Bread and circuses: Pair of projects offer insight on society’s slide
Sometime between the reign of Nero and Marcus Aurelius, the Roman poet Juvenal coined the phrase “panem et circenses” – bread and circuses in English. He was referring to the age-old practice of keeping the peace by appeasing the masses with a powerful combination of entertainment and free food.
By the Pax Romana, this practice was more than 300 years old, seeing the old republic, with its trappings of democracy (like a senate and courts), devolve into an empire ruled by an almighty Caesar.
This phrase was in the forefront of my thoughts recently. I had had a few discussions over the previous few days about an article a friend made me aware of by retired U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas and John Early, formerly a researcher at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The article, published in the Wall Street Journal Aug. 29, put forth some rather alarming data that seemed to hold the key to many of the mysteries of the modern age.
The writers expand upon analysis of “income inequality” provided by the Congressional Budget Office. Data shows that there is not nearly as much variability among the three lowest quintiles as one may expect. But the conclusions go well beyond that.
It’s a rather stark juxtaposition against prevailing narratives just how close these quintiles are. Before taxes and transfer payments, the lowest quintile had an average household income of $7,000, the fourth quintile $32,000 and the third (middle) earned $67,000. But when you adjust for transfer payments and taxes, the leveling is dramatic.
The lowest quintile shoots up to $49,000, the fourth to $50,000 and the third (middle) falls to $61,000. The cumulative impact of tax and entitlement legislation had more or less squashed any variation in net income for the bottom 60% of Americans.
This decimates the financial incentive for working and doing well.
The impact is even more severe when you factor in that the bottom quintile is dominated by single adult households. When you adjust for this, the members of the fourth quintile (almost all holding jobs) actually bring home less income per capita than those in the fifth (lowest) quintile, largely unemployed.
Light bulb moment. This is why there are so many firms that can’t find workers and why the dining room at your local McDonald’s is closed.
On Sept. 12, I took part in the monthly Fort Wayne Redevelopment Commission meeting. The two items pertinent to this discussion on the agenda were a modification of the funding for the downtown municipal baseball park and the initiation of a project to create a government-subsidized grocery store in an area city staff has deemed to be low income (using Census Bureau data).
The ballpark is facing some unusual requests from MLB regarding additional locker room facilities and lighting. The baseball park is often lauded as a success of local government and a good deal.
The financing for it basically boils down to taxes fund 100% and the ball club keeps the majority of the ticket sales and the concessions. Our vote (3-2) was to allocate more tax money from the TIF district to cover escalating costs.
The second interesting vote was to take possession of donated property (currently being used as auto repair for a charity) for the purpose of creating an “urban grocery.” This is to address the food desert issue.
The idea is that if residents in a census tract deemed to be low income live more than a mile away from a grocery store, those residents are in a food desert. That contrasts from my neighborhood, which is 3.5 miles from Kroger (the only grocery in my neck of the woods) because our area is not low income.
Keep in mind, there is a Kroger 2 miles from the location of the new urban grocery. This will be some sort of joint venture between city government and a nonprofit (ostensibly) grocery. The assumption is that people will be walking to this grocery to purchase subsidized food with EBT (thus the low-income element in the formulation).
So here we are, nearly 2000 years since Juvenal, managing bread and circuses and a society in decline where more and more residents are simply declining to work. We see an astronomical rate of drug overdose and suicide deaths among males 18-45. Perhaps that is linked with the institutional destruction of the value of work, and trying to simply gloss over this with entertainment.
It may be a stretch, but this triumvirate of income equality focus, bread and circuses seemed to get at the core of our issues.
This article was first published in the Journal Gazette