You Call This A Middle Class?

[Tom Joad]

A pretty good article on how the middle class is being eroded away.

http://www.alternet.org/economy/you-...age=1#bookmark

Welcome to the new America where good people with honest jobs are losing money each month — and scrambling to live.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics conducted a study of workers who were laid off during the Great Recession and found a new job. More than half are earning less money. During the recession, wage growth dropped from 3.5 percent a year to 1.5 percent, and has been stuck there ever since. The economic upheaval that began in 2007 was not a recession. It was a reordering. Employers used the downturn as an opportunity to ratchet down wages, which are likely to remain at their current levels.

Any reordering of society must be accompanied by a justification for the new arrangement. Conservatives loathe the term “economic justice,” because they see it as an indictment of the marketplace, which they consider a perfect mechanism for ensuring every worker gets what he or she deserves. If you earn $7.25 an hour, that must be all you’re worth. (Actually, the free market absolutists at the Wall Street Journal and the American Enterprise Institute believe minimum-wage workers are not even worth that much, but benefit from a government-imposed mechanism that inflates their paychecks.)

In order for this free market version of economic justice to make sense, wages can’t be low because the economy is not producing enough good jobs; they have to be low because employees lack the training and/or the work ethic to command more money.

“Income is a direct result of the effort put towards earning the income,” Ron Anari, a senior vice president of ICAP Plc, a broker of U.S. government debt, wrote in response to a Bloomberg Global Poll on inequality. “Our greatest shortcoming is not the income inequality of the top 2% from the bottom 2% but the systematic destruction of the middle class through handouts creating the entitled and complacent class.”

It’s Social Calvinism, a worldview that does not just see money as a reward for virtuous behavior, but as evidence of virtue itself. The 1 percent consider themselves an Economic Elect, whose wealth is a byproduct of self-discipline, intelligence, thriftiness and tolerance for risk. As inequality increases, so does the winners’ conviction that they are more equal than everyone else.

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