One sure thing in life is that someone, somewhere is plotting to profit at your expense this very minute. Believe that. The Trap: Selling Out To Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America, the first book written by Daniel Brook, a young author from Philadelphia via Yale and a New York City childhood, looks at what happens when successful profiteers aren't charged enough for the privilege of exploiting the American market: college graduates accept their diploma carrying student loan debt and, if they want to live in a major metropolitan area and afford to buy a home and raise a family, their only career option is to "sell out" and work for corporate America.

Tracing America's current inequality and dwindling middle class to the conservative intellectual movement established by William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater, a movement that was institutionalized by the Reagan presidency, The Trap argues that the conservative reliance on the market to provide ultimate freedom to the individual has failed, and that options in America for educated young people have become increasingly limited. "The tide of conformity continues to rise as the talented are corralled into a narrow swath of careers, forced to stifle their altruistic impulses and retreat from public life," writes Brook in his introduction. "We ignore the predicament faced by today's brightest young people, the coal-mine canaries of Reaganomics, at our peril."

illustration: ALICIA FAIRCLOUGH

The Trap draws on a clear, well-constructed political and economic analysis, and multiple interviews with young Americans who've been "corralled," who are struggling to maintain careers of their choosing at the expense of their quality of life, and who are in the process of giving up what they want to do for what they have to do. Startling facts propel Brook's argument—teachers priced out of 99.7 percent of the housing market in the San Francisco metropolitan area; New York City's wage inequality on par with that of Namibia; top individual tax rates for millionaires reduced, with little fight from Democrats, from 70 percent to 28 percent during Reagan's first term; "Conservative foundations now outspend liberal ones by a factor of more than ten to one"; "Corporations outspend labor in political donations more than fifteen to one"; "In five of the last six years, the nation's median income has actually dropped"; "Americans making $50,000 to $75,000 pay the same percentage of their incomes in taxes as the four hundred highest-income families in the country."

After reading The Trap and recognizing our family, friends and communities in Brook's portrait of a once-prosperous middle class laid low by tax cuts and exemptions for the wealthy—a failed system that has narrowed options and funneled America's brightest young people into a corporate system that pumps money upwards, COOL'EH had to get in touch with the author to discuss how America used to be just 30 years ago, and how a return to progressive taxation—increasing taxes for only the wealthiest Americans—could provide health care, education, and childcare to all Americans, and make it possible for college graduates to choose to teach middle school, start a business, or work as a non-profit lawyer without sacrificing dreams like starting a family, owning a home, or affording to live within an hour's commute of where you work.

Did the ideas that would eventually turn into this book start to gestate while you were still in college?

It came together post-college, but yeah, it started in college. When I was at Yale, for a semester I did the teacher preparation program, I was gearing up to be a high school teacher, and while I was doing that I was working on the student magazine; I realized I liked journalism better than teaching, so I ended up doing that—I ended up picking a different low-paying job. But once I got out [of college] it became clear that if you become a teacher you're in for a difficult financial existence if you do it in any of the major metropolitan areas, so that's where it started. And then watching friends, watching people I know sell out after school, really drove the point home. Junior year I did this program sponsored by a liberal think tank, liberal policy camp—it was more fun than it sounds, they had kind of lax drinking age regulation so it was OK—and we studied inequality from the perspective of, you know the facts, you guys are going to have your fancy degrees, you don't have to worry about this but you're all liberals, you're going to care about people at the bottom. But when these people [who attended the camp] all became corporate lawyers was when I was like, whoa, inequality is totally our problem. We just didn't see it. So then the point of the book is reconstructing how the country got to the point where it is now so quickly from a very different point not so long ago.

Right, the system that's creating this inequality is relatively young. Even though a lot of the ideas behind it didn't start with Reagan, it was his administration—

Reagan is the electoral triumph of an intellectual and political movement that started earlier, but yeah it's only with Reagan that all of their policies begin to get implemented, and then Bush has at least been trying to push them even further.

To what extent do people our age need to be reminded how young this system is?

