Americans fear losing affluence after decades of "dole."

[LongTomH]

Pierre Tristan has an interesting op-ed over at the Smirking Chimp blog. Mostly, it's an analysis of the numbers behind the 'shrinking poll numbers' for both Pres. Obama and his health reform plan. The author notes that Mr. Obama's approval numbers among the unemployed are much higher than among those who still have jobs; 61 per cent approval among unemployed adults versus 50% for the general population.

When the economy tanks, the president and his party pay the price in lower approval ratings. The jobless are last to reward the president. So, what's going on? This is: For the first time in any recession, including the Great Depression, health-insurance coverage for the unemployed was vastly expanded and made cheaper, unemployment insurance was expanded and homeowners, the jobless among them, got multiple lifelines to ward off foreclosure.

Obviously these people are not worrying about the size of the deficit! They're worried about finding jobs and keeping a roof over their heads.

There's a similar disconnect in health polls, which now show a sizable majority opposed to "health care reform," whatever that is, but not to proposals in their particulars. Big majorities still think the uninsured should be covered, that government has a responsibility to cover them, that a government-backed public insurance system competing with private insurers is a good idea, even that Medicare should be expanded. Bundle all those proposals under "health care reform," and you get a big fat "No" -- not from those who don't have insurance or jobs but from those who do: the employed, the retired, the rich. In sum, what "rebellion" there is about Obama and his agenda isn't the cry of the dispossessed. It's the rasp of the misers. It's the size of a national character diminishing in tandem with its presumed returns. The greediest generation is in its prime.

The radical change isn't the kind Obama supposedly wants to inflict on the country. It's America's radical change from what it was in the middle of the last century to what it has become since the 1980s. When Franklin Roosevelt increased Americans' taxes faster and more than ever before, and Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower raised them even more, they paid up. There was a Depression to get out of, fascism to defeat, a postwar world that wasn't even our own to rebuild, a Cold War to prosecute and a national debt much fatter than it is now (in relation to the economy) to pay down. We did it all. And got richer for it, because taxes were seen for what they are -- "what we pay for a civilized society," in Oliver Wendell Holmes' words. The generosity spilled over to the 1960s in the form of the Great Society, when Americans turned toward each other and extended a further hand. The country was rich and confident. It could afford it.

It still can. But, for a generation, Americans have been turning on each other for being too fearful of losing what they have. It's not responsible government they want. Quite the opposite. They're worried about the end of the decades of dole -- of the tax cuts and artificially cheap credit and God-bless-us-chauvinism that posed as reinventions of American power even as it plundered that power to the point of catastrophe. We paid the price in 2008 and 2009.

To sum up, our problem is a middle class terrified of losing the affluence they've gained in the last half century. The people ready for change are the people who've had their illusions of a comfortable, affluent middle class life for themselves and their children shattered. Sad to say, we can draw a sort of 'hope against hope' from the fact that the numbers of the latter group are growing.

[Mopar151]

1. It's the tentacles of the Bush family

Along with their cohorts, like JP Morgan.

When these sociopathic monsters are in ascendance, America's working class takes it on the chin. Prescott Bush was an up n' comer in the 20's, which begat the crash of '29. Roosevelt had a hold over many of these "moneyed interests" because of their involvement in the plot to overthrow him - many of his most successful programs came after 1936 (iirc), when the plot was discovered. Many of these "businessmen" turned to opprutunities in Europe, which was becoming "their kind of place" - like P. Bush's Siliesian/American Steel Co. , built to use slave labor, and Brown Brothers Harriman.
After the war, Joe McCarthy screwed up a lot of chances for the money boys, and Ike was crafty enough to hold them back and let the little guy get ahead a bit. JFK pissed off so many of the criminal capatilists and old spooks like Allen Dulles that a lot of bad people wanted him dead - we may never know who put what into play, but the cast of carachters was familiar. And I think that LBJ was not what the backroom boys expected - he was'nt necessarily nice, or benevolent, but he was smart enough to see what a drag Jim Crow, and grinding poverty, was on the economy of the nation, particularly the South.
Dick Nixon was a P.Bush protoge', who left his stand-in Gerry Ford with an awful economic mess. (Remember the WIN button?). The fallout from Nixon/ Ford and the CIA's mishandling of numerous affairs doomed Jimmy Carter. And then we had Ronnie Regan, who rivaled George W's reign for haplessness, and being a ventriloquists' dummy for the hard right and the spooks. I'll bet a lot of you can take it from here....