Diversity is a good thing. Diversity in nature makes all the different plants and animals in a given area into a sustainable ecosystem; a pond of nothing but frogs would not last long. Diversity in your assets buffers you against market drops; a portfolio of nothing but Enron stock would not make a good nestegg. Diversity in the workplace keeps businesses from making stupid cross-cultural mistakes; a Yom Kippur grocery sale would go over about as well as the apocryphal sale of the Chevy Nova in Spanish speaking nations.
Sometimes we try to impose artificial diversity — or artificial lack of diversity. For example, we plant a field of nothing but corn because it would be terribly confusing to separate ripe corn from ripe potatos; we accept the premise that this situation is unsustainable without human intervention. Or, we implement a program to insure that a school has a student population more closely mimicing the overall American population.
As the State of the Union address approaches, you will be hearing more about Bush’s ideas for the “ownership society,” an idea he has actually been building towards for some time. The short version of this policy is that not only is diversity good, but it is a good idea for all kinds of people to own things: “that American workers aspire to be owners — of stock for their retirement, homes, businesses, good health insurance, and skills they need to navigate multiple changes of jobs and careers.” And who is stupid enough to disagree with that thesis? Particularly if there is not much talk about the actual proposals?
Recent Fannie Mae ads are already towing the line on this issue. Those of you who have been reading the ShortWoman for a while know my opinion of such warm, fluffy idiocy. Again, the central idea is that everybody should own a house. Anybody foolish enough to ask why is greeted with a stare of disbelief and a speech about tax deductions and biggest asset the typical American has and stability. Never mind the tax deduction being smaller than the money spent, never mind a mortgage being the biggest liability the typical American has, never mind that quite simply there are reasons people might not want or need to own real estate. Indeed, although new legislation would help 40,000 low-income families with the downpayment on a house, these people are the most likely to find themselves buried under a house in serious need of Norm that they can neither afford to fix nor sell.
Unfortunately, when the Administration speaks of “ownership,” they really mean it in the therapist’s definition: “responsibility.” When you “take ownership” of something, you are “responsible” for it, responsible for needed changes to it. The Administration does not want you to just own your house, they want you to own your retirement (privatize social security, an idea which should have been completely debunked by this chart); they want you to own your healthcare; they want the unemployed to take responsibility for finding a new job. Here’s the problem: “For starters, the very people who lack the decent health insurance, the money for retraining, and the secure nest eggs are short of adequate earnings from which to take out savings. So most of the tax breaks, like the rest of the Bush tax program, will go to people who don’t really need them, while those who rely on genuine help will come up short.”
They aren’t interested in you owning assets; they are interested in you being responsible for liabilities. If the Administration had any stake in broad ownership of actual property, they would encourage more policies that promote small business, a proven wealth generator that even creates jobs.