Middle Class Suffers Under Obama

Continuing with what we believe are useful background articles regarding the hot topic of economic disparity, we provide this link and excerpts from an article by Mark Alexander at Patriot Post.   Obama’s ‘Middle-Crush Economics’

Obama in his State of the Union message made much of initiatives he pretends will benefit the middle class.Never mind that it his policies, typical of Democrats that are wrecking the middle class and increasing dependency on government as their portion of the economic spectrum shrinks.

The New York Times — not my first source for economic insights — offered this week some useful perspective on the middle class that takes Obama’s plans to task.
According to the Times, “In the late 1960s, more than half of the households in the United States were squarely in the middle, earning, in today’s dollars, $35,000 to $100,000 a year. Few people noticed or cared as the size of that group began to fall, because the shift was primarily caused by more Americans climbing the economic ladder into upper-income brackets [emphasis added].”

However, the Times noted that over the last 15 years “the middle-class share of households has continued to narrow [because] more people have fallen to the bottom [emphasis added].” As economic analyst Michael Strain observes, “In the Great Recession, we lost a lot of middle-income jobs and we gained a lot of low-paying jobs. That’s a slower-burning thing, but it increased in ferocity during the recession, and people are feeling it.”

In other words, the Obama recession, which was virtually institutionalized by his failed “economic recovery plan,” is largely responsible for the hemorrhaging of former middle-income earners into the ranks of low-income earners.

Furthermore, the Times made this accidentally adroit observation: “Fewer of those in [the middle class] fit the traditional image of a married couple with children at home.”

Indeed, as noted in a recent American Enterprise Institute study, “The growth in median income of families with children would be 44 percent higher if the United States enjoyed 1980 levels of married parenthood today.” So, much of our nation’s wealth gap is due to a marriage and family gap. And Obama’s “middle-class” plan does nothing to support married couples with children — in fact, quite the contrary.

That notwithstanding, under the cover of “middle-class economics,” Obama is trotting out even more taxation, regulation and social engineering policies, which have a proven record of undermining middle-class families, job stability and upward mobility. In the inimitable words of that great American philosopher Yogi Berra: “It’s déjà vu all over again.”

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