The American
middle class, like the American economy in general, is ailing. Labor-force
participation has hit a 35-year low. Median
household income is lower than it was five years ago. Only the top 5 percent of
households have seen their incomes rise under President Obama. Commuters are paying more than twice as much
for gas as they were in 2008. Federal payouts for food stamps, unemployment
insurance and disability insurance have reached unprecedented levels. Meanwhile, the country is still running
near-record budget deficits and is burdened by $17 trillion in aggregate debt.
Yet the stock market is soaring.
How can we
make sense of all this contradictory nonsense? Irony.
Obama promised
to restore the middle class. In truth, he has enacted the very policies that
have done it the most damage in years. That paradox may explain why his base of
support remains the very rich and the very poor. Goldman Sachs, federal
bureaucrats and aid recipients are helped in a way that the strapped hardware
store owner, Starbucks barista and part-time welder are not. For all the talk of infrastructure or
stimulus, the latest $6 trillion in federal borrowing seems to have been wasted
on bailing out insider banks and green companies, growing the federal
workforce, regulating the private sector into stasis, and subsidizing those who
are not working......To paraphrase the Roman historian Tacitus, where we have made a desert of the middle class, we call it a recovery....To Read More....
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