First Principles

Every liberal I have ever heard talk to be about how terrible President Bush is, from fellow law students to the Democratic Presidential candidates, talk about how the Great Middle Class, the Backbone of America, is harmed or shrinking or “losing.”  Hillary Clinton tells us, “After six and a half years of Bush administration policies, the middle class is struggling to succeed in an economy that is leaving more and more Americans behind.”  Barack Obama promises to “ensure the middle class is thriving and growing.”  Google “disappearing middle class,” and you get endless anti-Bush, anti-capitalism blog entries.  But is that true?  And if so, where are they really going?

Like so much else in politics, the devil is in the definitions.  I think most people consider themselves “middle class,” and people who make more than them “rich.”  To a populist politician, the “middle class” is the “us” that is against “them”, actual income or status being totally irrelevant to the discussion.

The median household income in the United States is $48,201 per year.  Sociologists have varied definitions, but they seem to fall between $35,000 to $100,000 per year.  If the middle class truly is “disappearing,” they must either be getting richer or poorer.  So which is it?

From George Will today:

Economist Stephen Rose, defining the middle class as households with annual incomes between $30,000 and $100,000, says a smaller percentage of Americans are in that category than in 1979 — because the percentage of Americans earning more than $100,000 has doubled from 12 to 24, while the percentage earning less than $30,000 is unchanged. “So,” Rose says, “the entire ‘decline’ of the middle class came from people moving up the income ladder.” Even as housing values declined in 2007, the net worth of households increased.

When I hear liberals talk about restoring or growing or otherwise “strengthening” the middle class, the only way I can see for them to do it is to stop letting all those people moving up the ladder, and maybe pull some of those who have been climbing back down.  Socialism has a long history world wide of ensuring everyone’s economic situation is more equal – the equality of the breadlines, that is.

I also think that, even though I think of myself as solidly middle class, I know that were I to buy into a politician’s populist rhetoric, I would suddenly find that the IRS would consider me to be “rich” come tax time.  And that’s help and salvation I just don’t need.