Legal Apartheid

Theresa May introduces plans to write income discrimination into UK immigration law:

Overseas "super-investors" who are willing to keep £5m in a UK bank account are to be given the right to stay indefinitely in Britain after only three years, two years faster than the five-year wait imposed on every other migrant.
An overseas investor who is willing to deposit more than £10m in the UK will win the right to stay even quicker, after only two years.

The explanation is that this will encourage entrepreneurs to settle in the UK, but notice that you don't actually have to do anything with your five or ten million pounds - it just has to be there. So there we have it - a firm commitment from the Home Secretary to the principle that there should be one law for the rich and another law for everyone else.

This woman makes me want to do un-Quakerly things.

Motherhood as class warfare

Sandra Tsing Loh has a piece in The Atlantic this month about Amy Chua's memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Tsing Loh has a very different perspective on being raised in an Asian family that's worth hearing about in and of itself, but she makes a good point about the relationship between child-rearing and class.

I scratched my head also at Chua’s unabashed description of her extravagant arrangements for Sophia’s debut at Carnegie Hall’s Weill concert space. Along with buying Sophia a “charcoal satin floor-length gown” from Barneys (“No David’s Bridal for this one!”), Chua reserved the Fontainebleau Room at the St. Regis, ordering up a magnificent feast of sushi, crab cakes, dumplings, quesadillas, a raw-oyster bar, jumbo shrimp, a beef-tenderloin station, a Peking-duck station, a pasta station, Gruyère profiteroles, Sicilian rice balls with wild mushrooms, and a giant dessert station. Chua argues that this is typical of “Chinese mothers,” who go overboard, but, raised myself by a notorious Shanghainese skinflint (who threw even my $1 book purchases across the room in fury), I find this expense less uniquely Chinese than perhaps, dare I say (brace for Internet firestorm), upper-middle-class suburban Jewish?

Chua claims she fears “generational decline,” in which the first generation of immigrants works hard to get a toehold in the country, the second generation (hers) becomes the educated professionals who make the money, and the third generation squanders the money. However, I don’t know exactly which generation the habit of spending half a million dollars per classical-music prodigy would belong to.

 She goes on:

I think of the time I attended a meet-the-donor dinner for a well-regarded theater in New York. My tablemate, an elegant 70-something gentleman, was a top executive at Credit Suisse. He lovingly showed me photographs of his children, all three of whom had gone to Harvard (which he assured me was full of surprisingly ordinary kids, not elites at all). To what did he attribute his children’s success? Clearly a favorite speech of his, here the fist went down, jingling our wineglasses: “Because I read to them! I came home as late and tired as any Puerto Rican janitor, but I made sure I always READ TO THEM EVERY NIGHT.” A twitchy mother at the best of times, I couldn’t help pointing out that, by his own admission, he had also spared no expense in sending his children to Manhattan’s most exclusive private schools, and in engaging a flotilla of private tutors and nannies to drive them to one-on-one training with the very best teachers for 18 years. Perhaps a better test of the banker’s theory, I argued, would have been to let his kids attend P.S. Whatever with the Puerto Rican janitor’s kids and let them flail on the playground afterward in the same crappy after-school programs … but still to make sure to do that all-important BEDTIME READING.

But no one defends America’s “meritocracy” more heatedly than the stratospherically affluent and privileged.

Death or taxes

An editorial in The New York Times today makes what to me is the most salient point about the current fiscal problems states and the federal government find themselves caught in:

The federal deficit is too large for comfort, and most states are struggling to balance their books. Some of that is because of excessive spending, and much is because the recession has driven down tax revenues. But a substantial part was caused by deliberate decisions by state and federal lawmakers to drain government of resources by handing out huge tax cuts, mostly to the rich. As governments begin to stagger from the self-induced hemorrhaging, Republican politicians like [Speaker of the House John] Boehner and [Wisconsin governor Scott] Walker cry poverty and use it as an excuse to break unions and kill programs they never liked in flush years.

This is classic, Marxian class warfare - war waged by the rich on the poor, with no one crying foul until the poor start to fight back. But the tide of public opinion may be turning:

A New York Times/CBS News poll published on Tuesday showed that Americans oppose ending bargaining rights for public unions by a majority of nearly two to one. And the poll sharply refutes the post-Reagan Republican mantra that the public invariably abhors all tax increases. Nearly twice as many people said they would prefer a tax increase to cutting benefits of public employees or to cutting spending on roads.

I find it bizarre that not one American political commentator I have heard on the radio, seen on TV or read online or in the papers has suggested raising taxes as a means of cutting the deficit. I mean, shouldn't this be the obvious solution? We have some of the lowest effective tax rates in the developed world - surely we have at least a little bit of wiggle room?