Alarm bells are sounding today all along the Eastern regions of the United States as Hurricane Irene roars across American’s eastern coastal islands and shorelines. Evacuation is advised and in the regions where the dangerous storm may hit as it moves north. Another storm is looming in America, one from which the most vulnerable people will not be rescued. This storm is more global than regional or national.
Anybody who doesn’t know that the American middle class is vanishing has been either too drunk or too ignorant to notice what has been happening. Americans no longer fall, perhaps a much too appropriate verb, into three groups as they did in the second half of the Twentieth Century. Ours is fast becoming a nation of two groups: the rich ten percent who possess and control 96 percent of the wealth on one side, including the one percent at the very top who control 90 percent, and the rest of the population on the other side whose collective assets amount to four percent of the total wealth of America. In the next decade the winning side in the battle for resources won’t have a hard time hanging onto what they have. Those on the losing side are in for a devil of a ride, mostly a slide downward in most of the ways success is measured in American culture. Economists on both the left and the right agree on what America’s economic future will look like unless corrections are made very quickly. What to do about it is where they differ. This BLOG writing is not an opinion which has an expressed solution to the problem, but it is about what the general living conditions for the previously comfortable middle class will most likely be as that population’s secure assets gradually disappear.
I am feeling a rising sense of alarm for several reasons. First, trends indicate that many of the people who are unemployed now or will soon lose manufacturing jobs or technology based employment will remain jobless if they are unable or unwilling to take relatively lower paying service jobs. Most of them are not innovators, so they will be unable to do something new in the job category in which they have supported themselves previously. Second, these losers will ignorantly support candidates for political offices who will do the most harm to them. They tend to be drawn to people who look and act and sound like themselves. The best example of this tendency has been the rush of economically stressed people to listen to and to believe the Tea Party line. The Tea Party, which is neither Democratic nor moderately sensible Republican is a populist third party that tries hard to sound as if it is looking after the interests of the “little guy.” Sarah (who?) Palin and Michelle Bachmann have advanced as far as they have on the political stage because they look and sound like people who think of themselves as regular middle class Americans, and because they claim to represent the already very poor who own practically nothing and are struggling to keep the very little they have. The Tea Party discovered quickly that they can be attractive to the poor if they can successfully blame poverty on government. For them, “The poor we always have with us,” takes on a decided different meaning from that intended by the one who said it. Somehow the Tea Party strategists understand the saying to mean that they’d better find a way to get the poor on their side without having to actually do things that would help them. It is easy to see that Bachmann and her peers learned right away that the poor respond readily to pro-life, which on the surface has a nice ring to it, pro-marriage, as long as it doesn’t allow homosexuals to get in on that action, and a tax-free America, which would let them buy stuff cheaper which they can’t afford anyway and allow them not to pay taxes on property (which they have lost to foreclosure or never had in the first place).
Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry sound as if they have solutions. They don’t. Both of them are perhaps inadvertantly doing everything they can to exacerbate the problem. I’m not cynical enough to believe they are doing it on purpose to hurt the poor and to take down the middle class. They want to be elected, so they promise not to raise taxes even on the rich, which would be a logical thing to do... not even on the super rich. An obvious solution to the nation’s debt crisis would be to dramatically raise taxes on the richest one percent (Those who control the whopping 90 percent of the country’s wealth) in much the same way taxes were raised on the wealthiest citizens in the Forties and Fifties. A clear governmental strategy to tax the wealthy more heavily became very clear during the Republican Eisenhower Administration and promoted the development of the great middle class. Once again a tax rate of 80% to 90% on the super rich could slow the vanishing act of the middle class, but the Tea Party is fighting to keep the tax rate of even the wealthiest Americans at a maximum of 30% to 40% of “earned income” with virtually no tax on capital gains. There is little mention of the fact that the very rich have tax shelters that keep their actual tax “burden” at an even lower percentage than that of most middle income Americans. Because sound bites are so attractive to unthinking people, Bachmann and Perry and the other Republican candidates for presidency in the 2012 presidential race, all except perhaps Huntsman, are required to pledge not to raise taxes on anybody, (actually to sign their names to a pledge on paper if they want the support of lobbyists like Grover Norquist).
The Tea Party “plan” is a formula for disaster cleverly disguised as a safe haven in the approaching political storm. It doesn’t help or hurt the poor who already don’t have anything. It just swells the ranks of the poor. The Tea Party formula for national economic health will not create jobs. The wealthiest Americans already have all the people they need to serve them, so they aren’t going to change a dismal unemployment situation. They already have all the maid service they need to maintain their standard of living. The grounds of their estates are getting the attention required to make them havens of luxury and ease. No more pilots are needed for their private jets nor captains for their yachts. They've already got all that. The corporations they control will continue to send more work to overseas workers because that’s what makes sense when a first concern is the bottom line. Why not outsource jobs to places where the work can be done for dramatically lower labor costs in places like China and India if it means bigger profits for the corporation? Not many of the super rich are as concerned about the day-to-day living circumstances of struggling American workers as Warren Buffet is.
I don’t know what can be done to change the future for the vast majority of Americans who are sliding downward, but I trust Barack Obama. He is clearly more honest and smarter than the rest because he doesn’t deliberately make promises which he knows before hand he cannot keep. Of course, he has made mistakes. His job is a very difficult one. He seems to be concerned about the real problems faced by average Americans. His values seem to be consistent with mine when he expresses determination to work for better education and better health for all Americans. He simply must be reelected in 2012. The country doesn’t stand a snow-balls-chance-in hell of avoiding real disaster if someone is elected to the presidency who clearly doesn’t know why we are standing at the very edge of an economic precipice.
To complicate matters, a majority of the justices on the Supreme Court have had sips of the Tea Party kool-aid and are not likely to take back the gifts they have given to corporations, which they officially decided have the same rights and shields as individual citizens. What was it Romney said last week? "Corporations are people, too." The Court’s decisions which directly enrich the already obscenely wealthy will make the very rich even richer. Our nation will not experience a crash as it did in the early Thirties. It will be a slow slide that takes down the middle class. The poor are already down. Along the way, programs like outstanding public schools and availability of reasonably affordable health care that helped build the middle class out of a population that was mostly poor are being critically weakened.
Pogo is only partly right this time. We have not yet seen the enemy, but it is nonetheless us. ...but not my neighbor Sammy. He had nothing to do with the mess. He's just a little boy who wants to be a fireman. We've got to find a way to correct the situation. We've got to try our best to keep mean spirited, selfish people from messing up a wonderful country.
