In the past 6 years, we have been watching the middle class get squeezed. Tax cuts for the rich, stagnant wages, removal or contraction of vital parts of the safety net, increasing retail prices and insurance premiums, etc... We lament the growing distance between the rich and the poor and how those in between are looking more and more haggard.
But we have to keep hoping and believing that someday, we can change this. We have to believe that someday, when the last of the neocon Republicans is quieted, swept out of office or - better yet - locked up, we can restore the strength and vitality of the middle class. This is a two part series on how I believe that can be accomplished.
Part 1 - Government relief for poor, middle class
This actually all started with an Overnight News Digest. As you can see, the diary begins with a very interesting story and a link. (The article is no longer freely available so I'm not going to bother linking straight to it.) To me, the excerpt was not the most interesting part of the linked article; it was the part that talked about how the few countries with increasing or stable middle classes are keeping their middle class from shrinking.
How do they do it? Middle class subsidies.
As the excerpt on this blog says:
I am not sure that the middle class can be self-sustaining. It seems to require active government policies. The market tends to produce great inequalities in income; these inequalities seem greater in a global economy. Contrary to earlier economic belief, the countries that are most competitive in a globalized economy are those with the most robust tax-and-spend programs. But they have to be aimed at the right places."
"Herein lies the paradox of the modern middle class: Its existence is reliant on a thriving and open market economy, but its size and sustainability are equally dependent on the tax-and-spend mechanisms of the modern welfare state – which, it turns out, are even more important in globalized, high-competition economies.
In other words, the very "socialism" that Republicans decry is what created the broad middle class of the 1950s that they idolize so much. For example, subsidies like those provided for housing for veterans and their families after World War II increased the middle class because they increased the ability of those who were only tenuously middle class to pay for a house1. Owning their own home can be a major asset for a family: (#4) "Your house is a built-in savings plan. It not only provides shelter and security -- and tax benefits -- but the equity you build up can act as an insurance policy in an uncertain future."
As the Globe and Mail article says, subsidies for the middle class are more important in maintaining that class than subsidies for those who have fallen on the hardest times, the poor. Otherwise, it makes any income bracket but the lowest more tenuous, as we are seeing, for instance, with middle class people whose medical bills are making them go broke; if there was relief for high medical bills available through the government, these people would be able to retain their houses.
That lack of support for the middle class actually harms lower classes as well, acting as a hurdle that can stop individuals from improving their class position. I've seen this kind of thing happen in my own life. In order to get a college education, my husband and I have taken on multiple jobs to help us support ourselves. Yet as our income has increased, my available aid has decreased, which only increases my need to make even more money to help pay for schooling. The more we make, the more I'm expected to pay, yet an increase in income does not equal an increase in ability to pay, and the expectation that it does simultaneously increases our need to earn more. It's a peculiar catch-22 that sinks a lot of poor students and keeps them from engaging in the economic mobility that America likes to pride itself on.
As someone in one of my classes last semester (called "Inequality in America") said, "If people need to 'pull themselves up by the bootstraps', they need to have bootstraps to pull on." We need bootstraps like universal health care, public mass transit, effective unions, subsidized daycare, paid family leave, more financial aid for students of all classes, etc. - in short, all of the things that we liberals/progressives consider so important. Without them, the middle class is a mere shell, easily swept away in the tides of the capitalist markets.
1See"Still at the Periphery: The Economic Status of African Americans" by Julianne Malveaux