Graphic: The Pew Research Center
While the mainstream media and blogdom engaged in hyper-dissection of General Petraeus’ testimony, a stunning report went unnoticed. Its statistics detail an unprecedented change in America, one that should have us all worried. Unfortunately while our Presidential candidates were elbowing each other to get their soundbite with Petraeus on the nightly news, none of them said even a word about a report that will decide who wins the coming election.
Inside the Middle Class: Bad Times Hit the Good Life from the Pew Research Center may be the most important document about what is happening to America in a long time. Everyone should at least read the web page that contains a summary of the main findings.
In short, the report documents a development in America that should be the main topic of discussion in the coming election, for its shows that this nation is undergoing not a Depression but something totally new–what I term a Repression. During the last few decades of economic expansion, the rising tide has not lifted all boats, but instead seems to be sinking most of them.
A bold-faced sentence at the beginning of the report stops you in your tracks:
Fewer Americans now than at any time in the past half century believe they’re moving forward in life.
This is followed by a graph that will determine who wins Congress and the White House in November.
Those who follow this blog know of my fondness for graphs, but this may well be the single most important graph that I have ever published. Note two frightening developments–the lines look like they are about to cross for the first time since the Gallup Survey has asked the question and they are moving toward that crossing with dramatic speed.
In a little over a year, the pessimism factor has jumped an astounding ten points! At that rate it is quite possible they may cross some time around the November election. If they do cross, their intersection will mark a rubbing together that could set off some serious political sparks.
If you have any concern for America’s future make a copy of that graph and carry it with you. Show it to anyone who will listen. If by some miracle you happen to pass through the pre-debate question screening make sure you ask the candidates about it. Put in on your refrigerator to remind you of what is happening to this country. Stick on your car bumper.
Another bold-faced entry in the report suggests what could trigger those sparks:
For the past two decades middle-income Americans have been spending more and borrowing more. Housing has been the key driver of both trends.
Read that paragraph out loud–very loud, because maybe someone will hear you. I’m going to make another of my predictions–one word will define November and that word is the first word of the second sentence.
After this comes the political dynamite, suitably in bold face:
At a time when these borrow-and-spend habits have spread, Americans say it has become harder to sustain a middle-class lifestyle.
Economic, demographic, technological and sociological changes since 1970 have moved some groups up the income ladder and pushed others down.
Most middle class adults agree with the old saw that the Republican Party favors the rich while the Democratic Party favors the middle class and the poor.
But let’s turn away from statistics for now, turn away and do something we Americans have found uncomfortable for almost a generation, the lifespan of that ominous graph which is really a downward spiral, a whirlpool of circumstance that threatens to pull us all under. Let’s really look around us and acknowledge the reality we see and hear.
For years we have averted our gaze the way people do around something particularly unpleasant. We can take in slasher movies by the dozen, but it isn’t some creep in a hockey mask who really worries us, it’s the “For Sale” sign on the house next door, the coworker cleaning out her desk, the friend with the mounting health care bills. Our monthly credit card and bank statements inspire more fear than a Stephen King novel.
The Pew data may be unprecedented in American history–which is disturbing enough–but even more unprecedented has been our passivity as that whirlpool pulls us closer to the abyss. Researchers have churned out reports warning us about the decline of the middle class for years, but each table and chart has found itself subject to a kind of Lake Wobegon effect that believes all the bad stuff is happening somewhere else but we live where everyone is in the middle class.
The Pew study confirms the Lake Wobegon effect still lives, for it found that 40% of those with incomes below $20,000 still believe they are middle class. At the other end of the scale, a third of those making over $150,000 also thought they were middle class.
The reality of what is happening is nothing like Lake Wobegon. Pew researchers confirmed that the playing field is becoming increasingly uneven:
From 1983 to 2004, the median net worth of upper income families grew by 123%, while the median net worth of middle income families grew by just 29%. In effect, those in the middle have been making progress in absolute terms while falling behind in relative terms.
It is hard to believe we do not know this. We experience it every day on the freeway as we see the Mercedes and Jaguars pass us on the right. We see it in the clothes and accessories of those who walk by us at the mall. Those who raked in that 123% don’t just celebrate it they flaunt it; flashing their bling with an in-your-face insouciance.
Once we Americans were a feisty lot. Alexis de Tocqueville saw us as barely governable. We almost seemed to carry chips on our shoulders which periodically would erupt in social protests, mass movements and even throwing a few punches.
Today the talk shows and the Internet are full of angry voices, but that is all they are–voices. Are they doing anything? Those voices have all the tone of water cooler and coffee shop rants, a way of blowing off steam, but they show little evidence of taking action.
The last time in our history when the gap between the rich and the rest of us was this wide was a time of ferment and unrest. William Jennings Bryan swooped out of the prairies and threw such a scare into the plutocrats that the more astute of them began to realize things had to change.
You actually had a situation in which the two most popular Republican and Democratic leaders-Bryan and Teddy Roosevelt–both were outspoken reformers. But more impressive were the thousands of grassroots reformers who prompted historian Richard Hofstader to give those times the title, The Age of Reform.
Today we ask where are the Bryans, the Eugene Debs, the Ida Wells, the Upton Sinclairs, the Joe Hills, the W.E.B. DuBois, the Jane Addams of our times. The Pew report suggests one possible answer: we don’t know who to blame or what to do.
Among middle class respondents, about a quarter (26%) blame the government, 15% blame the price of oil, 11% blame the people themselves, 8% blame foreign competition, 5% blame private corporations and the rest cite other factors or do not have an answer.
But one little noticed factor stands out in these data, it is no longer Republicans who blame government for their problems. For both Democrats and Independents, government ranked as the number one cause of their troubles, where for Republicans it was the “people themselves.”
This suggests that at least some people believe their government no longer represents them. If that feeling grows things could get interesting as the campaign develops. It certainly suggests there is a theme for some candidate to pick up.
In the end the Pew report leaves us with a disturbing question–what will happen if those lines cross with a clang like two swords meeting?
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