Middle Class Would Be Sweet Right About Now

Here's an article with an interesting point, covered in a sea of garbage.

First the interesting point: one-third of those who self-identified as "middle-class" in 2008 now call themselves "lower-class" or "lower-middle-class." As the author, Kevin Drum, notes:

Class self-identification is deeply tied up with culture, not just income, and this decline means that a lot of people—about one in six Americans—now think of themselves as not just suffering an income drop, but suffering an income drop they consider permanent. Permanent enough that they now live in a different neighborhood, associate with different friends, and apparently consider themselves part of a different culture than they did just six years ago.

This speaks to me, as I'm one of those who considered myself middle-class in 2008 and now consider myself lower-class. I have suffered a permanent income drop. I have come to the realization that, if I want my family to prosper, I have to leave America. Like my ancestors who left Germany and Ireland and Greece and Czechia in the second half of the 19th century, I have to emigrate.

I'm not sure yet where we're going; most countries have much more stringent immigration requirements now than back then. So far I've looked into Belize, Chile, China, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. But more on that some other time.

Now for the sea of garbage. Drum quotes the Nobel Laureate in Polarized Nonsense as writing, "Conservatives claim that character defects are the source of poverty." No, Paul, they don't, but it's a lot easier to make that position look stupid than to engage the actual conservative argument. Another writer known for perpetuating New Yorkers' stereotypes of conservatives, Andrew Sullivan, writes, "I have old childhood friends who are out of work or between jobs, or have kids with special needs who are going up on Facebook every day with brutal takedowns of Obamacare."

Ah, the elephant in the room. Obamacare. Because it is Obamacare that has moved me from the middle class to the lower class. It is Obamacare that has made it so I have to move my family to Chile or China to be able to work again. I mean really work, not stock shelves at Petco for 29 hours per week and then stock shelves at Target for another 29 hours per week. Sullivan's friends are angry about Obamacare because it is Obamacare that has made them out of work or between jobs. Hence the "brutal takedowns." But since Sullivan, like Krugman and Drum, comes from the view that Obamacare can never be wrong, the real explanation, of course, is that his West Virginia friends are just too partisan. "...they have no scruples about savaging anything with a D next to it."

It's not the D next to Obamacare that makes us erstwhile middle-classers hate it. It's the way it killed the American dream so quickly, leaving us in a position our ancestors left Europe 150 years ago to avoid.

via oneofthebest

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