The Left’s middle class hogwash continues …

By John Sykes

The Left constantly tries to tell us that the middle class is far worse off than it used to be. This is hogwash!

The first thing you can do to disprove this is to ask anyone in the middle class if they have less opportunities today than the middle class had even a decade ago. One simple example – cars. Does anyone not have one now? I mean anyone in the middle class family. Not the whole family!

From Heritage.org’s Why Does Income Inequality Matter?:

Another way to view gains shared by the middle-class is looking at total worker compensation: wages plus benefits and pension (see here and here). Note the upward trend in this graph of real compensation per hour provided by the St. Louis Federal Reserve.

Not only are we, the middle class, earning more, some of us are working hard enough or smart enough to rise out of the middle class.

Finally, the left advances the notion of a war on the middle-class, noting that as wages stagnate, the middle-class shrinks. Well, it’s true that the middle-class is shrinking, but only because more people are getting rich. As Rose notes:

“True, fewer people today live in households with incomes between $30,000 and $100,000 (a reasonable definition of “middle class”) than in 1979. But the number of people in households that bring in more than $100,000 also rose from 12 percent to 24 percent. There was no increase in the percentage of people in households making less than $30,000. So the entire “decline” of the middle class came from people moving up the income ladder.”

We make more, buy more, and generally live better!

Equality of opportunity and equality of consumption have never been so ubiquitous. In terms of purchasing power, living standard, compensation, and overall quality of life, today people of all income levels live better than ever.

If income inequality has been so destructive, ask yourself, would you rather be one of the richest people in 1913 (the first year of the Piketty-Saez study) or an average American today? That most people would choose the latter is testament to why inequality has been a good thing

It seems the rich are helping us “eat cake”! The collectivist left would have us all share less cake.

Never ever forget that collectivist societies all have ended up eliminating the middle class! And poor societies have not been able to develop one!

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