The Forgotten Middle Class

by Errington C. Thompson, MD

Ladies and Gentleman, the young and the old, step right up and watch the greatest spectacle that you will ever witness. Over here you can see a family living out of their car. They have been kicked out of home. There, see it? Foreclosure, right in front of your eyes!

And over there—that’s right, look this way—there is a man who just took a knife to his own stomach because he didn’t have insurance and couldn’t wait any more for surgery. Come on. Take a look, but don’t stare.

Now, we have something special just over here. Our main attraction. Right here. And there. Everywhere you look. We call it the forgotten Middle Class.

This is a very strange attraction, ladies and gentlemen. Both parents are working full-time jobs yet can barely make ends meet. Forty years ago, the average household had one bread-winner who could support an entire family. Now, they have two, and they face a mountain of debt. Look at the kids. Yes, they have an iPod and an Xbox 360, but they aren’t learning anything in their schools. They aren’t being prepared for tomorrow. There is no push and no drive. They do not have the real X’s—excel and excellence. This is the forgotten Middle Class.

How we got here, folks, is complex. We have a corporate world that rewards only the top one percent for good work (and equally for failure), while workers on the line are given pink slips as their jobs are shipped to a different part of the country or overseas.

Then we have a media complex telling us that we should retrain for a better-paying job. So we do—and then discover that most of the high-tech, well-paying jobs are going to 20-year-olds instead of retrained 50-year-olds.

Look, ladies and gentlemen, there it is: the illusion of opportunity!

Okay, how about a quick flashback. Over the last 40 years some folks have been blaming teachers for everything that is wrong in our schools—the same folks who have cut budgets and reduced morale, forcing qualified educators into other jobs with marginally better pay and less stress. Isn’t that great, ladies and gentlemen? This brain drain has been killing our school systems for years.

And here’s another, one of the greatest illusions that have ever been created! No, I’m not talking about David Copperfield causing the Statue of Liberty to disappear, but the law called “No Child Left Behind.” This wonderful panacea forces teachers to teach to a test rather than offer children real learning opportunities—which can be the most fun, memorable, and educationally effective moments in a classroom.

Yet another great illusion is “the wisdom of the market,” a pretend philosophy embraced by Republicans and Democrats alike. Why, all that was needed was to remove the constraints that gave us the greatest market in the world, and the market would soar. And it did! Corporate profits became so much more important than anything else that CEO pay went up by a factor of hundreds while workers’ wages stagnated and prices continued to increase. In the past, this pressure would have forced the Middle Class into the streets to protest with pitchforks, but Wall Street gave the Middle Class a way out of this squeeze: another illusion, called easy credit.

Never before in the history of the US did the Middle Class have access to so much credit. College students with no income were offered credit cards with $5,000 limits. Homeowners were encouraged to borrow more and more. Wall Street knew that if it felt good for the Middle Class, then it was really, really good for Wall Street. Banks increased their leverage from 1:10 (for every dollar they had on hand, they would have 10 dollars tied up in investments) to 1:20 or even 1:35. Wall Street even created instruments like the credit default swap so that they could increase their leverage even more. Credit is what created the circus atmosphere, the great illusion, that we see today.

Guess what, folks? We can fix this. Just as Bill Clinton did in the 1990s, we can balance the budget and pay off our debts. We just need to do a few specific, logical, realistic things. We need the government to quit rewarding corporations for bad behavior.

That means giving tax breaks to corporations that do the right thing, not the wrong thing. If a corporation keeps jobs over here, we should give it a substantial tax break. But taxes should be raised on companies like Apple, which created the iPhone over here but assembles it in China at low wages, then imports it back here for us to buy at inflated prices.

If we are good enough to buy your product, then we are good enough to assemble your product!!

Corporations that pay a living wage need to be rewarded. Corporations that don’t, like Wal-Mart, need to be punished—not by the government but by us, the Middle Class.

If you want our business, you have to support the American Middle Class.

The only way that we can stop this circus is for us to take charge. We cannot depend on politicians or corporate CEOs to look out for us. We have to do it. With corporations fighting for themselves and politicians fighting for campaign donations from corporations, none of them care about us. If we don’t look out for each other, we are doomed to become Mexico—a nation with a few rich guys, a tiny Middle Class, and a huge lower class who work for almost nothing. We can decide our future. It is time to stop this circus.