Who’s Responsible for the Decline of the American Middle Class?
The folks over at the Pew Research Center asked self-identified Middle Class Americans who they thought was responsible for the fact that they have has an especially tough go of it over the last decade or so. Here is what they said:
This is interesting, right? I would make the case that is Corporations who are the proximate cause, since they have been the ones slowing down wage growth by ensuring that employees don’t share in the productivity gains achieved by these folks. Politically, blaming Congress would sync up with an “obstructionist” message reminding folks that this Congress didn’t want to do anything to help middle class people hurt by the downturn. The political course might help in the short term, but still does not take care of the fact that Americans do not share in the bounty that their work produces. But the 34% who reported that they thought President Obama was responsible for alot of the last 10 years’ pain is mind-boggling.
They also asked which presidential candidate’s policies would help the middle class, and President Obama was the choice for both middle class and poor groups. Only the wealthy didn’t think much of the President’s policies:
There’s alot more in the report. Let us know what you think in the comments.
I blame middle class people who vote Republican. We have met the enemy and he is us.
Lately though, not even electing Democrats is enough to escape Republican economic policy. So I also blame the middle class for remaining silent when Obama extended the Bush tax cuts, which is the centerpiece of the Republican economic policies shrinking the middle class.
Not only did they remain silent, they perhaps even thought it was a good thing for them and breathed a sigh of relief. Except that the jobs and wages didn’t come back. They never do with tax cuts. And now we are preparing to rerun that movie in December.
And the end game is the dismantling of the New Deal. If that happens we have nobody to blame but ourselves.
Right now things look good for Obama’s re-election. But a few bad jobs reports and GDP shrinkage could change that picture in the space of several weeks. So ironically, Obama’s failure to kill the Republican economic policy when he had the chance in 2010 may have damaged the economy enough that he actually loses this election.
I guess I have to stop listening to NPR’s Swing State reports. They are depressing the hell out of me.
Good points though. If middle class Americans fall for the “tax cuts create jobs” & basic services are “busting the budget” stuff one more time, we deserve all the misery that Romney and a teabag congress can pour down on us.
There’s a story making the rounds about how Iceland resisted the IMF austerity program. Iceland told their bondholders to pound sand, and bailed out their people instead. Now there is a Bloomberg article hailing Iceland’s “surprising” recovery, with social services intact.
Go figure