Income Gap More Like a Chasm

From the LA Times courtesy of the Daily Kos:

But let's forget illegal immigration for a moment, because if you ask me, we've got other economic problems in Southern California, and here's a thumbnail sketch:

Despite a relatively healthy economy on paper, middle-income jobs are as scarce as intelligent screenplays, and that has more to do with the death of manufacturing than the influx of illegal immigrants.

Meanwhile, you've got to be Eli Broad to afford a house in this cuckoo real estate market, and thousands of kids can't get through high school, let alone move on to a college and university system that isn't what it used to be.

What this means is that we've got $20-million houses offering spectacular views down the hill and into the Third World. If not for the fact that it takes forever to get anywhere on the bus, we'd have a revolution on our hands.

So the question I've been asking public officials and civic leaders is what we can do about the income gap that runs like a fault line through the land, dividing the haves from the help.

Click here for the rest.

I think it's safe to say that one can generalize the "economic problems in Southern California" to the rest of the country. Good jobs providing middle class incomes are a thing of the past, by and large, and what few remain continue to vanish at an alarming rate. As the blogger over at Kos who introduced this piece said, "the resultant social and economic distress is not just trickle-down fallout - it's a directly orchestrated policy decision from the elite of this nation." Indeed, the middle class in the United States was created by New Deal and post WWII federal economic policy, and it is policy, not hard times, not psuedo-laws of economics, not individual failure to live up to some constructed ideal of what a worker should be, that is now dismantling the middle class. It doesn't have to be this way, and the above excerpted essay has some good common sense suggestions for how to dig us out of this hole. Go check it out.

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