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  3. Goal Trimmer Utopias are supposed to be dreams of the future. But the American Utopia? Lately it’s a dream that was, a twilit

Goal Trimmer Utopias are supposed to be dreams of the future. But the American Utopia? Lately it’s a dream that was, a twilit

admin2010-03-25  57
问题                         Goal Trimmer
   Utopias are supposed to be dreams of the future. But the American Utopia? Lately it’s a dream that was, a twilit memory of the Golden Age between V-J day and OPEC, when even a blue-collar paycheck bought a place in the middle class. The promise of paradise regained has become a key to the Democratic Party pitch. Mickey Kaus, a senior editor of the New Republic, says the Democrats are wasting their time. As the U. S. enters a world where only the highly skilled and well educated will make a decent living, the gap between rich and poor is going to keep growing. No fiddling with the tax code, retreat to protectionism or job training for jobs that aren’t there is going to stop it. Income equality is a hopeless cause in the U. S. "Liberalism would be less depressing if it had a more attainable end." Kaus writes," a goal short of money equality." Liberal Democrats should embrace an aim he calls civic equality. If government can’t bring everyone into the middle class, let it expand the areas of life in which everyone, regardless of income, receives the same treatment, National health care, improved public schools, universal national service and government financing of nearly all election campaigns, which would freeze out special-interest money --there are the unobjectionable components of his enlarged public sphere.
   Kaus is right to fear the hardening of class lines, but wrong to think the stresses can be relieved without a continuing effort to boost income for the bottom half." No, we can’t tell them they’ll be rich," he admits." Or even comfortably well off. But we can offer them at least a material minimum and a good shot at climbing up the ladder. And we can offer them respect." And what might they offer back? The Bronx had a rude cheer for it. A good chunk of the Democratic core constituency would probably peel off. At the center of Kaus’ book is a thoughtful but no less risky proposal to dynamite welfare. He rightly understands how fear and loathing of the chronically unemployed underclass have encouraged middle income Americans to flee from everyone below them on the class scale. The only way to eliminate welfare dependency, Kaus maintains, is by cutting off checks for all able-bodied recipients, including single mothers with children. He would have government provide them instead with jobs that pay slightly less than the minimum wage, earned-income tax credits to nudge them over the poverty line, drug counseling, job training and, if necessary, day care for their children. Kaus doesn’t sell this as social policy on the cheap. He expects it would cost up to $ 59 billion a year more than the $ 23 billion already spent annually on welfare in the U. S. And he knows it would be politically perilous, because he suggests paying for the plan by raiding Social Security funds and trimming benefits for upper-income retirees. Yet he considers if money well spent it would undo the knot of chronic poverty and help foster class rapprochement. And it would be too. But one advantage of being an author is that you only ask people to listen to you, not to vote for you.
The title of the review suggests _______.
选项 A、giving the poor more financial aid and more job opportunities
B、a fundamental change in the goal which the Democratic Party uses to appeal to Americans
C、the elimination of the unfair distribution of social wealth among Americans
D、a modification of the objective to make it more easy to realize
答案D
解析 推理题。从全文来看，文章谈到了美国社会乌托邦理想(Utopia)的不可行性与贫富差距加大的现实问题。文中指出要达到收入平等是不可能的，但如果转变观念和目标，从强调收入平等转而提倡公民平等，使每个人都得到同等的公民待遇，这不仅具有实现可行性，也可以缓和贫富之间的阶级矛盾，这也正是本文标题Goal Trimmer(目标修整)想要概括的意思，因此选项D(修改目标，使之切实可行)符合题意，为正确答案。
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