Less with Less

For the past few months I have been working my way through "The Wire" on DVD, a tv series I cannot recommend more highly provided one has a stomach for frequent though not overly graphic violence and constant profanity. For those not familiar with it, on a surface level the show is about drug dealers and the cops who try to put them in jail in the city of Baltimore, Maryland, but on a deeper level it is about failing institutions and the people they leave behind.

David Simon, the ex-Baltimore Sun crime reporter who created "The Wire" has a new show on HBO about New Orleans called "The Treme." On the occasion of its premiere, The New Yorker reran a 2007 profile of Simon by Margaret Talbot which I read with interest. Simon is quoted as saying, "Management says, ‘We have to do more with less.’ That’s the bullshit of bean counters who care only about the bottom line. You do less with less.”

He was talking about the downsizing of his newspaper, but it seems to me that for the past twenty or thirty years the more-with-less canard has been aggressively foisted upon the whole of American society by Republicans and business-oriented, DLC-type Democrats alike.

Democrats need to stop shying away from the class warfare, wealth-redistribution charge. Damn right that policies such as health care reform and repeal of the Bush tax cuts seek to redistribute wealth. But so did the Bush tax cuts. The only difference is the direction in which the wealth flows. Democrats need openly and unabashedly to work to reverse the marked growth in wealth inequality over the past thirty years. Democrats need to take off their managers' hats, asking for more with less, and start offering us more with more.