Obama’s Middle Class is Not America’s Middle Class

We who have watched the transformation of America’s political landscape over the past few decades better understand what has been lost than newcomers to the scene. There have been changes, and many, and most for the worse.

The left’s drumbeat, from the beginning and in all countries they have infiltrated and destroyed has been that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Is that true?  And if so, what is the real cause?

We hear President Obama speak of his unrivaled protection of the “middle class,” as though he invented the idea of the middle class.

Who is the middle class in America? It used to be that it consisted of the majority core of the hard working people who were fulfilling their version of the American Dream—education for children, home ownership, predictable and comfortable retirement, etc. These have traditionally been the majority of the country, tax payers who did their fair share, and wouldn’t take handouts as long as they were able-bodied. Is this the “middle class” of which President Obama now speaks and claims to represent?

In fact, it is no secret that nearly half of all Americans contribute nothing these days to federal income taxes. Is this Obama’s middle class? Certainly, a tax scheme that requires no contributions from half the population is either backed by an incredibly strong economy, has extremely low tax rates, or is grossly unfair in its distribution of the tax burden. In our case, it is the last. In our May 10, 2012 article Bringing Fairness to Taxes we demonstrated that relatively few Americans shoulder the heavy burden of America’s spending addiction, with the top 25 percent of earners paying 87 percent of the total burden, and what can’t be squeezed out of them is merely bought on credit, creating an inevitable collision course with economic Armageddon.

We are compelled to ask the question, if the bottom half of the country doesn’t contribute to the federal income tax base, who is in the middle class? Shouldn’t the middle class be somewhere in the middle? We instinctively imagine that the middle class would consist of those above the bottom, and below the top, forming a bell curve. Although a bell curve is a technical concept with many possible variables, if we are in a class being graded on a bell curve, we would expect that there is a top 20%, a bottom 20%, and 60% distributed throughout the “middle.” There is our true middle class.

In our historical social structure, indeed, we had 1) the wealthy, who got that way through risk taking investment, hard work, or inheriting from one of those, 2) the less fortunate or poor, and 3) the 60% in the middle who worked hard to get an education, pursue a career, buy a home, educate their children, and retire comfortably. In most cases, the upper 80% provided aid and assistance to the bottom 20%, enabling millions to be elevated out of poverty—something our left leaning government has entirely failed to do with $ trillions.

Although we still hear much of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, the truth is that since Obama took office, the average American family has lost 40% of its net worth—rich, middle class and poor. With 11 million family homes sinking into the quicksand of foreclosure during Obama’s tenure in office, and the rate climbing fast in 2012, much more of the remaining wealth will be destroyed by the time the next president takes the oath of office. Since taking office Obama has seen the addition of over 6 million Americans to the poverty rolls, with those on food stamps doubling to 47 million, and unemployment averaging 9%.

No, Obama’s rainbow coalition of supporters is not the middle class. It is heavily weighted to that portion of the population that has nothing to lose by raising the taxes on the portion who actually pay all of the taxes, or by spending the income of future generations. It is made up of those who are not part of the historic middle class, but instead those with ideological or racial axes to grind.

Divide and conquer has been the method of despots from the beginning, and the left divides Americans from the middle class by telling groups that their interests are adverse to those of other groups, but that if they all assemble under the umbrella of the Democratic party, their unity will give them political strength.

The scheme has been successful, from the viewpoint of the left and its insatiable appetite for power, but it has come at the expense of the middle class’s American Dream.

It is time for Americans to come together and to reject the lies of the left. We are not a splintered nation with adverse interests that set us against one another, but a unified group seeking what our middle class forbearers sought—liberty, peace and prosperity, with everyone pulling his own weight and contributing to the whole. We should be looking to politicians who believe in the America of Washington, Jefferson, Jay, Franklin, and all those who sacrificed so much so that we would have the opportunity to choose freedom and prosperity over the servitude and poverty offered by Obama’s left.

PUBLIUS