It’s not surprising that the President’s State of the Union Address last night, which supposedly focused on helping the middle class, didn’t have anything worth hearing in this regard. The president, as well as his advisers, top administrators, and members of our national legislature, don’t have a clue about how the American middle class really lives, much less what it really needs.
Not a single policy maker in Washington, not one, makes much less than triple the $50,000-a-year median income of today’s middle class American, and most make a lot more. They have far better benefits than middle class Americans. They have greater job security, in the sense that even when they leave their official posts they get scooped automatically into corporate, academic or lobbying secures. They don’t have future pension or cost of health care worries, or worries about not having the wherewithal to send their kids to college.
They don’t know squat, in other words, about how the middle class struggles these days from a personal perspective.
The advice they get from economists barely touches on these real world struggles. It’s invariably geared to growing the economy, as if the fact that the pot is bigger will automatically mean that everyone will benefit from a bigger pot, even to a marginal extent, which hasn’t been the case for many years.
Which brings us to the well meant but pathetically inadequate, and in many ways useless middle class aids proposed by President Obama in his speech last night. These involved boosting educational opportunities (without reducing their costs so as not to make more education just the road to debt peonage); infrastructure improvements and alternative energy development (which addresses the issue of more jobs but not job pay, benefit packages that go along with this base pay, and the middle class work-related tax burden); and raising the federal minimum wage to $9 an hour.
This last “middle class booster” would be a really howl if it weren’t so sad, so utterly absurd in terms of middle class creation. Nine dollars an hour over a 40-hour work week is $360, or $18,000 a 50-week work year (less the Payroll and other taxes, of course). Someone would have to work two-and-one-half of these jobs, 24 hours a day, to even approach the median national wage of about $50,000 per year.
In a recent post I noted two things that would actually enhance middle class living — sane and progressive Payroll Tax and bankruptcy law reform. There are other things that would also work to protect and preserve this country withering middle class in meaningful ways. You won’t hear any of these things coming from Washington policy makers or legislators of either party.
If you’re old enough, you can still remember the middle class America that existed and thrived for five decades after WW II. If not, well…
(Michael Silverstein’s new novel, available on Amazon, is The Bellman’s Revenge)