This following essay was authored by Patrick M. Garry. It is reprinted in its
entirety by permission from ModernAge and can be found in its Winter 2016 issue.
Since the
recession that began in 2008, the issue of income inequality has been a central
tool of political strategizing. Progressives have used the issue as a sword
against conservatives, accusing the latter not only of indifference toward the
plight of working Americans but of actually welcoming the widening gulf between
rich and poor, as if conservatives want nothing more than to see the wealthy
become wealthier, even if it is at the expense of the poor. At the same time,
however, conservatives have shied away from the issue, perhaps afraid of how
the issue might feed the big-government agenda of liberalism.
Even
though they have had a sympathetic ear in the White House for fifteen of the
past twenty-three years, progressives have used the inequality issue to put
conservatives on the defensive, blaming them for the failure of the middle and
working classes to match the progress made by the upper income groups. This
assault against conservatives has been deceptive and distorted, but at the same
time conservatives have often retreated by trying to dismiss the extent of the
widening income gap.
The
inequality issue is not the simple problem the left makes it out to be. The
left argues that inequality is the cause of all other economic woes,
specifically a diminishing upward mobility. But in reality, it is just the
other way around. Inequality is less a cause than a symptom of our economic
woes. The widening income disparity is a result of diminishing upward mobility,
which in turn is the result of various technological, globalization, and
governmental policy factors. For progressives to ignore these factors and focus
only on taxing the rich is to disregard all the obstacles facing upward
mobility, including the left’s own misguided policies.
The public
is right to worry about wage stagnation and economic mobility, as well as the
rising costs of education, health care, and raising a family. But all these
problems are not simply the result of income inequality. If anything,
inequality is a reflection of these problems. Therefore, conservatives must
address the actual mobility problems being felt by working and middle class
Americans through, for example, lowering the cost of higher education,
improving secondary education, and easing the cost of raising a family through
expanding the child tax credit. Conservatives must seize inequality as their
issue, not only because of the failed policies of the left but also because it
is a problem that goes to the heart of the conservative vision of society. It
is an issue that must be addressed if conservatives are to provide a workable
governing vision that can be embraced by all of society.
Given the wage stagnation and weak employment gains of recent years, it is not
surprising that many economists claim that the gap between rich and poor is at
its widest since records began forty-five years ago. This gap widened even
throughout the recovery. From 2010 to 2013, only the households at the very top
of the income ladder saw gains, while families in the bottom 40 percent saw
their incomes decline over that period, according to the Federal Reserve.
Meanwhile, household incomes in the middle stagnated.
The real
incomes of the poorest fifth of Americans, which began their decline during the
Bush administration, have continued to decline even throughout the economic
recovery from the 2008 recession. Although the wealthiest Americans have seen
substantial gains since the 2008 recession, the poverty rate remains two full
percentage points above what it was in 2007, and more than three percentage
points above what it was in 2000. If the rate today were what it was in 2000,
ten million fewer Americans would be living in poverty.
Not only
has the middle class experienced wage stagnation, but the supply of midwage
jobs has shrunk proportionally more than jobs at the top or bottom. A
polarization or hollowing out of the labor market has eliminated many of the
jobs traditionally available to the middle class. The wealthy and highly
educated are doing well, and the number of low-wage, unskilled jobs are
increasing, as are government benefits to low-income individuals. But the
middle class is struggling against the trend of decline.
According
to the Pew Research Center, 61 percent of all adults lived in middle-income
households in the early 1970s. By 2012 that figure had fallen to 51 percent.
Meanwhile, the numbers living in upper- and lower-income households both
increased. The middle-class share of national income fell from 62 percent in
1989 to 45 percent in 2012, while the share of national income received by
upper-income households rose from 29 percent to 46 percent during the same
period.
For black
Americans, the situation is much worse. Black median household income is almost
14 percent less than it was in 2000, and the poverty rate for black Americans
is nearly five percentage points higher than in 2000.
These
developments in turn have affected public opinion about the economy. In 2000
the majority of Americans believed job opportunities would be better for the
next generation than for their own. Today the number who think so stands at
just 16 percent. Majorities now believe that the ability of young people to
afford college will never return to the way it was and that workers will never
again feel as secure in their jobs as they once did.
