What do you view as key points or initiatives the executive or legislative branches could address to expand the middle class and shrink the lower class?
All long term things, all things we did in the 1950s. Improve funding for infrastructure, research, and education to start with. For education, I don't just mean college, I mean all SKILLS that lead to promising and needed careers. An electrician, welder, mechanic, carpenter, or machine operator can make a fine living. An unskilled hammer man or punch press button pusher struggles. This isn't a popular notion because it isn't a quick fix, no progress will be made in one term.
Don't shift additional tax burden onto the middle class. Sales taxes punish those who spend most of their money. The bottom 50% of Americans spend most, if not all of their earnings just to keep afloat - their effective tax rate therefore suffers. Many tax exemptions do little for the economy (mortgage deduction set up to encourage the purchase of the largest McMansions you can afford, corporate welfare, etc.). Many investment tax schemes make little sense; the secondary stock market does almost nothing for the actual economy - yet a low capital gains tax indicates speculating on the secondary market is more important to the economy than actually working (I'm not against the stock market in any way). A tax overhaul is needed, and all tax policy should be set with sunset provisions.
For example: a family with 2.58 kids making $50k a year lives a decent life, but doesn't exactly have extra money sloshing around. What they have, they are plowing immediately back into the economy and/or trying to scrap together a rainy day fund. Its unpopular, but those that make more can afford to pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes. The highest income earners pay 18% effective tax rate (at all levels). The US National Average is 26% (which is among the lowest in the developed world, I do't think there is a country with a higher standard of living and a lower tax rate). Conservatives hate this idea because it means people need to pay more in taxes. Liberals hate this idea because it means people other than "1%ers" are in that group (professors, attorneys, doctors, well paid government bureaucrats).
Yes, cutting taxes would be best. But we aren't going to do that: the military is a sacred conservative cow, even though we spend as much as China, Russia, North Korea, Cuba, and Iran combined times 3, it isn't going to be significantly cut. Social Security and Medicare won't be cut by anyone. Liberals won't let medicaid be cut. Clearly we won't stop paying interest. And everything else is chicken feed (20% combined). I'm all for reallocating money, but "cutting" our way of a hole hasn't ever worked.
Income disparity isn't a talking point. It is an existential threat to democracy. 10% of wage earners make 50% of the income. In 1974, the top 0.1% of families controlled 7% of the wealth in the United States. Today they control 22% of all wealth in the country. The bottom 90% of families control 20% of all wealth (less than the top 0.1% combined). Poor people depend on the government more than middle class people, that starts a bad spiral. Poor people consume less: they buy less manufactured goods, they start fewer businesses, they retain fewer attorneys, etc. etc. etc. Wealth concentration is a cancer that leads to great episodes of "lifestyles of the rich and famous" but ends badly for societies.
But the solution isn't simple, it isn't quick, and it sure as hell isn't taking money directly from affluent people and transferring it to poor people (that's the other extreme, it also ends badly for society). The solution is funding programs that enable people to achieve on their own. We did it in the 1950s and resulted in broad based prosperity that began declining in the 1980s. The realistic solutions are unpopular for both sides - so we will likely just keep whining about it.
you can take away incentives to non-productive lifestyle: shorten UE benefit periods, tighten up what qualifies for “disability”, tighter restrictions on welfare, etc. and plough those into more and better advanced educational benefits (i.e. cheap or free college/tech tuition or grants).
Largely agree with you. Bring UE benefits back to their recessionary levels - and set up a phase out system instead of a cut-off system (if you work, you get less of your benefits... but you are better off with some benefits and working. Otherwise you set up a perverse situation where you are working for an extra 25 cents an hour over your benefit rate. Human nature often says that's not worth it).
"Welfare" is a bit of a misnomer, most "welfare" spending is on medicaid for disabled people, elderly (but no Medicare eligible), and children of lower income people. The next largest chunk is in WIC (great program) and "food stamps" (not called that anymore) - I would reform food stamps to be more like WIC - sorry, no redbull or doritos on government doll. Moving down we spend money on the earned income tax credit (great program from an economic perspective), child care credit and dependent credit (those mostly benefit wealthier people). Overall, the package is fairly effective and has ~8% fraud rate (mostly in companies billing medicaid for services not rendered and for affluent people claiming benefits they are not eligible for). BUT - I would make the same change to "welfare" systems that I would make to UE benefits; put in a phase out so you are better off working. You are better off working and receiving partial benefits as opposed to replacing benefits with work. Then a person gets a raise, a promotion, and eventually gets weened off benefits.
