Chuka Umunna Quotes
We do not just strive for a society in which every person has the opportunity to reach their full potential (all parties lay claim to that); we want to build a society in which whatever talents people have, they are rewarded with a comfortable standard of living when they apply them.
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He was concerned that if steps were taken to protect the environment and they slowed or shrank economic growth, the burden would fall disproportionately on the poor.
He was referring to the success of the Clinton Administration.
At the time of this quotation, the nation had gone through more than 3 decades of enormous increase in prosperity for the wealthy, and modest gains for the highly skilled, technically trained workers. However, correcting for inflation, average salaries did not increase at all. The middle class was particularly hard hit. Only 20 percent of the population benefitted from the growth at all; however, the 1 percent had rarely prospered more. Kenworthy’s principle did not apply for this period of American history.
The debate over income inequality generally ranges between the two extremes of Christie’s hypothetical equal, mediocre salary to the extreme wealth of the 1% controlling most of the wealth. However , where America was moving in its most general affluent times was not towards equal compensation, but to a large range of remuneration with the low end and middle constantly increasing over time and the high end a reasonable multiple of the low end. However, the breakdown came in the last decades of the 20th century and the early 21st century when the low end did not increase (discounting for inflation) in 40 years, nor did the middle, while the high end increased enormously. So the nation had 40 years of growth without the lower or middle classes benefitting much and all the benefit going to the wealthy and most of that to the very wealthy. Thus the instinct was to tax the wealthy more heavily and spending the money to increase opportunity for the lower and middle classes. However, the political battle was waged over the taxing issue and not on what could be done to have the poor and the middle class obtain a larger proportion of the growth and a smaller percentage of the setbacks.
Many of the very rich agreed with Lind on this point. So did many Americans with good jobs. However there were very few Americans who did not have good jobs who agreed with this point of view. In most industrialized countries ,most workers spend one-hired of their entire adult lives working. If we do not count sleeping time, it is more like half. It is hard to believe for most people that a person could have a good life when half of his/her waking hours are spend in a not very good situation. Many of Lind’s critics observed that this was the Classic Christian theological view until recent times that every person should accept his station and be happy in at as that is what God ordained.
Chuka Harrison Umunna is a British former politician who served as Member of Parliament (MP) for Streatham from 2010 until 2019. A former member of the Labour Party, he was part of the Shadow Cabinet from 2011 to 2015. He left Labour in February 2019, when he resigned to form The Independent Group, later Change UK, along with six other MPs. Later in 2019, he left Change UK and, after a short time as an independent MP, joined the Liberal Democrats. In the 2019 general election, he was unsuccessful in being re-elected as an MP and did not return to the House of Commons.