The
growing income gap has been driven by the anemic economic growth since the end
of the recession. But it has also been escalated by the Federal Reserve’s
attempt to counter the drag of the antigrowth policies of the federal
government and to stimulate artificially the economy through its $4 trillion
quantitative easing policy—a policy that drove short-term interest rates nearly
to zero. This also led to a surging stock market that in turn substantially
increased the wealth of the richest Americans, who had significant stock
investments. At the same time it vastly decreased the income received by the
elderly, who saw declining interest payments on their savings. Ironically, even
though the American economy has officially recovered from the 2008 recession,
middle-class jobs and incomes have not recovered.
While Fed
policy did boost profits in the financial markets, it did nothing to combat
wage stagnation or the reduced share of wages in gross national income. The
share of wages in the national income has decreased from 65 percent in 2008 to
61 percent in 2013, while the share of profits in the national income over the
same period has risen from 11 percent to 15 percent. Indeed, a significantly
smaller share of the nation’s income goes to labor than it did thirty years
ago.
A
debt-based monetary system has produced a debt-driven economy, which rewards
those with the financial acumen and assets to invest in the market, while
eroding the earnings of working Americans. Increased financial-sector profits
accrue mainly to upper-income recipients, who are relatively few in number,
while the decreased share of wages affects the relatively larger number of
workers—thus leading to greater income inequality.
The
eroding middle class cannot rely for help on the elite, who increasingly occupy
an almost completely different economy than that in which the middle class is
struggling. And because the political class is dominated by these elites, who
are largely isolated from the ebbs and flows of the private economy, it no
longer represents farmers and industrial workers dependent on private-sector
economic growth. Moreover, the private-sector worker has been replaced in the
Democratic Party by the public-sector unions, which are more interested in
expanding government than expanding the economy. Consequently, progressives
have lost sight of the basic need for economic production, presuming that money
just results from certain professions and that tax revenues just appear because
they have been set in law. Economic production—the anchor and output of the
middle class—has been downgraded vis-Ć -vis government.
In many
communities, the elite are withdrawing from the social institutions and venues
relied upon by the middle and working classes. Indeed, in this age of
globalization, the elites have more in common with their counterparts in other
countries than they do with the middle class in America, as reflected in the
elitist disdain for the values of patriotism and military service.
The implications of this social polarization are
ominous. As Aristotle observed more than two millennia ago,
middle-class-dominated societies are the most stable, just, and compassionate
ones. Aristotle argued that the wealthy tend to be arrogant and reckless, and
that the economically insecure tend to be resentful and destructive. But
members of the middle class tend to have more moderate desires, be more open to
reason, and have stronger communal ties and civic participation. Similar
observations were made by Christopher Lasch in The Revolt of the Elites,
where he argued that the social elites were undermining America’s republican
vitality with their asocial cultural values and absence of civic
responsibility.
Progressive
elites argue that income inequality lies at the core of what is wrong with
America. Consequently, the crisis of income inequality demands and justifies a
more active government agenda of redistribution, including higher taxes, higher
spending on government entitlements, and higher regulation of business: in
other words, expanding the public sector. And the left has used this call for
bigger government to paint themselves as defenders of the working and middle
classes, regardless of the fact that a bigger government has not only failed to
alleviate the income gap but has widened it.
In the
progressive view, the mere existence of income inequality provides an
indictment to the free market economy. But this highly partisan position
irrationally presumes that everyone should have the same income or that
everyone wants to live the same kind of life that would produce similar
incomes.
Although
the left frequently talks about income inequality, it is really focusing on wealth
inequality. Income is more reflective of present economic trends. It is more
essential to how people live and what opportunities exist for them. Income is
more immediate and more vital to livelihoods. Wealth, on the other hand, is
often more a product of what has happened in the past. Therefore, a focus on
wealth misses the picture of what is happening to that broad group of people in
the middle and lower end of the income-distribution spectrum. A focus on wealth
seems to reflect more a desire to confiscate or penalize a certain class of
households, rather than to empower the broader group of households. For people
in the middle- and lower-income levels, it’s all about earnings and income, not
about wealth.
