The Pursuit of Happiness?

By Richard Lacayo

TITLE: THE END OF EQUALITY

AUTHOR: MICKEY KAUS

PUBLISHER: BASICBOOKS; 293 PAGES; $25

THE BOTTOM LINE: Let the rich get richer, says Kaus, and the poor get respect. That's a plan for the Democrats?

Utopias are supposed to be dreams of the future. But the American Utopia? Lately it's a dream that was, a twilit memory of the golden age between V-J day and OPEC, when even a blue-collar paycheck bought a place in the middle class. The promise of paradise regained has become a key to the Democratic Party pitch. Mickey Kaus, a senior editor of the New Republic, says the Democrats are wasting their time. As the U.S. enters a world where only the highly skilled and well educated will make a decent living, the gap between rich and poor is going to keep growing. No fiddling with the tax code, retreat to protectionism, or job training for jobs that aren't there is going to stop it. Income equality, or even anything close to it, is a hopeless cause.

"Liberalism would be less depressing if it had a more attainable end," Kaus writes, "a goal short of money equality." So he wants liberal Democrats to embrace an aim that he calls civic equality. If government can't bring everyone into the middle class, let it expand the areas of life in which everyone, regardless of income, receives the same treatment. National health care, improved public schools, universal national service and government financing of nearly all election campaigns, which would freeze out special- interest money -- these are the unobjectionable components of Kaus' enlarged public sphere.

Kaus is right to fear the hardening of class lines, but wrong to think the stresses can be relieved without a continuing effort to boost income for the bottom half. "No, we can't tell them they'll be rich," he admits. "Or even comfortably well-off. But we can offer them at least a material minimum and a good shot at climbing up the ladder. And we can offer them respect." And what might they offer back? The Bronx had a cheer for it. In an age when the two- candidate presidential race is no longer something to count on, a good chunk of the Democratic core constituency would peel off for third parties.

At the center of Kaus' book is a thoughtful but no less risky proposal to dynamite welfare. He rightly understands how fear and loathing of the chronically unemployed underclass have encouraged middle-income Americans to flee from everyone below them on the class scale. The only way to eliminate welfare dependency, Kaus maintains, is by cutting off checks for all able- bodied recipients, including single mothers with children. He would have government provide them instead with jobs that pay slightly less than the minimum wage, earned-income tax credits to nudge them over the poverty line, drug counseling, job training and, if necessary, day care for their children.

Kaus doesn't sell this as social policy on the cheap. He expects it to cost up to $59 billion a year more than the $23 billion already spent annually by state and federal governments on welfare. And he knows it would be politically perilous, because he suggests paying for the plan by raiding Social Security funds and trimming benefits for upper-income retirees, whose knives are long and sharp. But he considers it money well spent if it undid the knot of chronic poverty and helped foster rapprochement among the classes. And it would be too. But one advantage of being an author is that you only ask people to listen to you, not to vote for you.