Resuscitating the Middle Class or Pulling the Plug. It Is Our Decision.

by Errington C. Thompson, MD

Hopefully, everybody has had an enjoyable Labor Day. Now, it’s time for us to make some serious decisions about the middle class. Over the last 30 years, the middle class has been shrinking. Millions have been pushed from the middle class into the lower class. Even Americans making $100,000 to $200,000 a year are having trouble making ends meet. Expenses are rising yet wages are stagnant. It is decision time.

Many conservatives will tell you that this conversation that we are having is simply blasphemy. “We should let the market decide. The market should decide the best place to put an investment and we, the American people, should stay out of it.”

The fact is, we have stayed out of it. We’ve stayed on the sidelines
for decades. In 1992, when billionaire businessman Ross Perot was
running for president, we laughed when he said that we needed to pay
attention to that huge sucking sound of jobs being pulled to Mexico. He
urged us to throw away NAFTA and all the other free trade agreements.

We didn’t pay attention. We decided to let the markets decide. Well,
the markets decided that labor was cheaper in Mexico, Malaysia, and
China. The markets decided that these large corporations could
efficiently manufacture and assemble goods offshore and then reimport
the goods for us to buy here in the United States. Tens of thousands of
middle-class workers were laid off as domestic factories closed and were
moved overseas.

Now, with the middle class on life support and an economy stuck in
neutral, we have an extremely wealthy, successful businessman who is
running for president. Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney is not a manufacturer
like Henry Ford, or an inventor like Thomas Edison, or a flamboyant
lawyer like Johnnie Cochran. No, Mitt Romney has embraced the principles
of making money.

There are lots of ways to make money if you are a private equity
company. You can invest a little bit of money into a startup and, if
you’re lucky, it hits really big like eBay. Or you might buy an
established company using borrowed money, break it up and sell the parts
to the highest bidder, and walk away with your profit. Or a venture
capitalist like Mitt Romney can make a ton of money by buying a company
and moving its manufacturing out of the United States and into
facilities in Mexico or Malaysia, in the process firing hundreds if not
thousands of well-paid American workers in favor of low-paid foreigners.
While running Bain Capital, Mitt Romney bought companies like Ampad and
GS Industries; in the short term he and his gang of business vultures
increased the value of both companies, making themselves hundreds of
millions of dollars; then in the end, both companies went bankrupt and
thousands of workers were laid off. But Mitt had his millions.

We have to decide how we want America to look in the next 10 to 20
years. Do we want a tiny, exclusive upper class and a large lower class
with no middle class? If so, I think we need to go the Mitt Romney way.
He will allow Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and the venture capitalists to
buy and sell and export us into bankruptcy. In the end, the big boys
will be rolling in stacks of money and the rest of us will be out
panhandling for nickels and dimes.

Or, we can resuscitate the American economy and the American middle
class. We can invest in the middle class. We can understand that
rebuilding our broken roads and worn-out schools may not give us the
same quick return on investment as outsourcing everything to Thailand
but, by investing in America, by putting Americans back to work, we are
investing in our future. We are doing the same thing that our
grandparents did when they decided to build the interstate highways.

On September 8, President Obama will propose a jobs plan before a joint
session of Congress. He could throw out some lukewarm jobs program that
would keep the unemployment rate between 8-9 percent, but I would much
prefer the president to boldly invest in the middle class. He should
announce a $1.5 trillion program that, if implemented, would push our
unemployment rate below 5 percent. Now that would resuscitate the middle
class. That’s a bold investment in the future that I could
support—because in the end a bold investment is about us. I will always
believe that an investment in the American people is the best
investment.