The Fed’s
monetary policy for a long time has been much more effective in boosting
balance-sheet wealth than in spurring real income growth, which results from
capital investment that in turn spurs job growth. Because of Fed policies,
corporate managers have often chosen financial engineering tools—for example,
debt-financed share buybacks—over the kind of capital investment that would
create wage-paying jobs. This is largely because financial markets have
rewarded the former. In a rising asset-price environment, businesses engage in
asset manipulation, not capital investment, and are more concerned with
balance-sheet wealth than with business investment, which is the only way to
boost real economic growth. Wealth creation comes from strong, sustainable
growth that turns productivity into labor income, and then to more business
investment. Federal Reserve–engineered balance-sheet wealth creation provides
no shortcut to real growth.
One way in which progressives have attempted to reduce income inequality
is by raising the minimum wage. But this is hardly a remedy. At least half of
the minimum wage earners are not in the lowest household-income bracket, and
even fewer are their household’s primary earner—they in fact may be children or
spouses of a primary earner who makes a higher income. So raising the minimum
wage is not a great way for lifting up the incomes of the poorest households in
America. The minimum wage will benefit those lucky individuals who keep their
minimum-wage jobs, but it will decrease the number of such jobs in the future.
The other
progressive measure for addressing inequality is to raise taxes on the
higher-income households. But again, this measure greatly exaggerates what
actually can be done. A recent Congressional Budget Office study on The
Distribution of Household Income and Federal Taxes finds that the top
20 percent of American households finance 100 percent of the transfer payments
to the bottom 60 percent, as well as almost 100 percent of the tax revenue
collected to run the federal government. Sixty percent of U.S. households are
already net tax recipients, collecting more in transfer payments than they pay
in federal taxes—about $10,000 more. The next highest 20 percent pays only $700
more in federal taxes than it receives in government transfer payments.
Therefore, the top 20 percent of households are financing nearly the entire
federal tax burden, along with almost the entire system of entitlements and
transfer payments.
This is
not to say that taxes cannot or should not be increased on the wealthy,
depending on what effect those taxes would have on economic growth; it is just
to say the current taxation system is not the cause of or the remedy for
inequality. The problem is much more complex than simply taxing the rich.
Revenues
from a tax on high incomes also do not necessarily result in programs actually
aimed at lifting up the lower- and middle-class incomes. Take education, for
instance, where higher levels of government spending have coincided with an
eroding middle class, lower skill levels for workers, and stagnating wages. Nor
does higher government spending do anything to give families the freedom to
choose the schools their children attend. (An educational approach that focuses
directly on expanding the skill levels of working Americans might embrace an
array of job-training initiatives operated through the private sector that
would be more helpful for the lowest income groups than is traditional higher
education, the benefits of which these groups are often handicapped from
receiving.)
The only
certainty produced by higher taxes is bigger government. Indeed, it is not even
certain what revenues would be produced by such taxes, since higher-income
individuals will increasingly shift their money into various tax shelters.
Thus, sky-high income and wealth taxes would not raise much revenue for very
long, and any revenue is likely to fund government programs, not checks to the
needy.
Contrary
to the stated aims of liberalism, a state-by-state analysis shows that the blue
states following liberal policies have bigger income gaps than do red states
that follow more conservative, growth-oriented policies. So, at the minimum,
redistributionist policies like raising tax rates or the minimum wage fail to
achieve greater income equality. And at worst, such policies actually worsen
the inequality by dampening the economic opportunity and mobility needed by
lower income individuals.
Thomas
Piketty writes in Capital in the Twenty-First Century that wealth
inequality can lead to the rise of plutocracy and the end of democracy. But even
more likely to lead to the rise of plutocracy is the massive growth of
elite-led central government, with its corresponding crony capitalism, that the
left espouses as a remedy to wealth inequality. This isn’t to say that extreme
wealth inequalities pose no problem for a democracy; it just means that the
left’s proposed cure is no cure at all.
It often
appears that the progressive approach reflects not a desire to uplift the lower
income classes but an envy toward the upper classes. However, government policy
based on social envy can be toxic for American culture, just as it has been for
many Latin American countries. Social envy and anger over income inequality
might make for potent politics, but it only damages the cultural cohesion that
lower-income Americans desperately need. There is no reason to cater to the
rich, but it does no good to vilify them. The challenge is to rally the nation
around a unifying vision that can produce upward mobility for all.
One such
vision involves the uplifting role of work. According to the Wall Street Journal, nearly seven
million Americans are stuck in part-time jobs. They want full-time jobs, but
those jobs are not available. There are still two million fewer full-time
workers than there were in 2007. And only 47 percent of all adults are working
full-time.
