USAToday, Political Blindspot, Press TV, and The Huffington Post have all run articles recently based on new findings that four out of five Americans are below, at, or near poverty.
Their stories, based on survey data from the Associated Press, make it clear that the new American “middle class” is poor. About 76 percent of whites live in economic insecurity at some time before turning sixty and using color blind sampling, according to the AP, that number rises to 79 percent of the country living, at some time, in “economic insecurity.” Economic Insecurity is a polite term for poor, hungry, and desperate.
While there is much talk of the new global middle class most people forget that this “new” class is mostly composed of what used to be the upper middle class to lower upper class. This new economic group is composed of doctors, engineers, higher degree college graduates and the similar. They are also being short-changed because they too have crept down an economic rung. ?These people who used to be “the poor rich” now are considered “middle class.” They are just as afraid as the rest of us, if not more so.
What is going on? Part, if not most, of the problem is that the new global rich do not need a middle class at all. ?Salon?did a great piece about this recently, talking about the damage happening to our country right now by not making necessary investments to MAINTAIN our infrastructure. Maintain, not improve, maintain. Which is an economic recipe for disaster because this delay will eventually lead to an even higher economic cost to society the longer it is delayed. ?But to the super rich it doesn’t matter because even when we do eventually borrow the money (from them) to do this work, we will hire companies they own anyway.
So the more decrepit and derelict the more they eventually make. Additionally when you look at the very richest in America, MOSTLY inherited money, the Waltons and the Kochs, one of whom (Waltons) do better when we as a country feel poor, and the other (Koch brothers) who only do well by corrupting the political system and not paying for the environmental costs of the products they sell. In short, we are being ripped off and kept poor because it is more profitable!
?It is not the fortunes which are earned, but those which are unearned, that it is for the public good to place under limitation. -John Stuart Mills
John Stuart Mills lived in England about two hundred years ago but even then people, well he, had already figured out that there were people who were rich by work and those who were rich by “unearned” wealth. That is what the real battle is going to be about.
If it is true that the new American normal is to be poor then it is safe to say that we shall see crime begin to rise, police corruption become the norm (again), and at the rise of the “next” Tea Party, they won’t just carry their guns in protest they will be using them. That is history. Our choice is simple: Restore America by reducing income inequality, restore faith in the system by taking back the wealth STOLEN by those who have exploited slave labor in China, and restore our national sanity by allowing working people to make enough money to have their basic needs meet.
Even a cursory knowledge of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy?of needs should lead anyone with common sense to the obvious question as to what happens if those needs are not met. I fear we are going to find out.
In America the new Middle Class is poverty. God help us.
Edited by SS
