The Empire 717

Middle Class Strife Left Out of Conversation
Peter S. Goodman  Updated: 12-14-10 08:45 AM


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/14/middle-class-strife-left-_n_796196.
html

Oh, to live in Washington, where the annoyances of external reality are so
conveniently ignored and The Conversation can be changed like an un-liked
song on the national iPod.

Was it not just a couple of weeks ago that The Conversation was all about
the supposed five-alarm emergency of the federal budget deficit and the
hellish consequences that surely awaited the continuation of profligate
spending? Never mind. The political establishment decided to tack another
$900 billion on the federal tab to stave off an apparently more dire
crisis: the prospect that tax cuts lavished on people wealthy enough to
worry about mooring charges might soon expire.

Now, the only talk that seems capable of sustaining the Conversation is
whether tax cuts for the richest will be extended again two years forward,
and how this will play for those determined to become President.

How can we generate quality jobs by the million and prevent more homeowners
from sliding into foreclosure? How can we arrest the long-running breakdown
in American middle class life? These are fragments of a narrative long
since discarded as politically infertile. They no longer fit into the
format of the Sunday talk shows, where the only real question is who won
the week, because no one is even trying to win on these points. Not this
week. Not any week. The unemployment rate remains snagged at nearly 10
percent and 6.3 million people have been officially out of work for six
months and longer, but the Conversation has moved on.

If only the topic of discussion could be so easily be dispatched around the
dining room tables of ordinary Americans (an institution increasingly
dependent on food stamps). There, the conversation seems stuck on the
puzzle of the age: How to get by with less. How to pretend that, despite
all indications to the contrary, better days lie ahead, because that's how
things are supposed to go in the movie version of this land of limitless
opportunity.

That dream has become increasingly difficult to sustain in the face of a
broad sagging of national fortunes, a point brought home with discomfiting
clarity by a new study released this morning by the Rockefeller Foundation.
The report, "Standing on Shaky Ground: Americans' Experiences With Economic
Insecurity," lays out just how savagely most Americans have been battered
by the Great Recession and the degree to which fundamental economic anxiety
has insinuated itself into the national psyche. It reads like a catalog of
needs deferred, hopes relinquished and sustenance denied as people have
lost their peace of mind, along with their jobs and savings.

Between March 2008 and September 2009 -- a span that captures the worst of
the recession -- more than nine in ten American households suffered either
a "substantial decline in their wealth or earnings," or a significant drain
on their funds due to an emergency, such as an expensive health crisis or
the need to help a relative, according to the report, which draws on
surveys of more than 2,000 people.

Far from an affliction reserved for the poor, the recession spread
widespread pain across the income spectrum, even as the consequences proved
sharpest for those at the bottom. Even in households with incomes ranging
between $60,000 and $100,000 a year, among those who suffered the loss of
wages or large unexpected medical bills, more than half reported having
been "unable to meet at least one basic need." Put simply, they had lost
their homes due to foreclosure or eviction, skipped meals, or dispensed
with necessary medical care.

The report adds the imprimatur of academic authority to a reality that most
ordinary people already know: Long before the headlines became consumed
with economic crisis in 2008, times were already lean. Jobs were scarce and
wages were stagnating, if not declining. People whose parents had been
accustomed to expecting more as the years unfolded were contending with the
likelihood of diminished aspirations as work became less rewarding and the
costs of education housing and health care climbed.

Anxiety about job security jumped dramatically over the last two years for
most Americans, but concerns about retirement savings, medical bills and
housing changed little: They were already as common in 2007 as they were
during the worst period of the recession, the study found.

And yet, despite the conspicuous evidence that large numbers of people are
still ensnared by this recession, despite the abundance of signs that the
last quarter-century has proven cruelly inadequate for people accustomed to
living on what they can earn, The Conversation in Washington is surreally
divorced from this reality. President Obama and his advisers insist they
had to accept the extension of tax cuts for the wealthiest -- a primary
source of the aggravated inequality that has afflicted the economy -- in
order to get some relief. This was the cost of extending emergency
unemployment benefits for people who have reached the limit. This was the
cost of lowering payroll taxes in a bid to spur jobs.

But none of that addresses the long-term vibrancy of the economy. None of
that amounts to a viable plan to help nurture new industries and provoke
serious job growth. That will take money and time and political fight. It
will require a sustained effort and a willingness to take on the enemies of
change in Washington -- a bipartisan interest group that seems to hold the
votes on everything. And there is no sign of that today, alas.

It is as if the mode of thinking on Wall Street -- where prosperity is
measured in incremental movements in share prices -- has so saturated the
Congress and the Obama administration that an unemployment epidemic and a
foreclosure crisis is, as they say, already priced into the market. It has
been accepted as the new baseline of the political discussion, a facet of
life so taken for granted that it is hardly even worth discussing.

If the findings in the paper released this day were new, they would surely
inspire immediate action. If terrorists were planning a plot that could, in
one cataclysm, visit such damage on American households as has been
collectively absorbed in recent years, whole arms of the government would
now be in full crisis mode. Instead, the chattering class goes on, picking
over the electoral implications of one tax scheme or another. The
Conversation is a small-minded, dispiriting drone.

"There's planet earth and there's planet Washington," says Yale University
political scientist Jacob S. Hacker, the study's lead author. "The
telescopes on planet Washington seem not powerful enough to reach to planet
earth."