Middle class victims of the 'class war'
The war is over. Not the war in Iraq or Afghanistan, but the "class war". The rich have won and the middle class is beaten. Ronald Reagan, a nice enough grandfatherly figure, wittingly or unwittingly started the war. He identified the rich as "job creators" and those who "pull the wagon." They needed to be rewarded and incentivised. Give them tax breaks. Disarm the IRS for the rich. Get rid of regulations and trust the markets. Make it harder for the middle class to declare bankruptcy. Give Social Security to the Wall Street Bankers.
Well we have taken that path and followed it from Reagan to Bush I to Clinton to Bush II. What has happened to the middle class? Real median earnings have dropped in the past 30 years. More and more women have been forced into the work force, just to keep up. The accumulated wealth of the middle class has been raided by too many credit cards and too many home equity loans. The rich pound the buy-buy drums of TV and radio advertising. Our president tells us to support the war effort by going "shopping."
Assumed benefits of the middle class in every other industrialized nation (health care and subsidized or free college education) have been demonized as "socialism".
Social Security is in jeopardy. We opened our consumers to the world. This worldview lost millions of U.S. manufacturing and service jobs.
We went into debt with China. We have a negative savings rate. The war has provided us with the savings and loan crisis, the junk bond crisis, the dot com crisis, the Enron crisis, the sub prime crisis, the gas and oil crisis, and a war of choice. The profits have been drained by the Ken Lays, the Wall Street bankers, Bear Stearns, the Halliburtons, the Lincoln Savings executives and the losses have been taken over by the government. These losses will be paid disproportionately by the middle class. Maybe we will have to give up Social Security to pay off our bubble debts. Yet we are told that "government is the problem."
The markets over the past 30 years have a checkered history. We have succeeded in making the rich richer and created more and more debt for the middle class. We are beaten, at least let us negotiate our surrender with dignity.
Patrick Cleary
Wheaton