The
proportion of Americans in the labor force is at a thirty-six-year low. For
decades, wages constituted about 55 percent of total national income. But in
the wake of the Great Recession, that measure dropped to 50 percent. High-wage
industries have lost a million positions since 2007, and the highest job growth
is occurring in low-wage, low-skill industries that often do not even offer
full-time work, relying instead on a large part-time workforce.
Even after
the end of the Great Recession, tens of millions of working-age Americans
remain jobless, working part-time involuntarily or having dropped out of the
workforce. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, almost ninety-one
million people over age sixteen are not working, which is a record high.
The
decline in job creation corresponds with a decline in new business start-ups,
which in many industries is near a thirty-five-year low. Indeed, if the rate of
start-up formation after the Great Recession had been equal to what it was
during the Reagan recovery, 760,000 additional jobs would have been added in
just one year. But job creation during the present age has been inhibited by
government action. The National Federation of Independent Business reports that
worries about the expansion of the regulatory state and the increasing burdens
of bureaucratic red tape have become small businesses’ primary concerns.
The
progressive attempt to spur economic growth and prosperity through government
spending has not worked. Such spending has increased so much that the federal
debt held by the public, as a share of GDP, grew to nearly 80 percent in 2014.
But, as demonstrated by the decline in median household incomes, government
spending does not produce economic growth. This is a lesson that has long been
known because the multiplier for government spending is less than one, which
means that a dollar of government spending produces less than a dollar of
economic growth.
For
decades following World War II, the U.S. economy grew at an average annual rate
of 3.3 percent. But the recent growth rates are much lower: a negative 2.8
percent in 2009; 2.5 for 2010; 1.8 in 2011; 2.8 for 2012; and 1.9 in 2013.
Recent economic policy has essentially relied on three approaches: a huge boost
in government spending, which was supposed to create new jobs; a tax on the
wealthy, which was supposed to address the growing inequality; and a reliance
on the Federal Reserve zero-interest-rate policy, which hasn’t increased median
family income but instead fueled a record stock market and significantly added
to the wealth of the already-wealthy, who have significant stock holdings and
whose incomes are less reliant on wage levels than are the incomes of middle-
and working-class people.
A belief in growth of opportunity, fueled through a dynamic private sector,
constitutes a primary conservative belief—an essential conservative belief
since Abraham Lincoln: the belief in work, the freedom to work, the ability to
reap the full rewards of work, and the opportunity to work.
Just as it
was with Abraham Lincoln, work should be at the center of conservative thought
and policy. Work is fundamental both to a healthy individual and a healthy
society. The true measure of society should be how well it provides work
opportunities to individuals and how well it rewards those individuals for the
work they perform. The measure should not be, as the liberal approach so often
sees it, whether some individuals have more money than others, or whether
government could somehow equalize the material resources of people. The measure
should not be all the programs that government is administering, but rather the
work opportunities and rewards available to individuals.
The
progressive political culture no longer seems to have a high regard for
blue-collar-type work. Progressives celebrate actors and rock stars and
investor billionaires and academics and nonprofit-foundation bureaucrats, but
they don’t seem to value the blue-collar culture of working hard with one’s
hands for eight hours a day and going home to a family and painting the garage
at night, and then coaching a sixth-grade baseball team on the weekends.
Progressives talk a lot about the act and rewards of consumption—of all the
things people might buy or own or enjoy—but they rarely talk about the act and
rewards of production.
Production
is essential for a healthy society—consumption is simply the reward of
production. Yet in the progressive mind-set, an unemployed worker is not
someone to be channeled back into productive work but a statistical victim of a
free market who needs to be transformed from independent worker to a dependent
beneficiary of governmental largesse. To progressives, the unemployed are a
necessary and valuable resource—people who justify a larger government role and
presence in American economic and social life. Progressives, in fact, have a
rather dismissive and pessimistic view of blue-collar workers: since they
really don’t think such workers can support themselves or better themselves, why
not put them on the government dole?
Work is
the pathway to the middle class, and independence is the hallmark of the middle
class. But progressive policies often enhance dependency. Progressives resist
giving the middle class control over their Social Security accounts, despite
the fact that the Social Security system run by the government is going broke.
