Slipping Validated
Yo, remember this post from last November about how this 40-something is slipping behind the parents? Well, an interview with an author over at Salon seems to validate what’s happening.
The financial maladies of the so-called middle class involve wide structural changes to the American economy and are not just the fault of individuals. (Yes, this was obstensibly written for a suddenly insecure white audience to whom all this is news. But damn, even I as a post civil rights African American, was optimistic just like the white folks. Guess I should have known better. LOL.)
Follwing is a letter posted in response. The second paragraph of this statement validates what I’ve suspected:
There may be no fixing it. Already it is too late to prevent the decline of the US middle class. From here it’s mostly a matter of how little the average American will settle for, and experience suggests Americans may be prepared to settle for very little.
Most of history is characterized by a small, wealthy elite ruling the great mass of poorer people. Even US history before WWII is that way. The prosperity of US middle class of the last 50-60 years is the product of the reforms of FDR, but that relative prosperity is suspected to be merely an aberration of history.
The Wealthy and Powerful Powers That Be have militated against those reforms ever since they were passed. Money, unlike water, naturally runs uphill unless effective mechanisms are in place to keep some of it in the lower classes, and those mechanisms - minimum wage laws, higher education, taxes on the rich, labor unions - are increasingly minimized where they are not compromised outright.
This entire article mostly provides indications that those mechanisms have been compromised, but it tends to be a symptomatic treatment and does not directly address the root causes: the rich, represented by corporations and their lobbyists, largely control all three branches of the federal government, and government policies favor the wealthy elite over nearly everybody else.
The last time the country was in this situation it required the desperation of the Depression to motivate change. This time, that may not be sufficient, because the wealthy and powerful who profit from this situation are likely to be able to prevent those kinds of reforms.
Then there’s this:
The so called Greatest Generation as well as the Korean War Generation right after it are in fact anomalies. No where else in the history of people was there an entire generation that voted and awarded itself such an enormous bag of free stuff. From SSI to early retirement to rich union plans to subsidized healthcare, IRA’s, 401Ks, the GI bill, massive tax breaks, to the greatest long run surge in property values from 1955 to 1995, Medicare, Medicaid, and long slow retirement where expensive and extensive travel is the norm not the exception and it goes on from age 55 to age 85. Not only did those generations not take care of their own parents, outsourcing them to nursing homes, but they didn’t take care of their children’s generation either - letting them take out loans for the their college or letting the government pick up the tab, so long as they got out of the house at 18.
Yeah. And we all know that African Americans were largely excluded from grabbing from that goody bag. At least until much later.
As I commented before, my father asked me if my last employer offered a pension. I almost told him he should join Steve Harvey, Cedric, and D.L. on the Kings of Comedy circuit because he had jokes. You see, my dad was able to get into an electric utility in 1971 and get out 30 years later with a pension. Hmm, a pension? What the hell is that?
Happy reading.
Peace.
