Free Republic

Strike up a conversation with any taxi cab driver or any fry cook at a roadside diner and the word “inequality” is unlikely to ever come up. That’s not on the list of top concerns for middle class America. It’s also not on the list of concerns for the world’s poor. Millions of people are willing to risk life and limb just to come here and start out at the bottom of the income ladder.(Don’t the immigrants realize how unequal things are? Yes, they want to live in a country where a poor immigrant can become a billionaire.)So why is...

We just got more evidence that the middle class in America is dying. According to brand new numbers that were just released by the Social Security Administration, 51 percent of all workers in the United States make less than $30,000 a year. Let that number sink in for a moment. You can’t support a middle class family in America today on just $2,500 a month – especially after taxes are taken out. And yet more than half of all workers in this country make less than that each month. In order to have a thriving middle class, you have got...

Presidential candidate Donald Trump's newly released tax plan is putting the plight of the middle class in the spotlight. On Sunday, Trump told CBS News anchor Scott Pelley his tax plan is "a substantial reduction for the middle-income people ... [b]ecause our middle class, Scott, is being absolutely decimated." The decline of the middle class has been going on for over 50 years, and no politician, pundit, or media outlet has focused on it sufficiently.Who are the poverty pimps?Any politicians who have ever voted for legislation that took money out of Americans’ pockets and put it in failed programs in...

There’s an old chestnut about how a frog in water that is very slowly heated will not jump out. Instead it will remain in the water and be boiled alive. This is most likely untrue as frogs are not as stupid as people, but the metaphor is often used to describe how cultures can evolve in terrible directions. Anyone over the age of 40 understands this because they can think back to their childhood, seeing how things have changed, for good and ill. A better example of this is the immigration crisis in Europe. Over the last few decades, European...

If Western countries want to disprove the dire forecasts of Karl Marx, we must think creatively about how to make the middle class more prosperous and secure Go back, for a moment, nearly 30 years. In March 1987, Margaret Thatcher visited Mikhail Gorbachev, the reforming leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in Moscow. Sitting in the Kremlin, the two argued for hours. At one point, Mr. Gorbachev accused Mrs. Thatcher of leading the party of the “haves” and of fooling the people about who really controlled the levers of power. The Iron Lady had an answer: “I...

While hardly as dramatic as Bill Gross' last letter in which he urged readers to "go to cash" as a result of the "Frankenstein creation" that ZIRP has created, his latest letter "Saved by Zero" takes a calmer stance and taking a page out of Paul Marshall's FT Op-Ed profiled yesterday, urges central banks to "get off zero" as the "developed world is beginning to run on empty because investments discounted at near zero over the intermediate future cannot provide cash flow or necessary capital gains to pay for past promises in an aging society. And don’t think that...

...There’s a huge chasm between the ruling class of American society and those over whom they rule. It’s not simply a disagreement over the direction of society. In many respects, the duty of the ruling class is to guide their subjects to the right policies. In a sane society, the people in charge are smarter and more knowledgeable so they better be more right than the masses. No, the dispute today is over the nature of society and it is an irreconcilable dispute. The ruling class of today imagines a world that does not include a thriving, rambunctious middle class...

  Wall Street and its senior bankers have laid America down  to sleep.  They have done it in less than one generation.  They lost their way and corrupted their role in our capitalist society, having used wealth to control and manipulate the political process, producing ever increasing, and even obscene, wealth. For the purpose of this article, Wall Street refers to the agglomerated mess of brokerages and banks invigorated by Clinton’s passing of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999, repealing the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, separating deposits from the speculation of the stock market casino.  After which, Clinton doubled down with...

Western media has often been criticized by Israel for only on rare occasions presenting Gaza as anything other than an open-air prison suffering from Israeli blockades, but an unusual glimpse into the glamorous life of Gaza’s middle class made its way to light on Sunday. Articles such as an Economist expose in 2012 detailing golden Porsches and Hummers cruising the streets of Gaza under corrupt Hamas rule were joined by a Washington Post report, revealing on Sunday how the “other half lives” in the terrorist enclave. The article begins by noting how under-reported the middle class aspect of Gazan life...

Last month I bought a house in Potomac, Md., a trade up on my current home, and was shocked to learn in the ensuing weeks that I couldn’t get a mortgage loan. First, I went to PNC bank. Then Wells Fargo. Then another. Denied. Denied. Denied. No, I don’t feel entitled to a loan, and the banks have every right not to lend me money. But my tale of woe tells a broader tale of what is going on in the lending industry these days. All the bankers told me the same thing: “Steve, if you’d walked in our bank...

