Thanks to Maggie Mahar for posting about Sunday’s NYT piece on John Edwards. She correctly summarizes my work, while nailing Matt Bai for embracing the Third Way’s claim about the middle class: If we don’t count the middle class people who aren’t doing well, then the remaining middle class people are doing pretty well. Go, Maggie!
Now that she has me rev’d up, how about a second point in that same NYT paragraph?
Some progressives have tried recently to get around this problem by arguing that there really isn’t much of a distinction anymore between the poor and the middle class “that, as inequality worsens, the once-solid middle class, as the Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren has written, is vanishing.” By this theory, average voters should now support antipoverty programs because those same programs will benefit the middle class.
The chapter I wrote for Edwards’ new book, Ending Poverty in America, focused on the alliance of interests between the poor and the middle, but from the reverse perspective: Laws that would help the middle would also help the poor. For example, reining in the credit industry — mortgage companies, payday lenders, credit card companies, check cashing services— would help a broad spectrum of people who are middle class, working class, and trying to scratch their way out of poverty. Legal protection would also help prevent middle class Americans from losing their foothold and winding up in poverty.
The same could be said of programs for universal health care, for plans to let students borrow what they need for college and pay back their loans with four years of public service, and for plans to help families develop emergency savings accounts.
Sure, there are some programs aimed only at the poor and there are some aimed exclusively at the middle, but the trap many progressives have fallen into is to see the middle and the poor as a zero-sum game — what one gets, the other gives up. That simply isn’t true.
It serves the interests of the very wealthy to divide the middle from the poor, to convince middle class voters that anyone who cares about the poor will rob from the middle. But it is the poor AND the middle who are crushed by many of today’s regressive policies. Dividing the poor from the middle protects those who profit from both.
