Frances Fox Pivin, a political science professor from the City University of New York, denounced the rise of political deals that promote tax cuts at the expense of social programs, in a speech she gave last night in Carpenter Hall.
About two dozen people gathered to hear Pivin's speech, titled "Welfare Reform and the Transformation of American Electoral Politics."
Pivin said congressmen are "slashing welfare" rather than reforming welfare.
"American politics used to be pristine, and now they have turned into big money mass advertising," she said
Pivin attributed the rise of "money politics" to the pressure that business leaders exert on government officials to cut social programs in an effort to balance the federal budget.
She said since the majority of the four million people currently on welfare are single mothers who receive an average of $367 per month, "politicians are campaigning to make people -- namely single mothers -- worse off."
Pivin said politicians wrongly claim welfare reform "has perverse consequences" such as increasing poverty and giving incentives to mothers to have sons out of wedlock.
While that argument is not "completely illogical", Pivin said, the consequences of welfare reform would be "four million desperate women joining the labor force at once" which would cause "wages to go down by at least 11 percent."
Pivin also said economic inequality and job insecurity are two key problems that politicians have failed to sufficiently address.
Twenty years ago, the top 1 percent of workers in the United States accumulated 79 percent of the total income, she said.
But today, corporate chief executive officers in the U.S. earn 180 times what an average worker does, thereby rendering the U.S. "the most unequal rich country in the world," she said.
Pivin said another serious problem American politicians need to address is the state of labor unions.
Twenty years ago, 30 percent of the private work force was organized, and now this figure is down to 15 percent, Pivin said.
This type of politics will ultimately "divide communities and spoil the future," she said.
The lecture was the fifth in a series of speeches called "Inequality and Conflict", sponsored by the Dickey Center.
Pivin was formerly a member of the Board of American Civil Liberties Union.
