Trump’s appeal to a declining middle class
Israel told me that most voters see their own position as fragile, vulnerable to collapse in hard times. People who in the past blamed structural forces for their difficulties, including globalization and trade, now “blame politicians.”
.. Members of the middle class are living paycheck to paycheck, they are anxious about terrorism coming to their own backyard, and they believe that the rule of ‘if you work hard and play by the rules, you can get ahead’ is in danger of disappearing from the American ethos. Most important, the middle class believes that the rich play by a different set of rules and just get richer, but they also believe that the poor get all the programs and benefits, and all they get is the bill.
.. The American dream used to mean something – that you could count on good American wages and benefits for a hard day’s work. But that’s changing as big corporation have been shipping our jobs overseas and lobbyists have been rewriting all the rules. In just the last eight years, the average white family has lost about one-eighth of its wealth and seen its income drop for the first time in 80 years. If you were African-American or Latino just starting to catch up through hard work and determination, you’ve lost more than half of everything you put away. Ordinary people, whether white, black or brown, shouldn’t be paying for a crash they didn’t cause. We can’t afford to be a nation of haves and have-nots, where young people can’t find their first job and middle-aged construction workers may have seen their last. We can’t afford to be a nation where white kids are living in their parents’ basements, where too many young men color are living on the streets. It’s time to return to America where everyone willing to work and play by the rules can count on a fair shot. Opportunity should knock on every door no matter how humble the home, or who lives in it. That’s what I promised my children, that’s the American dream.
.. The 2014 real median income number is 6.5 percent below its 2007, pre-crisis level. It is 7.2 percent below the number in 1999. A middle-income American family, in other words, makes substantially less money in inflation-adjusted terms than it did 15 years ago.