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2 Candidates, 2 Fortunes, 2 Views of Wealth -- By DAVID LEONHARDT for the New York Times -- December 23, 2007By the final weeks of 1984, well before either turned 40, John Edwards and Mitt Romney had already built successful careers. But the two men were each on the verge of an entirely new level of financial success..... Mr. Edwards and Mr. Romney are basing their candidacies in large measure on the very different lessons each has taken from his own success.
“Some people come from nothing to being wildly successful and their response is, ‘I did this on my own,’” Mr. Edwards said in an interview. “I came to a different conclusion. I believe that I did work hard, and I think people should work hard, but I think my country was there for me every step of the way.”
Today, he added, “the problem is all the economic growth is going to a very small group of people.” .... The two men represent a clear divide between the Democratic and Republican parties over whether the government should redistribute more wealth, from the rich downward, now that economic inequality is greater than it has been since the 1920s.
Mr. Romney and Mr. Edwards also represent a divide among the affluent themselves. Many of the new wealthy — the great majority, in all likelihood — see their success as a sign of this country’s economic strength. Yet there is also a minority — including Mr. Buffett and William H. Gates Sr., Mr. Gates’s father, who have both opposed eliminating the estate tax — worried about inequality.
Mr. Edwards is running perhaps the most populist campaign of any major candidate in a generation. He has called for universal health insurance, tighter trade restrictions, more financial aid for college students and higher taxes on the rich. In several cases, his main Democratic rivals have followed his lead. The political system is now rigged to help the rich, Mr. Edwards says, which makes a journey like his, from modest beginnings to the middle class and far beyond it, much harder than it was. .... Mr. Edwards, as he often reminds audiences, is the son of a mill worker. His father, Wallace Edwards, recalled in an interview being paid 75 cents an hour when he was hired by Milliken & Company in 1951. That was the federal minimum wage then and translates to about $6 an hour today. In a full year, Wallace Edwards made as much money as George Romney did in a few days.
The careers their sons chose reflect that fact: Mr. Romney became rich investing in corporate America, and Mr. Edwards became rich doing battle with it. .... As he campaigns across Iowa and New Hampshire, he says that the tax code now favors wealth over work, that Washington lobbyists protect drug and health insurance companies and that trade deals are written to lift corporate profits rather than the middle class.
And Mr. Edwards’s broad argument — that the middle class is not doing as well as it used to — also has evidence on its side. The income of the median family has risen only about 25 percent in the last 30 years, after adjusting for inflation. From 1947 to 1977, the same measure more than doubled.
Most telling, perhaps, is the fact that there have been only brief periods since World War II, like the late 1990s, when incomes of the wealthy and the middle class were both rising sharply. From the late 1940s to the late 1970s, the incomes of the middle class surged while those of the top 0.01 percent rose only slightly faster than inflation. Since the late ’70s, the opposite has happened. Middle-class incomes have trailed inflation in the current decade.
“I think most Americans think that the economic disparity that exists in America today is worse than they can remember in a long time,” Mr. Edwards said. “Every step of my life has reinforced the notion that — unless there’s some obstacle that you can’t do anything about — that if you work hard enough in America, you can do anything. I think, though, that those obstacles are too high and too difficult for most people.”
To restore what he considers the right balance, Mr. Edwards would go further than either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama on several economic issues. Mr. Edwards would try to repeal the Bush tax cuts for everyone making at least $200,000 — not $250,000 — and he would do so as soon as he took office, not waiting until they expire in 2011. He also favors a law forbidding banks from giving subprime mortgages, which have higher average interest rates, to people who could qualify for loans with lower rates.
In the American Prospect, a liberal magazine, Ezra Klein called Mr. Edwards “the first genuine populist in decades with a serious shot at the presidency.”
His populist bent helps explain why only one high-profile economist — James K. Galbraith of the University of Texas, the son of John Kenneth Galbraith — has joined the campaign.
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