Drum Major Institute's State of the Union analysis: Little for the current or aspiring middle class

[marmar]

DMI’s 2007 State of the Union Analysis Part 1: The Economy,Taxes, and the Budget





Introduction



There was little for current and aspiring middle-class Americans in tonight’s State of the Union Address.

On the domestic front, which is the concern of this report, President Bush wavered between promoting ideologically driven experiments to fix our most pressing problems and offering such detailed proposals that the larger challenges were obscured.

When it came to health care, the President opted to push an aggressive ideological agenda on the backs of middle-class Americans, offering “market-based” proposals that treat health care as if it were any other commodity and fail to address the real reasons behind its ballooning costs. On the economy, the President wants to reduce the deficit while maintaining his tax cuts that favor the very wealthy.

On issues like education and energy, the President’s proposals lacked a core vision or an admission that previous years of inaction and underfunding have made these problems far more intractable today than they had to be.

Listening to the speech, average Americans heard the President use those words that the droves of Americans who abandoned him and his party at the polls two months earlier wanted to hear. He spoke of improving access to health care and of providing a system of public education that would “leave no child behind.” He told us he would balance our federal budget. He promised to reduce America’s dependence on oil, to improve our environment, to secure the border and to save Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. He looked Americans in the eye and told them our economy was good and their lives were getting better.

But when one looks past the State of the Union’s middle class window dressing, one cannot help but notice the speech reflects a view of America and an approach to government that is at odds with the reality lived by average Americans. The flourishing economy described in the speech may reflect the view held by corporate CEOs and Wall Street bankers whose fortunes have certainly improved in the past year, but it bears little resemblance to the experience of middle-class Americans who worry about the security of their jobs, how they can afford to pay their mortgages, to send their children to college as well as to save for retirement, and who wonder why their dollar seems to buy less and less every year.

The President’s proposals, at their core, would implement a conservative ideology that doggedly protects the wealthiest Americas from tax hikes by sharply cutting social programs and absolve corporations from their obligation to protect the health and welfare of their employees by shifting those burdens to the workers themselves. And on issues like the environment, the President merely plays a shell game by distracting Americans with promises to reduce our nation’s consumption of oil while he discretely announces his desire to step up domestic oil production and to double the capacity of our nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

As the father of the President’s party, Abraham Lincoln, once wisely observed, “you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” Tonight, those who genuinely value the interests of the middle class and those aspiring to join the middle class have not been fooled.



The Economy & Taxes



President Bush: The economy is strong and improving.



“The future of hope and opportunity begins with a growing economy – and that is what we have… Unemployment is low, inflation is low, and wages are rising.”
DMI SAYS: “The President’s glowing report of the condition of the American economy, while reflective of the views of corporate CEOs and Wall Street bankers, is out of touch with the average American’s experience. Faced with escalating health care and college costs, personal debt rising to unsustainable levels, and an ever weakening system of retirement security, the middle class is not feeling nearly as positive as the President about their economic future.”



These days, corporate profits are growing and CEOs are picking up enormous paychecks. But ordinary Americans are just trying to get by. The costs of health care and of putting a kid through college keep on going up. And with the housing market continuing to weaken, middle-class Americans who only managed to buy a house or find a job because of this industry's growth will be hit hard. For the 7 million Americans still unemployed and 46.6 million Americans uninsured, the economic recovery has not even begun.
Working people are just now beginning to see the benefits of economic growth, even as the prospect of a worsening housing slump threatens to bring on a slowdown.
Economic recovery may have come too late for the millions of Americans who cashed in equity from their homes to pay basic living expenses or relied on high-interest credit cards to make ends meet. More than 2 million Americans filed for bankruptcy in 2005, even as legislation championed by President Bush made it harder for cash-strapped families to dig themselves out of debt in 2006.
The President's economic policies have done little to address these issues, primarily because he has refused to acknowledge a middle-class squeeze characterized by increased obstacles to accessing the American Dream. While middle-class Americans aspire to build up equity in their homes, send their children to college and save for a secure retirement, even hardworking families with good jobs are finding it harder to meet these goals and get ahead.
Despite recent gains, job creation has been slow compared to previous economic recoveries, employers like Whirlpool, AOL and General Motors that offered well-paying middle-class jobs have just announced thousands of lay-offs, and many of the new jobs that replaced those that were lost during the recession are lower-paying and offer fewer benefits. .....(much more at http://www.drummajorinstitute.org/library/article.php?ID=6559 )