For a long time now I’ve been interested in “The Middle Class”, or as I call it, The Big MC™ What it is, what it means and how it’s been used over the years. My fascination comes from two sources; my own personal experience and then the use of The Big MC in today’s Liberal shaping of the term.
America’s greatest allure is that through the promise of Liberty any individual is able to achieve that goal of leaving the days of back breaking labor to the days of our fathers and giving a better life to our children. It is our birthright as a nation that our citizens are able to have a better tomorrow than a better yesterday. It’s our hope, our collective yearning, that our drive to and from the salt mines will bring better days, that has framed our national dialogue.
It is both ironic and horrifying that the same should be used as a wedge to drive us apart and serve to prevent that very dream from it’s manifest.
First, my own experience. My father was a teacher, my mom – a homemaker and later a bank teller. She stayed in the house until all of us were in school and then took a job working at the local bank. However, even when staying and caring for the home, she earned what money she could by watching and running a daycare. There were 6 of us; 4 kids and the folks. We had a 3 bedroom house. While we never went without bread and milk, we did use free and reduced lunches at school. 1 TV – 2 phones.
My brother wore every stitch of clothing that I owned as he grew into ’em. My sister wore of that what she could as well. Christmas and birthdays were modest and we did get 1 “HotWheel” car every time we went to Mankato to shop for groceries for the month. This trip to Mankato represented the 1 and only time each month we got to eat in a restaurant. And even then, that restaurant was Hardee’s.
I don’t remember having a TV or a phone in my bedroom, but I think that my younger brother did before he graduated. I got a digital alarm clock as a Christmas present. Of course, Santa addressed that gift to both my brother and I. A fact that would manifest itself when I moved to the basement years later; we took turns sharing it month to month. Not until I was 16 did we own a computer, and even then it cost $400.00 or more.
I don’t think that I ever considered us poor. We always had food and always had clothes. I never ever remember hearing my folks talk, after they thought we were sleeping, that we wouldn’t have the money to pay the mortgage. I think I can grasp the concept that my folks would have hoped us kids would grow up to live comfortably in The Big MC. As a child, we were barely hanging on.
So, as we just finish a brush with any Libertarian’s dream; a government shut down, I see this:
Plouffe said that Ryan’s budget proposal had some good ideas in it, but that it put too much of the economic burden of debt reduction on economically vulnerable portions of the population.
“Seniors, the poor, the middle class in the congressional Republican plan are asked to bear most of the burden,” Plouffe said. “If you weren’t giving enormous tax cuts to millionaires, you wouldn’t have to do that.”
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Plouffe collects the poor and The Great MC into a group, adds the Seniors in as added tastes and says that we should tax the rest way higher than we already are. And the simple use of the language implies that the poor, and that group the poor wants to become, are victims. The Great MC are sacrosanct and the poor are the pitied.
So, I ask you, what is The Middle Class? What makes someone Middle Class and someone else – well, not? Is it the realization of a home and a car and college? Can The Middle Class be obtained by saving a poor man’s salary? Or is The Middle Class the realization of an education or just plain old hard work; i.e. a Middle Class salary?
My take is that The Great MC has never been larger and that they’ve ever had it so good. And Obama wants to make it worse for ’em in the name of making it better for ’em.
What say you?