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I’m a small business owner
and a middle-class American. When I started this column for this newspaper, it
was about how the middle class in America has been losing ground over
the past 20 years. I’ve read lots of evidence that this is true, from Paul
Krugman’s book on the topic, The Great
Divergence, Timothy Noah’s ten-part series in Slate entitled “Why We Can’t
Ignore Growing Income Inequalities,” and recent CNN stories on income
stagnation.
But what I came to realize is that I don’t need to tell anyone who is a member
of the working class that he or she isn’t making any more money than they did
five or 10 years ago, and that their dollars don’t stretch as far as they used
to.
During the real estate
boom, we could ignore the fact that we didn’t get raises, not even
cost-of-living increases, because we could use our homes as an ATM and withdraw
a little cash whenever we ran short, like when we needed a new car or our
parents or children were sick. Some of us even used that money for less
responsible spending, like a vacation now and then.
But that all ended when banks stopped lending to anyone but each other, and now
even those of us who still have jobs or small businesses can’t get loans, even
from banks and credit unions we have done business with for many years.
So I decided that I would write about what our recently elected members of
Congress, state representatives, and County
Commission are doing
about this problem of income inequality. After all, they campaigned on bringing
jobs back to us and jump-starting the economy.
What I found was that the amount of legislation they have passed in
the nearly five months they have been in office to address this problem
would make a mighty short column.
Our state legislators have been wasting time on a voter ID bill and trying to
nullify federal health-care legislation, when they should have been working on
ways to hold the line on de-funding education. Now more than ever we need to
prepare our children for 21st century jobs that are going overseas.
Our new representatives in
Raleigh have been pressuring Governor Perdue to roll back incentives for
companies coming to North Carolina, incentives which brought Google, Apple,
Facebook, and WiPro data centers here in the past three years. They probably
would have taken away collective bargaining too, like the legislators in Wisconsin, except that North
Carolinians already gave up their right to that in 1959.
The new Republican majority in the U.S. House hasn’t done any better. Even
though House Speaker John Boehner said on national television (Fox News,
1/30/2011), “Election day showed that the American people said we should focus
on jobs,” the Republican agenda has been anything but. We have rehashed old
arguments about what marriage should be, who should have health care, and the
de-funding of National Public Radio instead of figuring out how to keep the
economy rolling.
The new Republican majority has decried the stimulus package (which many of
them voted for) as government waste, but they haven’t given us a clue as to
what they are going to do now that the stimulus is over. They claim to be
deficit hawks but are continuing to ignore the elephant in the middle of the budget
called defense spending, which is a third more than Social Security and three
times as much as Medicaid. All of this while ignoring the problem I started out
to write about: that over the past 30 years, income has grown nearly 300
percent for the top 1 percent but only 25 percent for middle-income Americans.
And they decided to give that 1 percent of the richest Americans a tax cut.
We Americans are ever optimistic. We believe that someday our ships will come
in, and we’ll be as rich, glamorous, and successful as the celebrities we see
on TV. But for the last 30 years or so, the deck has been increasingly stacked
against us. We elected a new bunch of dealers, but it turns out the deck is
full of jokers.
As the old saying goes, “If, after the first 20 minutes, you don't know who the
sucker at the table is, it's you.”
Marsha Walpole runs a small business with her
husband in Sugar Grove.
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