I lost my virginity during the Carter malaise era 70s when lower and middle income families were locked out of the American Dream of home ownership due to liberal democratic party induced 18% mortgage interest rates and double digit inflation and unemployment rates.
I got married during the Reagan recovery era 80s and 90s when conservative monetary and supply side economic policies healed a nation.
I got divorced when George W. Bush’s 2000s economic policies drove overall and minority home ownership to record levels, where they remain today.
The affluent society is a fact. Our poor are obese. But affluence and girth are no guarantors against anxiety and stress, especially, relatively speaking. We don’t access our well being by comparing our lot with that of the average Belarusian.
Some other things happened on the way to record home ownership, in the culture and in the workplace.
I converted to the GOP in 2000 praying for a conservative spanking for my country to arrest its slouching towards Gomorrah, as I swallowed ever more bi-carb to relieve the side effects of working for Mike DeVine.
Which brings me to the issue at hand, and to what I think is one of the main reasons for the anxiety of lower and middle income families: job insecurity and the stress of self employment.
My father and grandfather worked for Southern Railway for 43 and 53 years respectively. Until the 1990s, a very high percentage of Americans worked most of their lives for one stable company.
That America is no more.
I quit high school and worked in a cotton mill for a year and learned more than I would have in the 12th grade. I learned that I wanted to work for me. I got my GED and chose law as my course of study, partly out of a a love for justice, but also because I saw it as path to self employment (Perry Mason TV shows lit my path: Della and a nice view of the skyline out the window).
I don’t think my family ever really appreciated the fact of my achievement of working for myself all these years. I have always joked that while I’m sure the stress of running my own business is taking years off my life and lining off my stomach, that its worth it for the freedom.
I learned in that year at the mill that I simply can’t suffer fools, especially if they deign to boss me around.
I said all that to address the first cause of this economic anxiety Mike Huckabee addresses.
The job security of post WWII America that most Americans enjoyed and that a high percentage of Americans have a memory of their parent’s enjoying is gone.
It has been replaced by a dynamic economy of great rewards and great uncertainty. Americans change jobs 7-8 times in a lifetime. Many more Americans work for themselves. And most of those without education or special skills no longer have the option of well paying low skilled manufacturing jobs.
Result: stress
Add to that, the following:
2 - Divorce
3 - Corrupt culture into which one’s children are immersed each day
4 - Keeping up with the Joneses
5 - Gasoline prices
6 - Sin taxes (on the products that the lower income consume instead of going on the vacations they can’t afford)
7 - Health insurance they can’t afford
8 - Health care they can’t afford and do without
9 - The memory of the late 90s technology driven unique hyper-economy
10 - The lack of a memory of the 70s
11 - No new technology driven efficiencies to boost the standard of living since the late 90s
12 - The Housing value/Mortgage credit crunch
13 - Higher food prices
The Democratic Party has won a lot of elections by improperly exploiting the anxieties caused by the above. But, of course, their policies make things worse. They live for class warfare, and my hatred of such is one of the reasons I left the Dem Party.
I love the GOP for its eschewing of class warfare politics. I hate some of the rhetoric of Mike Huckabee that attacks “Wall Street.” I have noticed, though, that Huckabee doesn’t propose any new laws, when pressed, to punish Wall Street.
Good.
And he does hint at wanting to reduce regulations on small business formation.
Good.
But the main point I want to drive home to my fellow Republicans is that Huckabee has given us a gift that we could use to bury the Dem Party.
FELLOW REPUBLICANS, HEAR ME.
It is no sin to tout the fact that conservative policies help lower and middle income families. It is not class warfare to say that and use that fact to get votes. And it is no sin to advance policies designed to help ease the anxieties and burdens of same.
Don’t you see!? If we win this battle, we destroy the Dems. The Dems lie to these people and never help them.
Let’s help them! How, you say?
Let’s lower or eliminate the federal gas tax. It hurts the poor. Why not pay for roads out of general revenues.
Let’s build the fence in a massive project and hire the unskilled at good wages.
Let’s drill for our own da*n oil. Good paying jobs.
Let’s advance health savings accounts and private soc sec accts.
Let’s pick judges that will let parents control schools.
Let’s repeal the energy bill and let corn be eaten instead of burned in a motor.
Let’s eliminate the Dept of Education or require states to give parents choice if they ant federal money.
Let’s stand up and proclaim what the GOP has always been, but has not been acknowledged as:
The champions of the poor and middle class.
Our policies let them pull themselves up. We have been empowering them for 27 years. Let’s admit it and be proud of it and take away this constituency from the Dems.
[More later on the moral aspects of keeping up with the Joneses, i.e. living beyond one’s means, that is at the root of of a lot of the anxiety.]
Mike Gamecock DeVine @ The Charlotte Observer
The HinzSight Report
The Minority Report
Huck is history in the Race 4 2008
“One man with courage makes a majority.” - Andrew Jackson
FRED08
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