'No One Really Believes in Equality of Opportunity'

Ezra Klein on the equality of opportunity:

No one really believes in ‘equality of opportunity’, by Ezra Klein: ...Everyone in American life professes to believe in equality of opportunity. But nobody really believes in it. ... You can’t have real equality of opportunity without equality of outcome. A rich parent can purchase test prep a poor parent can’t. A rich parent can usher their children into social networks a poor parent can’t. A rich parent can make donations to Harvard that a poor parent can’t. ...

When people say they believe in “equality of opportunity,” they really mean they believe in “sufficiency of opportunity.” They don’t believe all children should start from the same place. But they believe all children should start from a good enough place. They believe they should have decent nutrition and functioning schools and a safe community and loving parents. They believe they should have a chance.

The question is what they’re willing to do about that belief. Democrats who believe in sufficiency of opportunity tend to want to spend more on health care and education for the poor. ... They believe that the less children or their parents need to worry about staying afloat, the more they’ll be free to work to get ahead.

On the Republican side, Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.) has taken the lead in arguing that conservatives should focus on opportunity. But his approach largely consists of cuts to the safety net. ... These are not policies required by the finances of government. ... Rather, they’re required by Ryan’s theory of opportunity, which is that a key problem for the poor is the transformation of “our social safety net into a hammock, which lulls able-bodied people into lives of complacency and dependency.” His budget reflects this theory. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, almost two-thirds of his cuts come from programs that serve the poor.

Helping the poor by cutting the programs they rely on is, to say the least, a risky theory of uplift. It’s easier to see what Ryan’s plan does to impede sufficiency of opportunity than to spread it. ...

I don't see how we can achieve equality of opportunity without some degree of income redistribution. Republicans, of course, generally oppose income redistribution.

I've obscured the point of Ezra Klein's post in the extract above, it's mostly about whether "conservative reformers" who profess to believe in equal opportunity are serious, or simply using the mantra of "equal opportunity" to defend the same old policies that favor key constituencies. There are certainly people in the Republican Party who truly believe that government intervention harms the poor, but for the most part this looks like an excuse to pursue "you're on your own" polices that lower taxes and favor those at the top.

[Note: I have been battling an allergic reaction for the last several days, nothing serious but it is a big annoyance and distraction (the itchiest hives you can imagine from head to toe along with scary tongue swelling, hands a bit swollen, etc., no idea what causes it but Benadryl in large doses provides relief). I'm hoping it will be over soon, in the past it has never lasted this long and I'm "itching" for it to end, but in the meantime it's been hard to focus on blogging (or anything else) -- hence the mostly "echo blogging" the last few days.]