Who’s to blame for the middle class struggle?
http://money.cnn.com/2013/04/18/news/economy/middle-class-poor/index.html?source=cnn_bin
I suspect one large reason is that what is ‘middle class‘ today is actually on the edge of being poor. Back when being middle class meant only one bread winner, a nice house with a white picket fence, 1.5 cars and 2.5 children (who all went to affordable college without accumulating a life-time of debt) I suspect that people were more generous to the poor (there were a lot fewer of them!). Now that the poor represent close to (or more, depending on how you measure things) half our population, the half that can afford to pay taxes is quite resentful of the half that can’t. Rather than address the root core of the issue (the vast asymmetry of income), it is much easier to blame others. Since it is the American Way to imagine oneself as one of the elite, the majority of our population, it seems, never wants to do anything to damage their prospects for that never arriving event (indeed, as the asymmetry increases the probability (always tiny to begin with) shrinks even faster) and thus coddle the rich (the vast majority of which inherited their wealth and have done (and continue to do) bupkis to be ‘job creators’ (what a bunch of bunk! I can’t believe the sheeple eat that lie up)). What is left then? Blame the nonexistent ‘welfare queen‘! The poor, after all, can’t fight back (they have no resources!).
So, instead of complaining about the real core of the problem and risking having to invest effort to do something about it (like elect politicians that actually represent them instead of the oligarchy), it is way easier to make poor people even more miserable. Ironic, I feel, as because of our dysfunctional social safety net any one of the current ‘middle class’ are just a few weeks of unemployment from becoming a member of the hated poor.
