Paul Simon

A diminished demand for unskilled labor is widening the disparity between rich and poor and creating a psychological divide that rivals the nation’s racial chasms, according to former Illinois Senator Paul Simon.

“The great division in our society is not between black and white, or Hispanic and Anglo, but between people who have given up and those who have hope,” he told a packed Northwestern audience at Hardin Hall on February 6.

Despite a U.S. unemployment rate of 4.6% that sank to a 24-year low in February, Simon noted that the upper one-fifth of Americans is moving up the income scale much more dramatically than the lower one-fifth whose incomes have remained fairly static. “That’s long-term dynamite,” he predicted.

Simon delivered these remarks in the first of IPR’s 1998 Distinguished Public Policy Lectures on the topic “Public Policy and the American Labor Market.”

Simon retired from the U.S. Senate in 1996, after four decades in public service. He currently heads the Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University, which he founded shortly after leaving office.

According to statistics cited by Simon, “four-million Americans can’t recognize their name in block print; 23-million adult Americans can’t read a newspaper or fill out an employment form; and 82% of people in prison are high school dropouts.”

New investments in education and a massive public works program modeled after Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal Works Projects Program (WPA) might turn these numbers around, Simon said.

The former senator firmly supports a tax increase to bolster education. “Every economic study says we ought to be investing more in education,” he said. “It would be better for Illinois and for the nation that we be willing to sacrifice a little bit.” Simon had supported Illinois Governor Jim Edgar’s proposed income tax hike that was defeated by the state legislature.

“One of the great myths is that as a people we are overtaxed,” Simon said. “But as a total percentage of our income, Turkey is the only country below us. And I am not sure that Turkey is the model we should be following.”

In addition to beefed-up spending for education, Simon proposed a longer school year, more attention to foreign language training, and better preschool and adult education.

According to Simon, the nation’s longest school year is only 180 days compared to 243 in Japan and 240 in Germany. He scoffed at the notion that children can learn as much in the shorter year and pointed out that increasing the school year through 12th grade from 180 to 210 days would add up to two more years of school.

Foreign language study gets equally short shrift in U.S. education, he said. “We are the only nation in the world where you can get a a Ph.D. and never have a year of foreign language.” In his view, it means Americans are not exposing themselves to other cultures, since only .007% of U.S. students study abroad. We need to be more sensitive to the rest of the world, he said, pointedly noting that the United States is not paying its UN dues.

Simon believes there is a critical need to create job opportunities for people on welfare. He assailed the new five-year limits on public assistance without providing jobs, day care, or training for poor women with children. Instead he sees merit in a program modeled after the WPA program that paid minimum wage for four days work on government-sponsored projects, and gave workers a fifth day to find a private sector job.

Under WPA, 1.5-million people learned to read and write—including playwright Arthur Miller and novelist Richard Wright—said Simon, who thinks “this is one area where liberals and conservatives can come together.”

He is pessimistic, however, that the current political leadership will develop any new ideas to combat the thorny issues of health care and social security reform, both of which he also considers major threats to the future labor market. “It is hard for me to conceive of any party today proposing anything major without taking a poll, and if the subject is unpopular, going ahead anyway. We have moved beyond the point of real leadership to letting public opinion mold what we do,” he said.

Had that been the case after World War II, there would have been no Marshall Plan, Simon believes. He pointed out that in the first poll taken after the plan was proposed, only 14% of the American public supported it.

Simon also used the occasion to criticize campaign finance practices, acknowledging that “public office is not for sale but access to public office is—and all this affects the labor-management climate.” Simon’s last Senate campaign cost $8.4-million, one reason he decided not to run for re-election.