The Conscience of a Liberal

6.

See, for example, Reed Abelson, “Wal-Mart’s Health Care Struggle Is Corporate America’s, Too,” New York Times, October 29, 2005.

7.

See Piketty and Saez, “The Evolution of Top Incomes.”

8.

See Andrea Brandolini and Timothy Smeeding, “Inequality Patterns in Western-Type Democracies: Cross-Country Differences and Time Changes” (Luxembourg Income Study working paper no. 458, Apr. 2007). An attempt to systematize the survey data, yielding results similar to Piketty and Saez, is http://www.tcf.org/list.asp? type=NC&pubid=1403.

9.

Carola Frydman and Raven Saks, “Historical Trends in Executive Compensation, 1936–2003,” Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 2005.

10.

See Xavier Gabaix and Augustin Landier, “Why Has CEO Pay Increased So Much?” (National Board of Economic Research working paper no. 12365), July 2006.

11.

Pay Without Performance: The Unfulfilled Promise of Executive Compensation (Harvard University Press, 2004).

12.

Michael C. Jensen and Kevin J. Murphy, “CEO Incentives—It’s Not How Much You Pay, but How,” Harvard Business Review (May/June 1990), pp. 138–53.

13.

Ibid.

14.

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/ fortune/fortune_archive/ 2001/06/25/305448 /index.htm.

15.

Ibid.

16.

“U.S.-Style Pay Deals for Chiefs Become All the Rage in Europe,” New York Times, June 16, 2006, p. A1.

17.

Sherwin Rosen, “The Economics of Superstars,” American Economic Review 71, no. 5 (Dec. 1981), pp. 845–58.

8 THE POLITICS OF INEQUALITY

1.

At the time Republicans insisted that they were not proposing cuts in Medicare, because the dollar amounts spent per senior would continue to rise under their proposal. But the increases in funding would have fallen well short of increases in medical costs, so they were in effect proposing big cuts. Similar evasiveness marked the 2005 debate over Social Security.

2.

After the Washington Post columnist David Broder, the “dean of the Washington press corps,” who spent most of the Bush era placing the blame for discord equally on both parties.

3.

American National Election Studies, “The ANES Guide to Public Opinion and Electoral Behavior,” table 2B-4, http://electionstudies.org/ nesguide/toptable/ tab2b_4.htm.

4.

“Special Message to the Congress Proposing a Comprehensive Health Insurance Plan,” February 6, 1974, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=4337.

5.

Thomas Edsall, The New Politics of Inequality (W. W. Norton, 1984), p. 73.

6.

Francis X. Clines, “Watt Asks That Reagan Forgive ‘Offensive’ Remark About Panel,” New York Times, September 23, 1993.

7.

Decedents, http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/ TaxFacts/TFDB/TFTemplate .cfm?