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De Omnibus Dubitandum - Lux Veritas

Thursday, September 26, 2013

The Late, Great Middle Class

Victor Davis Hanson | Sep 26, 2013
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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