War on the Middle Class: How the Government, Big Business, and Special Interest Groups Are Waging War onthe American Dream and How to Fight Back - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Lou Dobbs is the anchor and managing editor of CNN’s Lou Dobbs Tonight. He writes for Money and U.S. News & World Report and manages the Lou Dobbs Money Letter. He has received the Peabody Award, the Luminary Award by the Business Journalism Review, the Horatio Alger Association Award for Distinguished Americans, as well as an Emmy Lifetime Achievement award.

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Chapter 1

I cannot imagine what the men who wrote these words would think of America today: We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. I don't know about you, but I haven't consented to much of what government has done in the past twenty years.

Our declaration states unequivocally that all men are created equal, and that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Our country was founded with the intent that class distinction and rigid social structure were things left behind in the old world and had no place in the new. The American Dream was, from the beginning, the promise of political democracy, a wide range of civil liberties, and the opportunity for economic prosperity...for each and every citizen.

The men who signed our Declaration of Independence were a mixture of the wealthy and the poor, the well educated and the uneducated. Revisionist history would have us believe that our nation's founders were uniformly elitists, wealthy and entitled men who were the only individuals capable of grasping the enormity of what it took to govern a new country. This was born of a very European notion that the aristocrats were born, or entitled, to public service. They point to Thomas Jefferson, a landowner with extensive holdings. Or John Hancock, who inherited one of the largest estates in the colonies. Or Samuel Adams, owner of a brewery. They rarely cite the fact that Benjamin Franklin was one of seventeen children of a candle maker, and spent much of his youth as an indentured printer's apprentice and clerk. Or that George Taylor worked in an iron mill. Or that William Whipple was a merchant seaman. Or that George Walton was an orphan who apprenticed as a carpenter.

The fifty-six men who signed the declaration were a diverse group, consisting of doctors, lawyers, soldiers, farmers, and merchants. Their backgrounds were varied. Some were born in one of the colonies, others came from disparate parts of Britain. Some went to Harvard, some went to Yale, some were schooled in England, some were schooled at home, others were entirely self-taught. Together these men forged a collective understanding of the needs and desires of the entire country, not of a few select and special interests.

Today the politically powerful and wealthy dominate our society, economy, and government. Never has social class been more distinct or disturbing in American society than it is now. As well as having become a nation sharply divided by partisan politics, race, religion, culture, and age, we are divided by what we do and what we have—or don't have. Our social, economic, and political divisions are all the more troubling because we Americans, or at least the vast majority of us, still truly believe in the democratic principles that have defined our nation from its founding: equality, individual freedom and responsibility, and economic opportunity.

Now a new reality is being forced upon us, a reality that is being shaped by elites who care little for the common good and the success of the great American experiment as it's been defined for two hundred years. Political, business, and academic elites have embraced a vision of the world that supersedes our mere nation, and what they apparently consider to be quaint notions of citizenship. Those making the rules, and often breaking them, are less representative of our country than at any time in our history. Elites are not interested in working people. They are dedicated to attaining power and money, and in the process deprive the middle class of economic opportunity, fair wages, and a voice in Washington. The arrogance and indifference of our elites not only give lie to the notion of America as a nation without class distinction, but their abuse of power has actually brought class division in America into stark relief. We ignore the clash between classes at our own peril.

Our reluctance to address the reality of what has become a class structure in the United States is born in part of our long-standing ideals of American society. Interestingly, the U.S. Census Bureau makes no mention of class but simply divides the population into five groups, in descending order of income. While the census's top quintile is comprised of families who make an average of more than $150,000 a year, for the purposes of this discussion let's consider our upper class as consisting of the top 1 percent of income earners, those making more than $400,000. The top 1 percent of our population earns, on average, more than $1 million per year, and is a heterogeneous group, including CEOs, Wall Street bankers and brokers, a lot of Hollywood actors and actresses, entertainers, professional athletes, and entrepreneurs.

The bottom 20 percent, or our lower class, includes families scraping by on just over ten thousand dollars a year. They are called the working poor, and barely survive.

The remaining three quintiles make up what is commonly understood to be our middle class, making between $26,000 and $150,000 per year. In purely economic terms, it's the people in the middle income brackets, between the richest 20 percent and the poorest 20 percent, who make up our middle class. The average U.S. income, interestingly, is $60,529, due to the fact that people making millions of dollars dramatically offset the income of those at the poverty level. In actuality, half of all Americans make more than $44,000, and half make less.

I would argue that the middle class includes Americans from all walks of life, working at almost every kind of job, and includes all but the very rich and the very poor. Most people in the middle class are from families in which one or both parents worked and strived for the best possible lives for their children. For generations, middle-class families have been able to rely on public schools to be the great equalizer. Even the poorest people in our country could rely on that same public education system—where intelligence and talent were often discovered and nurtured.

The breakdown in the public education system means that the meritocracy in our society has been compromised, and in some instances eradicated. And without a strong public school system that serves all of us regardless of wealth or poverty, a class system will become ever more firmly entrenched.

Some critics believe that money should not be the only index of class distinctions, and have proposed other definitions. Elizabeth Warren, a law professor at Harvard who has done extensive research on the issue, argues that finances alone don't provide enough information, and that using a scale that divides the population into fifths is too confining and doesn't take into account that some people move freely between those various quintiles. Instead, she's developed this baseline criteria for membership in the middle class: property ownership, higher education, and occupational prestige. People in the middle class have been to college, but have not necessarily graduated. They have, or have had, a "good job"—a job in the upper 80 percent of occupational prestige scores. And they have bought a home.

A recent comprehensive series on class by the New York Times identified occupation, income, education, and wealth as four criteria that—when viewed in various combinations—determine class status. Moving up the class ladder, according to the Times series, can be achieved by overcoming shortcomings in one area with strong showings in others. For instance, too little wealth can be offset by a superior education, while too little education can be offset by a prestigious...