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump clearly prides himself in shunning focus-group research. He refuses big campaign donations that he asserts make his opponents beholden to special interests. He seems to target no specific constituency. Many pollsters remain puzzled by Trump’s political appeal. “Republican support for Donald Trump just continues to grow,” said Patrick Murray, director of Monmouth Polling after its August survey, “with no clear sense of who his constituency really is.” Yet a constituency is emerging. Trump’s strongest supporters, roughly a quarter of Republican voters across the polls, are not dissuaded by any increased media scrutiny of their candidate....

In a scathing rebuke of the importance of U.S. manufacturing in The New Yorker ("What's So Great About Manufacturing?") James Ledbetter attempted to dismantle the benefits of manufacturing in our transformational age. Ledbetter, who is editor of Inc. Magazine and this website, is wrong. Here are 8 reasons U.S. manufacturing is great for America and critically important to focus policy solutions to help this job machine thrive. 1. Manufacturing creates strong middle-class jobs. 2. Manufacturing jobs create dignity. 3. Manufacturing creates wealth for a nation. 4. Manufacturing is critical during wars. 5. Factories are safer than ever before. 6. U.S....

President Obama is surreptitiously colluding with radical anti-growth environmentalists to force ideologically driven carbon-emission controls on the energy industry that will devastate the U.S. economy, congressional investigators have discovered. As the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) drew up rules aimed at limiting carbon emissions from power-generation plants, "key stakeholders — including the American public — had little to no influence over the debate while powerful environmental activist groups were given unprecedented access to and influence over administration officials," the Washington Times reported yesterday. Collusion between the EPA and the green's isn't exactly breaking news. They've been doing it for years, but...

<p>Smart politics is behind the alliance of the GOP’s two leading bomb-throwers.</p> <p>To many Republican presidential contenders, Sarah Palin is a skunk at the party, someone to be handled gingerly and kept at arm’s length.</p> <p>To Donald Trump, she is Cabinet material, “a special person,” and a worthy presidential contender in her own right.</p>

Hillary Clinton is a walking, talking cliche who spouts decades-old sound bites that were bad enough when her husband first delivered them but are painfully anachronistic today. Same old material, same old demagoguery. You would think a self-styled "progressive" would be less regressive and reactionary, but this woman apparently believes that the Clinton magic of the '90s can be dusted off and resurrected without the slightest rhetorical modification. The problem with that is that Clintonomics only works on the heels of Reaganomics and liberals have been squeezing every last ounce of Reaganomics out of our system. In her first major...

Ben Wattenberg died this week at the age of 81. He gave me my first job in Washington, as his research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank. (I returned to AEI as a fellow a few years ago, my office just a few doors down from where Ben used to work.) Ben was one of the last star pundits of what might be called the Old Order, before cable news and the Internet transformed the landscape. When everyone was rushing to CNN to shout at each other on "Crossfire," he launched a PBS show called "Think...

It’s no secret that the American middle class has been on the ropes for a while now. The problem isn’t just a crippling recession and an economic “recovery” that has mostly gone to the richest one percent, but the larger shifting of wealth from the middle to the very top that’s taken place since the late ‘70s. Add in things like the dismantling of unions that has accelerated apace since Ronald Reagan crushed the air-traffic controllers, and we’ve seen the middle class more solid in places like Canada, Germany, and Scandinavia, and begin to grow in a number of nations...

The number of jobs in manufacturing has declined by 7,231,000--or 37 percent--since employment in manufacturing peaked in the United States in 1979, according to data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The real median household income of Americans who have completed high school--but have not attained a higher degree--also peaked in the 1970s and has declined since then. In fact, according to the Census Bureau (Tables H-13 and H-14), the real median household income of an American householder who has completed four years of high school peaked in 1973 at $56,395 in constant 2013 dollars. By 2013, it was...

Hillary Rodham Clinton calls them “everyday Americans.” Scott Walker prefers “hardworking taxpayers.” Rand Paul says he speaks for “people who work for the people who own businesses.” Bernie Sanders talks about “ordinary Americans.” The once ubiquitous term “middle class” has gone conspicuously missing from the 2016 campaign trail, as candidates and their strategists grasp for new terms for an unsettled economic era. The phrase, long synonymous with the American dream, now evokes anxiety, an uncertain future and a lifestyle that is increasingly out of reach. The move away from “middle class” is the rhetorical result of a critical shift: After...