Thom Hartmann: The Middle Class is not “Normal”
http://www.nationofchange.org/middle-class-not-normal-1397997553
Theres nothing normal about having a middle class. Having a middle class is a choice that a society has to make, and its a choice we need to make again in this generation, if we want to stop the destruction of the remnants of the last generations middle class. Despite what you might read in the Wall Street Journal or see on Fox News, capitalism is not an economic system that produces a middle class. In fact, if left to its own devices, capitalism tends towards vast levels of inequality and monopoly. The natural and most stable state of capitalism actually looks a lot like the Victorian England depicted in Charles Dickens novels.
At the top there is a very small class of superrich. Below them, there is a slightly larger, but still very small, middle class of professionals and mercantilists doctor, lawyers, shop-owners who help keep things running for the superrich and supply the working poor with their needs. And at the very bottom there is the great mass of people typically over 90 percent of the population who make up the working poor. They have no wealth in fact theyre typically in debt most of their lives and can barely survive on what little money they make.
So, for average working people, there is no such thing as a middle class in normal capitalism. Wealth accumulates at the very top among the elites, not among everyday working people. Inequality is the default option.
You can see this trend today in America. When we had heavily regulated and taxed capitalism in the post-war era, the largest employer in America was General Motors, and they paid working people what would be, in todays dollars, about $50 an hour with benefits. Reagan began deregulating and cutting taxes on capitalism in 1981, and today, with more classical raw capitalism, what we call Reaganomics, or supply side economics, our nations largest employer is WalMart and they pay around $10 an hour.