The tyranny of the contented.

• Author: Galbraith, John Kenneth
• Position: The majority of the voters

Don't blame Bush and Reagan for that screw-the-poor ethic. Blame yourself

Since the advent of the current recession, the Reagan and Bush administrations have endured a fair amount of criticism for cutting welfare and similar expenditures while lowering taxes to the special benefit of the rich. To opponents, these fiscal policies seem to betray a deficiency in compassion: a cruel diffidence toward the needy and oversolicitousness toward the privileged that will soon prove the Republican Party's political undoing. Yet as critics probe Republican psyches, they miss a political point. The rationale for the fiscal policies of the past decade lies not in "indifference" or political error, but in a current truth of American taxation--the marked asymmetry between who pays and who receives. Those pursuing aid-the-rich, hurt-the-poor policies have been reacting faithfully to the will of their constituency: the majority of voting Americans who are economically and socially contented.

In past times, the economically and socially fortunate were, as we know, a small minority. Now in the United States, the favored are numerous--greatly influential of voice and a majority of those who vote. This, and not the division of voters between political parties, is what defines modern American political behavior. This, and not the much celebrated circumstance of charismatic political leaders and leadership, is what shapes--and limits--modern politics. Thanks in no small part to the new power of the contented, our collective view of what government can and should do for its people is being continually narrowed. Thus homelessness, hunger, inadequate education, drug affliction, and poverty in general are being continually sanctioned by active democracy.

For a considerable, though by no means the entire, range of public services, the supporting taxes fall on the contented; the benefits accrue to others. In particular, the fortunate in the polity find themselves paying through their taxes the public cost of the functional underclass, and this, in the most predictable of economic responses, they resist. There follows a highly understandable resistance to all taxation. Yet, unfortunately, the services these taxes pay for are elemental to the lives of the poor--and increasingly, the poor alone.

In the United States, as in other industrial lands, the poorest people must rely on the government for publicly subsidized shelter. In no economically advanced country--a sadly...