They resist giving individuals control over the structure of their health care,
even though nearly every assurance made by the government concerning ObamaCare
has proved false. They resist giving families their choice of schools, even
though the public schools assigned to their children are themselves failing.
Progressives even resist the work requirement in welfare, even though work
leads to independence. Conversely, eliminating the work requirement only
expands dependency. And dependency only degrades the capacity of the citizenry
to operate as a check on government.
The flip
side of increasing dependency is denying the opportunity for advancement, and
huge bureaucratic government programs often do nothing to facilitate
advancement. Government has a static nature—it responds to static conditions
and entrenches static programs. Sometimes this is a good thing. Government
builds roads and bridges that are meant to be static. It monitors environmental
quality, which is meant to remain at a livable level. It establishes a social
safety net, which ensures to everyone a basic income status necessary for
survival. But static does not produce change or progress. Static cannot create
jobs and enhance social mobility. Static might be all right for the wealthy,
like Warren Buffett, but static is not what the struggling members of society
want. They need the dynamism of the private-sector economy.
The conservative approach to income inequality takes a bottom-up focus,
rather than a top-down one. It seeks to lift up the bottom, rather than to
bring down the top. It seeks to maximize the opportunities for the least
well-off through maximizing the income and economic opportunities of the whole
society, rather than simply targeting the most well-off for what may eventually
become punitive taxation, irrespective of how this taxation would affect all
the lower brackets.
A policy
agenda serving this focus includes increasing upward mobility through education
that empowers workers, and regulatory and tax reform that sparks job creation
and wage growth. Conservatives must fight crony capitalism, which benefits the
politically connected, and orient tax policy to benefit families and the middle
class, not just to penalize the rich.
Welfare
programs that incentivize work have been far more successful in boosting
incomes and mobility than simple cash-assistance programs. The U.S. Census
Bureau estimates that the Earned Income Tax Credit lifted 5.4 million people
out of poverty in 2010 alone. Conservatives advocate expanding this EITC to
childless adults, reducing the marriage penalty by adding a second-earner
deduction, and reducing the disincentives to work in other welfare programs.
Conservatives also propose reforming the child-care tax credit to make it
easier for single mothers to reenter the workforce, get off welfare, and take
advantage of opportunities for upward mobility.
Unfortunately,
the current welfare system largely serves the goal of providing a social safety
net, rather than that of moving people out of poverty. Although the first goal
is necessary for survival, the second goal is vital for achieving upward
mobility. However, the overall design of the entitlement and social welfare
system has greatly decreased the motivation of recipients to find work that
would take them off those benefits. Furthermore, government housing policies
expanding home ownership have made it more difficult for the poor and working
class to move to geographic areas where jobs are more plentiful. Because it is
especially difficult to sell a house in an economically depressed area, the
people most in need of mobility become trapped in that depressed area.
Since the
recession’s official end in 2009, real hourly wages have fallen by 2.6 percent.
In large part, this has occurred from a hollowing out or polarization of the
labor market, through which middle-skill and middle-earning occupations have
disappeared. A study by the National Employment Law Project found that between
2008 and 2012, midwage occupations represented 60 percent of jobs lost, but
only 22 percent of jobs recovered. Meanwhile, lower-wage occupations accounted
for only 21 percent of jobs lost, but 58 percent of jobs gained back. This
downward mobility in terms of job availabilities stems from current government
policies. And a widening income inequality is an inevitable result of downward
mobility. No government tax hikes or entitlement programs can ever make up for
this hollowing-out effect.
A social
polarization between a small upper class, an eroding middle class, and a large
lower class will only intensify, predicts libertarian economist Tyler Cowen in
his book Average Is Over. But contrary to such predicted trends,
conservatives want to preserve the traditional American upward mobility to all
income and skill levels. Cowen’s world is not the preferred world of
conservatives—a world where the top 10 to 15 percent do very well, the middle
stagnates, and the bottom falls further behind. But this is all premised on the
fact that the middle and bottom will not have sufficient education to advance.
In the modern world, the economic returns to job skills have increased, as have
the penalties to the unskilled.
Conservatives
need to recognize that a core challenge facing America is not simply income
inequality per se but rather wage stagnation and a restriction of upward
mobility. The problem is a declining mobility from the bottom and a wage
stagnation for the middle class. The real issue is not income inequality but
the level of opportunity for economic mobility.