I think that's huge. In some ways I hope the biggest service the book does is show people that it wasn't always this way, it doesn't have to be this way. And it's amazing the reactions I get when I just tell people facts. I mean, I don't mind if I tell someone my opinion and they disagree, but I'll tell people facts and they look at me like I dropped down from Mars. I'll tell someone, you know under Ike—a Republican president—the top marginal tax rate was 91 percent, and they'll look at me like I'm making this shit up. Or I'll say the public and private sectors used to pay their lawyers equally, in 1970, and they'll look at me like I'm making it up. And I just say no, that's a fact. If you want to disagree with my opinions go right ahead, but you can't disagree with that fact...The way the intro ends is with a sort of grudging admiration for the [Barry] Goldwater Right, where they came up in this New Deal era, and they had intellectual objections to it, and they weren't afraid to make them even though it seemed like getting the boulder back up the hill would be impossible, and because they weren't afraid to try they actually succeeded.

How long were you working on this?

The book was contracted about two years ago and a rough draft was turned in about a year ago, but I would say I started reading on the subject about three years ago. Basically I did a lot of reading three years ago, I did a lot of interviews and writing two years ago, I did a lot of editing this past year. That's how it came together.

Were there points where the scope of what you were trying to do was overwhelming in the sense that, in order to effectively criticize an entire system, there must be a huge amount one has to consider?

Let alone that, it was the first time I'd ever written a book, so even if I were just writing a biography of Brittney Spears I'd probably feel overwhelmed. But yes, the idea of trying to criticize an entire system was at times overwhelming; I just had the faith that, especially from reading the conservative intellectuals like Milton Freidman and Friederich August von Hayek, that it was a system, and it all fit together, and that I really could pull it all together because it was coherent, that inequality is one side of the coin and that rising housing prices and college tuition and no health insurance is the other side of that coin, and that it's all coherent if I can just pull it together right. Hopefully some people think I did.

If you had to identify the audience for the book, who would it be?

If anyone wants to read the book I would be happy. In the intro, I call our generation the coal mine canaries of Reaganomics, we're the people who solely grew up in this system, and we're not grandfathered in. I feel like my parents we're grandfathered in—my mom's now retired, my father is not—they were these public service professionals, and they could make a life in the New York area that is no longer viable. But they bought their house in 1977, they were grandfathered in, so what does it matter to them? So that's why I'm writing about young people, and I think because I'm writing about young people it will appeal to young people, but when people think it's a book about young people it's frustrating. I have a friend who's a neuroscientist and his experiments are on fish, and people say, 'Oh I have a problem with my fish, can you tell me about pet food.' And he's like 'No, no, no, I study neuroscience, I just look at fish because that's what I do my experiments on.' So I feel like I'm writing about politics and economics, not about young people. I'm using young people because their experience can tell us a lot about the political and economic changes that were put in place by Reagan.

Right, and it occurs to me that the ascendency of this conservative ideal of the free market equaling freedom hasn't been perceived as a failure because the generation basically responsible for it, on whose watch it rose, were able to raise their children and buy houses before the inequality reached this fever pitch that it's currently at. And in a lot of cases they've quite happily seen an enormous return on their real estate investments.

I agree with that. I remember my grandfather, who has passed away, who the book was dedicated to, I remember, I don't know if it was Reagan or if it was Bush the first, but some kind of economic plan they put forward he said, 'It's murder on the middle class they just don't know it yet.' I think he was right, it's even beyond that, it's suicide of the middle class they just don't know it yet. And the idea that, look at Reagan as the governor of California—which in some ways is like the mini social experiment that was then applied nationally when he became president—the idea that high taxes were eroding what was called the "California Dream", which was the sunny American dream where you could have your own house, if your kids were sharp they could go to UCLA or Berkeley for free, the idea that taxes were eroding that, at this point seems nuts when you look at—when you cut the taxes and cut the benefits—what its like in California these days, it's clear that the taxes were not the problem.

So then how important do you think it is that we convince our parents' generation, and even older Americans, who happen to have control of a lot of the halls of government, that the current system isn't working? Do we need to convince them, or do we need to just say 'You guys are getting old, it's going to be our country soon,' and rely on that fact.

