Bye Bye Middle Class
Jul 23rd, 2008 at 11:58 am by Susie
Go read the whole thing. Matt Taibbi:
A few weeks back, I got a call from someone in the office of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Sanders wanted to tell me about an effort his office had recently made to solicit information about his constituents? economic problems. He sent out a notice on his e-mail list asking Vermont residents to “tell me what was going on in their lives economically.” He expected a few dozen letters at best — but got, instead, more than 700 in the first week alone. Some, like the excerpt posted above, sounded like typical tales of life for struggling single-parent families below the poverty line. More unnerving, however, were the stories Sanders received from people who held one or two or even three jobs, from families in which both spouses held at least one regular job — in other words, from people one would normally describe as middle-class. For example, this letter came from the owner of his own commercial cleaning service:
My 90-year-old father in Connecticut has recently become ill and asked me to visit him. I want to drop everything I am doing and go visit him, however, I am finding it hard to save enough money to add to the extra gas I’ll need to get there. I make more than I did a year ago and I don’t have enough to pay my property taxes this quarter for the first time in many years. They are due tomorrow.
This single mother buys clothes from thrift stores and unsuccessfully tried to sell her house to pay for her son’s schooling:
I don’t go to church many Sundays, because the gasoline is too expensive to drive there. Every thought of an activity is dependent on the cost.
Sanders got letters from working people who have been reduced to eating “cereal and toast” for dinner, from a 71-year-old man who has been forced to go back to work to pay for heating oil and property taxes, from a worker in an oncology department of a hospital who reports that clinically ill patients are foregoing cancer treatments because the cost of gas makes it too expensive to reach the hospital. The recurring theme is that employment, even dual employment, is no longer any kind of barrier against poverty. Not economic discomfort, mind you, but actual poverty. Meaning, having less than you need to eat and live in heated shelter — forgetting entirely about health care and dentistry, which has long ceased to be considered an automatic component of American middle-class life. The key factors in almost all of the Sanders letters are exploding gas and heating oil costs, reduced salaries and benefits, and sharply increased property taxes (a phenomenon I hear about all across the country at campaign trail stops, something that seems to me to be directly tied to the Bush tax cuts and the consequent reduced federal aid to states). And it all adds up to one thing.
“The middle class is disappearing,” says Sanders. “In real ways we’re becoming more like a third-world country.”
I remember saying that the middle class was doomed during the first Bush’s presidency. I don’t remember what set me off then, but I know the middle class has been declining since Reagan, certainly, with his union-busting thing going on.
What I don’t understand is the point.
I do remember saying that Raygun’s policies would end up destroying the middle class and being told I was ’sophomoric.’ Well, here we are the rethug agenda accomplished. Only thirty years for America to realize it’s been sold a lie by conservatives.
..And these are happening to White American citizens, NOT to non-white races, or to illegals!
Fuck it all!!
Wait tin The AMERO POPS UP…No More USA..It wil be the NAU,North American UNION…MEXICO,CANADA,US………..Open BORDERS
WHAT A BUNCH OF WHYNNERS! A LITTLE GLOBLE COMPETITION AND YOU ALL TURN TO INSTANT SHIT. THIS IS AMERICA - AMERICA!
WE WILL GET BY AND BUILD IT BETTER. PEOPLE HAVE WAKEN AND THINGS HAVE STARTED CHANGING (NO I’M NOT ANOTHER STAR STRUCK OBAMA FOOL ). GET UP! AND STOP CRYING LIKE BABIES. THE WORLD HAS EVOLVED AND YOU NEED TO WAKE UP. NO BODY IS GOING TO HELP YOU - YOU GOT TO HELP YOURSELVE’S. WE CAN DO IT!
THIS IS STILL AMERICA! THE BEST THERE IS… I DON’T SEE ANYBODY LEAVING… WHERE U GONNA GO? CHINA? RUSSIA? MEXICO?
BE STRONG AND BE PROUD. THINGS HAVE STARTED CHANGING!
GOD BLESS AMERICA!