I Believe it is Time to Start Asking the Correct Questions

[Angry Dragon]

Job Creators: Who really are the job creators?? I always thought it was supply and demand economics. If there is no demand then the price would go down. If there was demand then either the supply would go up or the supply would stay the same and the price would go up. So it seems that demand is a very huge part of this equation. So if people have less money then there will be less demand.

However republicans would have you believe that corporations will just create jobs because their taxes go down. Under this scenario they will just put more money in their pockets and not put any money into the system to create demand.


Middle Class: What really is the middle class?? I have yet to hear an elected official to give a definition that makes any sense. It is time to ask all politicians to give a definition and if they refuse then they have no right to use the word.


Small Business: What really is a small business?? They same holds true here. Politicians have no idea what a small business really is. Ask the politicians. Don't know, don't use it.

[Chan790]

1. We are.

All three. Well, increasingly some of us no longer are the middle class...but we used to be and should be again.

[Angry Dragon]

2. Are you saying that the questions are being asked??

It seems you know the definition of middle class, care to share??
For I have no idea what it is .........

[Chan790]

3. No. I'm saying the answer to all three question is "we are."

Job Creators: We, the 99% of the population who are not the upper-class, are actually the job creators. We create jobs though the expenditure of our wages and labor. The 1% don't create jobs...they're largely the "economic vampire" class.

Middle Class: The middle class was for the majority of the 20th century the large class of the population that were neither the destitute-poor or the much-smaller class of the wealthy. At that time, the majority of America's wealth was in the hands of the middle-class; a class made up mostly of skilled-labor which rose in economic prominence following WW II. The vast majority of people posting on DU are middle-class or would have been if the GOP had not destroyed the economy and shoved us back into poverty.

Small Business: This one seems the easiest but is in some sense the trickiest. A small business is a business that has few enough employees that the owner actually knows who the people working for him are. It's a business where if you call up and ask to speak to the owner, you can usually get them on the phone. It's a business that often times but not always has a connection to a specific locale. In a more technical sense, it's a business with less than 500 employees and revenues under $5M/year. Most small businesses today are home-based sole-proprietorships--I am one; I am a freelance writer and I teach creative writing. Most small business owners are members of the middle class. None of these are really a great answer, they seem to dance around a definition rather than bulls-eye it.

[Sekhmets Daughter]

5. To further your point...

The rich have never created jobs in any large degree, except for those menial jobs of gardener, housekeeper etc. Jobs are created by working and middle class people who aspire to be rich. They form businesses, invent products, devise services others want....

[Sekhmets Daughter]

4. It is the huge segment of the population

that fills in the space between the bottom 20% and the top 20% of income. Years ago it was further broken down to working class, middle class, and upper middle class. Working class people were generally blue collar workers, the middle class was made up of skilled labor and lower level management. Upper middle class was your middle level to upper level management, small business owners, successful sales people, and young professionals. It is a fluid classification at best. The Income stagnation of the past 35 years has screwed up everything. Politicians know exactly what it is, they won't say because they are largely responsible for driving a huge swath of the population right into poverty.

In 2010 the median wage in the US was $26,364...to put that in perspective, when my skilled laborer/lower level management father retired in 1971 he was earning $19,900. The same groceries that you could buy for $20. in 1971 today cost $107.68. That's a very grim picture.

[Warpy]

6. I have always thought of the middle class this way

They were a buffer between the working class and the wealthy, usually university educated and earning enough to feed themselves, house themselves, pay for medical care, educate their children beyond public school, take yearly vacations, afford some household help (whether or not they had it) and save for retirement. I grew up in such a household.

Then first the OPEC oil shocks came along and their inflation blamed on working people earning too much money and wages never pretended to keep pace with double digit inflation. Then double digit interest rates hit us. Then Reagan got in and skewed the tax rates, starving government to the point that states had to make up the difference by hiking all the regressive taxes on working people. Everybody but the 1% took a beating.

My dad did surprise me with a portfolio on his death that has given me enough to live on, although in the mid 5 figures I have still not achieved the middle class lifestyle. I think that for 98% of us, that lifestyle might be gone forever.

However, it was the middle class as I defined it that gave stability to the country, that was able to educate the next generation of professionals and leaders without burdening them with debt, and that promised the working class that there just might be enough social mobility out there to make things better for their own children, if those children worked hard to become scholarship material. They also provided seed money for entrepreneurship and the bulk of the revenue to both the Feds and Social Security. All this was destroyed by the war against wages that became a war against everybody but the wealthy.

This was the middle class, how it lived and how it should now be defined. You'll notice I didn't assign a dollar amount because it is different if you live in a coastal city or East Buttcrack in flyover country. It is now largely gone, the lifestyle existing mostly on debt rather than income these days.

Large, strong and stable middle classes are an aberration and don't exist unless governments are there to nurture them and provide them with the tools to grow and flourish. The war on wages that became a tax war has ensured that those tools have been taken away. People who should now be middle class are burdened with debt that puts them into the same paycheck to paycheck lifestyle as labor.

If we want a middle class in this country (and it's in the interest of everyone, even the 1% to have one), we are going to have to find people to run for office who know how to grow one.

[We People]

7. Don't expect a straight, serious, or honest answer from Republicans. Sounds like you don't anyway...

It's just a reliable rule of thumb these days not to trust a lot of what they say!

[ConnorMarc]

8. I Got Something For You To See O.P.

Check this out...

[Angry Dragon]

9. I have dial-up and it takes forever and a day to download

[Bonobo]

10. Here's another: "What kind of energy independence is achievable?'

Because the lie that both sides tell about oil independence is old, very old. Enough of the lying.

[Angry Dragon]

11. Good one ..........