The people I worry about convincing are not my parents. I mean a lot of us are the children of the '60s generation, these people remain liberal, and a lot of people who vote for this stuff are evangelicals in Kansas, so I'm not entirely sure who we need to convince as much as just to problematize the whole system and look at it more broadly, rather than nitpick at certain issues, look at it more comprehensively. But again, the idea that—part of what turned me on to the ideas in the book is that the system is administered by people who don't even believe in it. So the people who are—in the book I have a liberal lawyer who ends up working at a firm that defends Unocal's use of slaves in Burma. If they needed to find people who believed in slavery to defend them there'd be a lot less slavery in the world.

I agree with you, but the other thing that occurred to me when reading your chapter that deals with lawyers and the legal system—you point out the irony of a group of lawyers who work at a major firm contributing money to the Kerry campaign while they protect Bush's corporate cronies on the other hand—

Okay, then I understand what you're saying, it's important to blow up the psychologically sustaining sweet little lies people tell themselves. It's important for people who work as Wall Street lawyers and then make charitable donations including to John Kerry, to realize they're doing more harm than good and just be honest about that. But again, think of it systematically, a lot of those people eventually get addicted to the money, that's its own thing, and that's farther out than I was writing, but initially a lot of those people really are in debt, and what they want, I would argue, is not luxurious. My grandparents, they were both school teachers, and they lived in Brooklyn in a truly suburban kind of neighborhood, their house now sells for a million dollars. You can't be a school teacher and buy that house. So if you're a corporate lawyer and you want a million-dollar house, that's basically a school teacher's house; I can't really fault you, it's not like you're living a life of luxury.

But you point out in your introduction how corporate America is full of these secret dissenters, you talk in various instances about how well-funded the conservative movement is in terms of its think tanks, public relations arms and its lobbying abilities; doesn't it stand to reason that the money for closing that gap in funding can come from people who've had to sell out just to survive but maybe still harbor these liberal ideals?

Yeah, I mean I certainly wouldn't begrudge anyone making a donation to a liberal think tank that's funded by their corporate law job, I think that's a good place to start, but I do want to use the book to call into question the larger issues, to call into question, why do you have to do X, Y and Z just to have what used to be a middle class life? And obviously if the Center for American Progress can get to work on that with their donation, yeah I have no objections to that. Do you feel like I come down too hard on the people like the corporate lawyers who are giving money to Kerry?

No, not at all, but I think you're absolutely right in pointing out how large the discrepancy in funding is, and we know in our sound-bite culture how important not only the message but the money that gets it out there is, so at some point it seems to me that the people from our generation that are managing to make a lot of money, even though they may have sold out initially just to survive, at some point can become an asset.

Yeah, you know, I'm happy that George Soros gives his money to liberal causes rather than conservative ones, certainly, yeah absolutely. But the ultimate goal is to have a society where people like George Soros pay taxes and it funds education and health care.

Your formula for providing greater security and therefore freedom to Americans in the form of health care, childcare and education is to return to this more progressive system of taxation that built the middle class in the first place, but you didn't mention reallocation of the tax dollars that we already have. Is there a reason, or is that just outside the scope of what you were doing here?

I think it's a little beyond the scope. Of course I was opposed to the Iraq War from the start, I think that's flushing money down the drain, I'm totally on board with that and I'm aware of the insidious influence of corporate pact donations and earmarks and all that, yes, but if we didn't elect George Bush we wouldn't have a war in Iraq. I mean I feel like the allocation of the resources, to some extent we really do have some collective control through voting over, not to say that the military industrial complex isn't gonna lobby to keep buying bombers we don't need, of course that's the case, but I think the service I'm trying to provide is to say its about A, throwing out the conservatives, but B, about getting the left side of the political spectrum to have better proposals that really address people's needs and can rebuild the middle class, and in doing so restore the promise of the country that we have an inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness.

What do you think are the biggest challenges facing progressive taxation?

Well one the problems is what you raised, is that people, even people who are sympathetic to progressive taxation, don't want to pay more taxes if it's just going to get sent to Iraq. In the book I do argue that in some ways progressive taxation is helpful because the inequality is distorting these certain markets, and if we just had more equality we'd be better off in that way, but I also think you have to tell people what we're going to do with their tax money. You can't just say we're going to take it away.

Right, and you give that example that people in Great Britain, because they know where their tax money is going, they know about universal healthcare and all the different social programs, they feel that taxes should be higher.

