, of economists of any stripe).  So you know he is not just blowing you off when he says he is (mostly) untroubled by wealth inequality in the United States:

...plenty of people among the richest 1 percent of Americans didn't defraud anybody in order to produce their incomes.  Do I feel oppressed that I made Steve Jobs richer by buying an iPad?  Of course not.  Do I feel cheated by the Walton family that I enriched them by shopping at Wal-Mart?  Again, no.  I don't even think it is unfair that Ken Griffin makes money by out-trading the institutional investors that manage my retirement portfolio -- I'm just sorry (but not jealous) that I don't have enough money to invest in Citadel so I could be on the winning side of those trades.

 Well, that's straightforward enough.  And I must say it's refreshing to read an academic economist (I name no names) who does not begin with a whine about how he professorial class really has it so rough.  Samwick does add a bit of a qualifier:

I do get angry at some aspects of what's happening with the richest 1 percent.  When they exploit campaign finance loopholes to effectively bribe politicians into giving them special treatment, my blood boils.  (The taxation of carried interest for hedge fund managers like Griffin is an example.)  And I think we should put a  swift end to it.  When the heads of the major investment banks hoodwink their buddies on the SEC to let them double and triple their bets, pay themselves record bonuses, and then get bailed out with public money, I can't stand it.  But these are failures of regulation and taxation, not production.

That's good stuff but it misunderstands a central point about distorted distribution.  That is: corruption of the democratic process--and indeed, corruption of the markets--it a necessary corollary of this pileup at the top. It's a feature, not a bug. It's not just an open system with a few bad apples who get offside on the play.  It's one of the things that you buy with a boatload of money: the chance to rewrite the rulebook and lock yourself in.

Samwick doesn't mention another fatal defect in the current regime of maldistribution:  the extent to which we've termited the stuffing out of everything else.  The golden age was the time when a fella (sic!) could get out of high school, maybe trade school, and find a job where he could generate a paycheck and sustain a sense of self-worth--a time when employers saw their work force not as a liability, but an asset.

This sort of halcyon economy doesn't just happen, of course.  It takes management vision; it also takes capital.  I suspect we could tolerate a fair amount of skew in the income/wealth chart if we felt that the anointed few were pitching in to juice up the economic engine.  These days we don't see that.  As Simon Johnson has so eloquently demonstrated, we see the super-rich just passing around preferences among themselves like so many Honus Wagner trading cards. 

And I should add that the world I imagine just a fantasy: we've got right now in, e.g., Germany where they've built a thriving economy on skilled labor--so essential and so well appreciated that management has understood that they can't just throw them away when times get tough. Germany has its problems of course--too much export, winning at the game that simply cannot be played by all.  But to say you're untroubled by inequality without considering how it corrupts the structure and sucks the lifeblood out of the system--it's a refreshing absence of envy, but fatally short-sighted.