The Late Great Middle Class

For the past generation the Middle Class has been stuck or declining while tip top incomes and accumulated wealth have grown enormously. Taxes that previous Republicans thought fair have been labeled "Communist" and "class warfare".

Taxing the rich isn't Communist. Nor is it Communist to pay working people decently; it's practical. Better paid employees pay the taxes that build the roads but they also make better consumers, which makes a stronger economy. A topheavy economy, like the one the Republicans have built, is unstable and more likely to collapse. Here is an excellent report from the BBC website.

Business insiders are noticing what's happening to the middle class, and they're worried even if the very rich don't care. They know you can't run an economy on jewelry and yacht purchases.

As noted in The Economist (hardly a leftist magazine), this ongoing recession, caused by the recklessness of the largest investors and financial institutions, is causing the impoverishment of the middle class, but is also discarding an entire generation of young people. New graduates from college may never gain their footing, careerwise and incomewise.

And there's this, from Forbes, on Rick Perry's odd rant that the middle class doesn't pay its share of taxes.

It isn't only the "liberal" media that's acknowledging how our tax structure tilts to benefit the upper classes. (And how it doesn't create jobs.) Responsible conservative journals are writing about it too. Our economy is unfairly rigged. Besides being unfair, it's also less productive and impractical.