[2ndDivisionVet]

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

[cunning_fish]

Isn’t it a main democrat goal since LBG? A war on poverty to bring more poverty.

[okie01]

An intelligent essay with a different perspective.

Thanks for posting.

[Jack Hammer]

“...which has been going on intermittently since the 1970s...”

The author seeks - as does everyone in the press these days - to deflect blame from the Marxist in the White House.

You want to know why the economy is in the tank? It’s because that’s precisely where Obama wants it.

[nathanbedford]

An American soldier returns from duty abroad with three limbs instead of four. His government rewards him by reneging on its promise to care for him and provide for his retirement by cutting his pension.

An American bureaucrat blows the whistle on corruption and is fired and disgraced by his government while his plight and the corruption which he exposed go unremarked by the American press.

An American couple complete 40 years of dutiful employment in the private sector and enter retirement under the expectation that their savings and their home together with Social Security would be enough to cover their "golden" years to find that there pensions have been bankrupted, their savings ravaged by inflation, their Social Security and health care under attack, their home worth less than they had been led to expect.

A young woman graduates from Bryn Mawr magna cum laude with a degree in women's studies only to find that she is massively in debt and with limited employment prospects. She had been told by the professors in college that the important issue confronting America was the Republicans' war on women and economic challenges facing America are the result of Republicans' failure to regulate big business and big banks. She is unaware of the amount of federal monies funneled into her alma mater by way of grants, subsidies, tax exemptions, and "projects."

The middle-class is being inexorably hollowed out by the government it votes for every two years.

[Tax-chick]

Nor does resistance, particularly among the Tea Party, to make the human and physical infrastructure investment that could help restore strong economic growth.

What does this mean?

He was writing intelligible English for a while, but then he seems to have switched on his content-free sentence-fragment generator so as to make sure he'd met his quota for bipartisan moral equivalency.

[DH]

There is a very simple solution to our “jobs” problem. Get government out of private enterprise....PERIOD!

Next, pay cash to employees each payday. Make them stand in a line at a table with about 15 people sitting at it, each having a duty to collect a fee for some type of government program or tax, and passing the stack of the employee’s dollar bills down the line to the end of the table where they are finally given their money.

When that day comes and each employee actually sees what the government and other leeches take out they will be alarmed enough to finally start voting for those who fight to allow them to keep most of their money.

[freedomfiter2]

It’s the result of the elites’ class warfare. The only threat to their complete domination is the middle class. They are the ones pushing for ever increasing regulation, moving the jobs over seas, and forcing American workers to compete with illegals for the remaining jobs.

[KarlInOhio]

This group, what I call the yeoman class — the small business owners, the suburban homeowners , the family farmers or skilled construction tradespeople– is increasingly endangered. Once the dominant class in America, it is clearly shrinking: In the four decades since 1971 the percentage of Americans earning between two-thirds and twice the national median income has dropped from 61% to 51% of the population, according to Pew.

Is this based on individuals or households? If households, the it could be because of the increased divorce rate splitting households. Other reasons could be because of wives taking low end or part time jobs thus being added to the low end. Also it could be because of a general spreading of the bell curve of pay. some move down and out, but others move up and out of the middle class.

Roughly one in three people born into middle class-households , those between the 30th and 70th percentiles of income, now fall out of that status as adults.

Interesting choice of the word "fall". No information is given whether the are moving up or down. In fact, if someone moves in either direction then someone else has to move into the 30-70th percentile range. This is strictly about income mobility rather than dealing with whether the middle class is doing well or not.

I moved from probably around the 40th percentile as a kid (Dad was a little below average income at the time) to about 85th now. So according to the author I "fell" out of the range.

Statistics aren't all that tricky, but tricky things can be done with them. And this article has a lot of warning signs that is what is being done.

[Excellence]

One of my “must-read” authors.

[GOPJ]

Liberal democrats are destroying the middle class.

[Georgia Girl 2]

I think thats the plan Stan. The fundamental transformation of America. In five short years Bam and company have nearly destroyed the middle class.

Why do you think Barry never looks upset or stressed out about the unemployment? Thats the plan. Everybody on the dole and/or working 29 hours per week.

[RetiredArmy]

There is very little “middle class” left. It is either up or down. Not much in between any more.

[Billthedrill]

The early decades of the Industrial Revolution saw a similar societal decline, as once independent artisans and farmers became fodder for the factory lines.

The author is actually describing the later stages of the Industrial Revolution, circa 1840, that culminated in the revolutionary year of 1848 and the penning of the Communist Manifesto. In that Marx and Engels predicted the increasing immiseration of the proletariat, decreasing profits, decreasing productivity, increasing illiteracy (by definition the real proletariat is illiterate) - none of these things took place. Instead, the proletariat became more literate - literate workers need less training - profits increased, production increased, and the proletariat as classically defined were wiped out by class mobility, becoming the despised petit bourgeoisie, which is really what the modern working class is. Proletarians don't own cars, TVs, or union pension funds.

Marx and Engels were right about one thing: a petit bourgeoisie so invested in capitalism because it was what had increased their quality of life, was a massive barrier against revolution that made the same promises (and never brought them to pass, but that was for the future to reveal).

It's still the case. The middle class, which is, actually, the taxable working class in America, must die in order for another model to flourish, the Marxist model, where a wealthy ruling class doles out largesse to the impoverished masses who by their very dependency cannot say "no". To effect this death the current ruling class must redistribute the income of the middle class to the dependent classes, purchasing the support of the latter while permanently addicting them to the payments. Progressives stoutly deny the existence of this ruling class while not so secretly yearning to join it. "They intend to rule wisely, but they intend to rule."

It is in this sense, I think, that the author intends the statement that the middle class is "turning" - it is actually being turned - "Proletarian", that is, is being impoverished, marginalized, demonized, and forced into dependency. I am inclined to believe that no set of economic programs will be enough to stop this sort of deliberately induced decay, that on the contrary, the most likely strategy to stop it is to strike at its promoters, discredit, disempower, and disenfranchise those who are causing it. That is a necessarily political act; it may be a necessarily violent act as well. The author is too polite to point this out. I am not.