A study
published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the widening
income gap has not translated into a lowered economic mobility—in fact, there
is a 0.6 percent higher chance for a child born in 1986 to move from the bottom
20 percent of household income to the top 20 percent than for a child born in
1971. Nonetheless, the study did conclude that the rate of upward mobility has
essentially flattened in recent years, despite periods of economic growth and
an expansion of welfare programs. This stagnating rate of upward mobility is
the primary conservative concern, not simply the abstract levels of income
differences.
Future conservative tax policy should focus on the needs of the
average American. This focus could include a significant increase in the child
tax credit, which would do more to provide meaningful tax relief to middle- and
working-class families than any reduction in personal income tax rates.
Currently,
the tax code works against parents, who have to pay just as much in taxes as
childless adults, even though the costs parents incur in raising children
constitute an additional contribution to the future of society. These costs are
borne almost entirely by the households doing the child-rearing, even though
the benefits that come when the children reach working age—for example, through
the social insurance systems—are broadly shared by everyone in society.
Therefore, the child tax credit should try to compensate for this additional
contribution, and it should be applied against both income taxes and payroll
taxes, especially since most middle- and working-class parents pay more in
payroll than in income taxes.
Making the
child tax credit applicable to payroll taxes suggests yet another area of tax
reform. For too long Republicans have focused their tax-reform energies on the
individual and corporate income tax systems, on the assumption that payroll
taxes cannot be changed because they finance the social insurance programs. But
the largest tax most families face is the payroll tax, not the income tax. It
is the payroll tax that directly affects the earnings of all working Americans,
thus determining the effective tax burdens on working- and middle-class
families.
Owing to
the realities of the tax system, only upper-income households tend to be
significantly burdened by high income taxes. Therefore, any strategy of cutting
income taxes plays into the liberal charge that conservatives care only about
the rich. A better strategy is one focused on lessening the overall tax burden
on working- and middle-class households.
A tax
proposal aimed directly at low-income households is the expansion of the Earned
Income Tax Credit. This is a much better help to low-wage individuals than an
increase in the minimum wage. Whereas an increase in the minimum wage to $9 an
hour would result in a loss of approximately 100,000 jobs, according to
Congressional Budget Office estimates, an increase in the EITC does not cause
any burden on employers. Furthermore, not all low-wage earners reside in
low-income households, and an increase in the minimum wage received by a child
or spouse of a higher-income individual will not do anything to alleviate
poverty.
The Earned
Income Tax Credit directly targets low-income families rather than just
low-wage workers. Moreover, since the EITC operates through the tax code, it
has the benefit of being financed disproportionately by those with the highest
incomes; on the other hand, raising the minimum wage operates as a burden on
those employers who hire low-wage labor. And normally such employers are not
wealthy individuals.
The lessons of the past, as well as the challenges of the future, indicate
that conservatives cannot just oppose the left’s polarizing use of the
inequality issue, for to do so would reinforce the image that conservatives are
not concerned about the growing income gaps, and thus not concerned about the
struggles of working- and middle-class America. What conservatives must do is
articulate a broad agenda that seeks to lift burdens from workers and
middle-class families, as well as to open up opportunities for economic
advancement. And this broader agenda must go beyond the traditional mainstays
of conservative policy—for example, across-the-board tax cuts and regulatory
reform. Such an agenda would do much in erasing the image of conservatism as
caring only about the rich.
Economic
growth and economic mobility are not the same thing, and conservatives must
resist presuming that strength in the former translates to strength in the
latter. Conservatives do not want to repeat the performance of the Bush years,
when economic growth coincided with stagnant wages and rising health-care
costs. Instead, conservatives must speak directly to the desire of working- and
middle-class voters for economic opportunity and mobility—a desire that is far
deeper than any desire simply to tax the rich more. This is why the progressive
focus on income inequality may unite their activists but does not speak
powerfully to voters. But this failure gives conservatives the opportunity to
offer voters a true understanding of today’s real economic challenge and how it
might be addressed.
Patrick M. Garry is a professor of law and the
author of Conservatism Redefined: A
Creed for the Poor and Disadvantaged. He writes frequently on how conservatism serves
the interests of poor and working Americans.
No comments:
Post a Comment