Yeah, somebody should just make the argument that—you know I'm self-employed, I'm a freelance writer and I'm lucky I don't have any serious medical conditions that would preclude me from getting medical insurance, I pay every month, a fixed fee (although it went up 25 percent this year), but you know I pay a monthly fee to Aetna to get my insurance, to me it would be a much better system to say if I have a good year in my self-employment, my business, I pay more taxes, and if I have a bad year I pay less, and either way I have my health insurance, as opposed to charging me a flat fee that doesn't reflect how well or poorly my business is doing that year. And I don't know why, we just need a democrat to say that, why will no one say that? Well, hopefully someone will read the book and say it.

But that's the thing, once a democrat does say it, do you think it's political suicide at this point?

Not with healthcare, no. I don't think with healthcare. I mean, my ideas with endorsing the British Higher Education voucher system, that's more to get that idea out there, to problematize the whole idea of paying tuition for college, because it should be problematized since we're the only country that does it. But a lot of Americans don't even know that we're the only country that has college tuition, or at least more than token college tuition. Canada, Britain and Australia have very modest tuition. That's something I just want to throw out there. So in the same way I have a grudging respect for [William F.] Buckley and [Barry] Goldwater, who were willing to throw out these sort of unfashionable ideas, I think that's where it starts, you know, saying we think the way things are going is wrong, and that needs to change. The way the Democrats in the primaries are talking about higher education financing makes me want to smack myself. It's a perfectly good policy, but Obama wants to get the private sector out of making the loans because it's a scam, which is fine, that's a good policy, and you know Clinton wants to increase the value of a Pell Grant, which is fine too, but these things don't effect the real problem which is that tuition has gotten totally out of control.

At various points in the book the word entrenched is used. It's going to be difficult to match the PR and lobbying power of the system currently in place, it's just a fact, but also there are inherent truths in the ideas that you're presenting, and they will resonate with a lot of people were they to sit down and consider them. But at the same time would changing the current system, would going to a more progressive tax system—in terms of the toll that it would take in the short term, short-term job loss or even a downturn in the economy—as in-debt and struggling as the middle class is right now, do they have just enough to lose at this point that upsetting the status quo is viewed as too risky?

No, I don't go to the level of policy-wonk detail of saying these should be the income tax brackets, but we need to raise taxes on the people who are upper middle class to very wealthy, not people who are middle class. And the idea of a threat to the economy, I feel, is in some ways a red herring. You know, we like to say we have a 4 percent growth rate and France has a 1 percent growth rate, but most Americans actually live in France, in that most Americans wages are flat or going up one percent, so the idea that, 'Oh we'll wreck the economy' is such a red herring because we've already created an economy that works for such a tiny percentage of people. It's a matter of taking the economic dynamism that seems to only be going to the top and using that engine to make life better for everybody.

Do you feel like there are economists out there that will support that idea long term?

Yeah there are. Did you see The Nation, there was an article either this week or last week about the American Economic Association, this conference, and the reporter, he was arguing there is a growing dissatisfaction with the growing libertarian, neo-classical economics within the profession. There are certainly economists who are on-board with progressive taxation, and there are plenty of economists on-board with universal healthcare. I'm hoping Paul Krugman has a chance to look at my book, I'd love to see what he says. Robert Frank, who's a professor at Cornell, he blurbed the book sight unseen, I don't know the guy, he wrote The Winner-Take-All Society from which I borrow, with a tip of the hat, the subtitle, and he said it's a terrific book, he signed off on it. So yeah, I don't have any illusions of winning over people like Barry Becker, who's sort of the acolyte of Milton Freidman who's still alive and kicking at the University of Chicago, but because these ideas are grounded in the best practices of other developed countries I don't think any of what I'm proposing is all that outlandish.

How are you feeling about the reception for the book in terms of publicity?

At this point I feel like it's too soon to tell. I'd like to say I'm very cautiously optimistic. I think it's very hard to be a first-time author and get your book noticed, and I know I'm up against that, I can see that. But I also think that the book speaks to an issue that's—it's about the elephant in the room, the book is about the issue that is staring down ambitious, bright young people coast to coast in the major metropolitan areas, and it's something that, because we're young people, is off the country's radar screen.

Click here to read the introduction to The Trap.