{"id":6857,"date":"2017-07-03T07:33:11","date_gmt":"2017-07-03T13:33:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=6857"},"modified":"2017-07-01T22:36:59","modified_gmt":"2017-07-02T04:36:59","slug":"are-you-a-dream-hoarder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2017\/07\/are-you-a-dream-hoarder.html","title":{"rendered":"Are you a dream-hoarder?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"from<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the premise of a new book, Dream Hoarders<\/em>, by Richard Reeves, being promoted by Brookings<\/a>. \u00a0(I\u2019ve put this on hold at the library, but it\u2019s going to be a while so this is based on other descriptions of the content.) \u00a0As described in The Atlantic<\/a>,<\/p>\n

Reeves agrees that the 20 percent are not the one percent: The higher you go up the income or wealth distribution, the bigger the gains made in the past three or four decades. Still, the top quintile of earners\u2014those making more than roughly $112,000 a year\u2014have been big beneficiaries of the country\u2019s growth. To make matters worse, this group of Americans engages in a variety of practices that don\u2019t just help their families, but harm the other 80 percent of Americans. . . .<\/p>\n

The book traces the way that the upper-middle class has pulled away from the middle class and the poor on five dimensions: income and wealth, educational attainment, family structure, geography, and health and longevity. The top 20 percent of earners might not have seen the kinds of income gains made by the top one percent and America\u2019s billionaires. Still, their wage and investment increases have proven sizable. They dominate the country\u2019s top colleges, sequester themselves in wealthy neighborhoods with excellent public schools and public services, and enjoy healthy bodies and long lives. \u201cIt would be an exaggeration to say that the upper-middle class is full of gluten-avoiding, normal-BMI joggers who are only marginally more likely to smoke a cigarette than to hit their children,\u201d Reeves writes. \u201cBut it would be just that\u2014an exaggeration, not a fiction.\u201d<\/p>\n

They then pass those advantages onto their children, with parents placing a \u201cglass floor\u201d under their kids. They ensure they grow up in nice zip codes, provide social connections that make a difference when entering the labor force, help with internships, aid with tuition and home-buying, and schmooze with college admissions officers. All the while, they support policies and practices that protect their economic position and prevent poorer kids from climbing the income ladder: legacy admissions, the preferential tax treatment of investment income, 529 college savings plans, exclusionary zoning, occupational licensing, and restrictions on the immigration of white-collar professionals.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

More concretely, Reeves instructs his readers<\/a> on five things to do (or to stop doing), to stop dream-hoarding:<\/p>\n