I'm sure there are programs/areas that more money can be saved. But overall, the US "welfare" system is a fairly effective economic and social engine. It is an easy target and making it better would take actual work from politicians (drug test them all! Oh, wait, what? We caught less than 1% of recipients and spent way more than we saved? Keep doing it!). Our main obsticle, on both sides, is an unwillingness to look at what actually works because of pure politics (its a handout to lazy scam artists! v. they all are "entitled" to it!).
Has free trade done much to benefit the American middle class? It doesn’t seem to have helped any from what I can see.
Yes. Economic theory says that each party is better off at the conclusion of a bargained for exchange. I could write a dissertation, but in short: American labor has become more and more efficient since entering WWII. We are no longer good at "unskilled" tasks (from an economic perspective, good essentially means cost effective). We are good at skilled tasks: advanced manufacturing, conceptualizing, design, engineering, marketing, logistics, finance. The iPhone is a great example - we thought of it, designed it, engineered it, figure out how to build it, did all the logistics to get parts from all over the world to a crap-hole in China, sell it, and reep the profits. China assembles it - the "value added" in China is a scant $8. The USA makes hundreds off of each iPhone. (there are entire scholarly articles written on the topic, as well as its perverse effect on the trade gap)
The high-pay low skill manufacturing jobs aren't ever coming back. The days where you can make $70k a year putting bolts into a frame on an assembly line died when you could lease a robot for $35k a year to do the same job. But manufacturing that requires more precision or skill, non-repetitive tasks, or intellectual ability are in high demand. There's a reason John Deere moved their foundry to, and then back from Mexico (quality). There is a reason the US can't find enough welders (many welding tasks are non-repetitive). There's a reason we need more engineers.
Asia has cheap labor to sell. We have things we want built with cheap labor. Asia has low-skill manufacturing goods they want to sell us. We have high-skill items and services we want to sell them. In theory, both sides win. That includes the American consumer. (I'm not making a personal argument for outsourcing, I'm making an economics argument for why free-trade benefits everyone)
I honestly see no way in which government can improve educational outcome as with every costly initiative. . . I am a firm believer that successful education starts in the home
Truth. Nothing is a substitute to a family and culture that values education. There is a reason that Asian have a stereotype as being smart, many Asian cultures value education.
But, there are proven methods that do result in better educational achievement. Smaller class sizes. Long school terms (less summer break). Better teaching methods (lecturing to a class is not an effective teaching method, it is just a method of passing on information for the student to later learn). Also, making the school a place kids want to go is conducive to learning: sports programs, music/art programs, better facilities. All of these things have been proven to increase learning, regardless of what's going on at home (the kid with supportive home life will almost always do better, but these things improve everyones achievement).
These things all cost money. This ties in directly with two of the three talking points above: improving the middle class and welfare. You want kids to not be criminals and to climb off the government doll? Educate them. Educate them to the best of our ability in spite of their home life. The alternative is cyclical poverty but-for a select few kids who can break the cycle. Statistically, that's very rare. So I'm not asking you to do this for the "child left behind," it can be pure selfishness. We are all better off if we break the cycle.
Some presidents have the luck. . . We are still 20-30 years from being able to fully digest how good or how poor this president has performed.
Again, very true. Historians can still debate if Lincoln was the great savior of the Union, or if he was a tyrant who set aside the Constitution to achieve his personal goals. Was Reagan a great hero reestablishing capitalism and squashing the communists, or a villain starting the decline of the middle class and bankrupting the country for future generations? We are entirely unable to view history accurately while in its midst, but future perceptions are often influenced by contemporary commentary.
I give this admin mostly failing marks in terms of racial relations/tensions. I believe we are worse off than we were a decade ago along those terms.
I didn't consider race relations. I'd say he has had minimal impact on race relations. Personally, I think race relations are about the same they were a decade ago, or two decades ago. The angst and disparity is much more visible recently, but I don't think that's a reflection of race relations deteriorating. I think it is merely a reflection of incidents taking places that shed light on the situation (more documentation of police situations, rebel flag debate, etc.). Perhaps having a black guy in the White House was a catalyst for some of that, when the feeling of achievement for the entire community wore off, they found that nothing changed as they had hoped (being in a group that historically underachieves is one thing, having that pointed out to you and/or coming to that realization is another).
I'm no expert on race relations, so I'm pretty well just making cap up on this one.
