Well…have been reading a lot today…yeah, I know, I do that everyday but today it seems that an idea has formed that I wasn’t even thinking about. Weird, huh? Not really, I’ll bet that happens to everyone…we have this long, protracted recession on our hands and one thing that I haven’t heard anything about is the decline of the middle class and it’s effect on the recovery. Since 75% of the economy is consumer spending, when the consumers have been squeezed as they have been by outsourcing of jobs, wage cuts, and rising health care costs, the engine of growth that used to be the middle class can only sputter. It has been an orchestrated attack on labor by the right and business that has led us to these straights; where the average worker makes less today than he did 30 years ago but the top one percent’s share of the economy has grown from 9 percent 30 years ago to almost 25% today. It is clear that it has been the goal of the right to decimate organized labor but I can’t understand why this same labor keeps voting for them because they will “get government out of the way” and allow them to keep more of their money. But more of less wages is always going to be less than what they would have had if the playing field wasn’t so tilted to business. And, the repubs have their thumb on the scale taking more and more from you and me and giving it to the rich.
I’ll end with a question that I now ask of all business but was originally aimed at GM: “Who is going to buy your 40 thousand dollar Suburbans when the middle class is destroyed?” I think we now know the answer….