Money and the Middle Cla$$
Back in the day, it was popular to consider money an evil thing, reserved for those beating or cheating the system in some way. This was a convenient attitude for the anti-materialistic crowd and the young, as most of them had little of it anyway.
Some forget that the live cheap, hippy-dippy 60s crowd gave way to recessions of the 70s, including gasoline rationing, pricing, wage controls, and a draft.
Certainly, “money isn’t everything,” but when you don’t have enough of it, it matters a lot, as any level of poverty forces hard choices, and decisions that one might otherwise not make, whether to start a family or not, for instance. Food or prescriptions?
For five years now, despite wishful statements to the contrary, America has suffered a self imposed “war on the middle-class.” This, through actions and legislation, makes it harder and harder to maintain home, health, and family. Although the term “middle class” can be defined as an income amount, it is better defined as those having children and raising families. The economic strains therein determine a certain constrained standard of living.
And these are the people with un-arguably the biggest investment in the system!
I recall going out to dinner perhaps three times during the first 10 years of the upbringing of our three wonderful children, for instance. This while relocating many times in order to be fast-tracked in career mode.
We felt like up-and-comers in our spirit, and very middle-middle class. Today, with hope for an economic turnaround all but vanished, the psychology of the moment indicates lower middle-class at best.
Today Congress languishes as the middle-class recedes as an economic group. College loan rates – a government monopoly traded back and forth with banks like a game – are in flux, discouraging parents at this life stage. Food prices, gasoline prices, and their derivatives, including electricity and gas utilities, rise exponentially.
Your governments’ response to that is to have those pesky economic stats removed from public measures of Inflation rate. Dr. Big Government gave you the pain pill instead of the life-saving surgery.
And then your government raises your taxes at the state and federal levels!
Your family would be better positioned to get children through college while officially and statistically in poverty, this via affirmative action programs sold to us to make life more “fair.” But fair for whom? There is benefit to some poverty.
The birth rate among American citizens is receding to unprecedented lows as evidence of the forces against the middle-class. Replacement generations come in force from illegal-Americans, though...Their poverty allows for it.
Contrast this with Germany, where in Western Europe they are ahead of our trend, and are in even worse shape. Their indigenous population cannot replicate itself and they actively import guest workers of other nationality. They incentivize German citizens to make babies with cash, paying grants of $4 to $8 thousand dollar-equivalents for those starting families.
We have food stamps and PELL Grants.
Food stamps mean that you have arrived, in much of urban America now, and are encouraged by the very government providing them. This program has been cleverly interwoven with agricultural subsidies to create supportive coalitions...
College aid for the middle-class via PELL Grants? Forget it; you make too much...
It’s the financial bubble of too much prosperity, while not enough of it that is the trap. The middle-class has been left to wither on the vine, while token administration efforts to change root problems flounder…
...While the population is distracted by social agenda issues like same sex marriage, gun control, plus adventures in the Middle East.
I just wish the government would STOP helping our middle class.
Before it is gone.
No comments:
Post a Comment