Preparation for Essay 3 - Occupy - Inquiry Between Columns

Dillon Waugh

Hayes

English 100 – 9:10

3/19/13

Word Count:

Inquiry: Occupy Movement

Across all levels of sympathy for the Occupy Movement, a citizen protest against American economic and social inequality (whose method is arguably best illustrated by the well-known Occupy Wall Street – occupation of the named area sought to dare New York City to function without its business activities) is some degree of agreement that they have an indubitable point. Whether or not the movement do make it clearly, with the lack of focus resulting from drawing members from whatever streets and homes that they’ll come in from and no consensus on what must be done against what they oppose, few will disagree that America’s is a system in which wealth is horded into the higher socioeconomic tiers of society (as well as the misguided national debt), as the rest scrape harder and harder for the means to content themselves as years widen wealth gaps and tug jobs further out of reach. Leif Dautch of U.S.A. Today regards the aforementioned lack of focus or solution of the movement as too irrelevant to distract from the essential morality behind the protest’s cries – the morality that should inspire the rich to get off of their surplus and spread to greater evenness – while Charles Kenny of the online journal Foreign Policy presses that it is unfair to think of such things only within an American society that encourages its children to eat with lines about those poor starving kids in Africa.

Both Dautch and Kenny can furnish the data to prove the Occupiers’ point; according to Dautch, the income tax is easier on the uppermost classes than it’s ever been, in spite of debt and steady inflation – “today's top federal income tax bracket is 35%; in 1918 it was 77%. In 1952 it was 92%. As recently as 1980, it was 70%.” Kenny meanwhile reports that, according to the I.R.S., while the average household in the top 1% of earners can afford to spend around $1,500 per day on each member, the average overall’s budget is closer to $55.00 – by contrast, however, the international is nearer to $11.00.

Neither’s statistics are complete let alone consistently cited – Dautch does not present any shifts or lack thereof in the income tax rate on the middle and lower classes, while Kenny would prop up a powerful statistic he poses claiming that “an estimated 900 million people . . . live on less than $1.50 a day”  significantly with even passing proof of credibility.

The philosophy that the two – and the Occupy movement – share, however, is where the meaning for and average person’s disinclination to doubt that data is understood. Like the movement, the importance of the statement made is in the actual realm, not the conceptual one. Dautch appreciates that about the protest – he finds the protesters’ “decision to frame the debate in moral terms is also refreshingly honest.” Where Kenny points out that the one agreed-upon measure to increase income tax on the top brackets would have, if enacted sooner, compensated for perhaps half of each year’s deficit, Dautch suggests that the protestors either know or simply don’t care – as they are no group of lobbyists or professional activists, what matters to them is not acceptance of a proposed government means of reaching an end. Increased taxes on the rich would be a symbolic act – the government itself urging the wealthy to make more of their resources active.

This fair degree of sympathy – interpretation of the movement’s motivations rather than criticizing its failings in others’ terms – is why I find Dautch’s article on the subject easier to approve of than Kenny’s, who suggests that the Occupiers “stop whining” – never mind that they have a point, and that change ought to begin someplace.

And change is, as is increasingly apparent, called for. A load of the scoffing at the Occupy movement comes from a view, founded or not, of the protestors as disproportionately middle-class – Kenny evidently finds it all the more absurd to fuss over the needs of the discontented American average Sir or Madame Doe over those of those living in war- and terrorism-torn and underdeveloped countries. But it is lazy if not foolish to accept the point that at society’s top tiers must be people who have significantly more at their disposal than they could really honestly want. And maybe if even those typical working people can see a wide gap between themselves and the richest – and know that the gap goes much, much further on behind them – to begin reaching out to spread resources may as well start at arm’s length, and stretch further, and stretch further. In any case, at some point, the lock had best be cracked on locked-away troves of resources at some point.