Analyze any of the presidential debates or speeches by the people who want to run the country for the next four years, or speeches by their surrogates, and two words appear again and again: middle class. Every four years Washington gets really concerned about those in the middle because traditionally, they have been the biggest voting bloc.
Even people who don't fit the economic definition of middle class consider themselves to be a part of it. There is something so American to it. There also is something worrisome about it - that bulk of hard-working, tax-paying producers of goods and services is shrinking.
The Pew Research Center says in 1971 the middle class was 61 percent of adults but now is 51 percent. The falling number goes beyond a loss of income and status. Most of us were taught that what made this country great was its middle class, that it is impossible to have a world leader where the population is either rich or poor, nothing in-between.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said, "We can have concentrated wealth in the hands of a few or we can have democracy. But we cannot have both."
Two Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporters, Donald Bartlett and James Steele of Vanity Fair, have been chronicling the dreams of the middle class for decades. In 1991 a well received series in the Philadelphia Inquirer became their book "America: What Went Wrong." Their new book, "The Betrayal of the American Dream" brings us up to date and, according to the authors, things haven't gotten better.
They point to the economic collapse of 2007 as responsible for most of the recent damage but predict that when unemployment drops and the economy improves the same government policies that eroded the middle class will be in place.
One such obstacle, they contend, is the tax code. "If you were one of the richest Americans in 1955, you paid on average 51.2 percent of your income. If you were one of the richest Americans in 2007, your tax rate had plummeted to an average of 16.6 percent. Over that period, Congress systematically cut tax rates for the rich, allowed certain income to be excluded, and enabled the wealthy to funnel vast amounts of money through loopholes.
"The justification for cutting tax bills was to stimulate the economy and create jobs. That hasn't happened; instead, tax cuts have given us a wealth gap greater than any time since the late 1920s, when a similar chasm between the rich and everyone else foreshadowed the Great Depression."
The answer, the authors write, is a simplified tax code to "eliminate the situation that puts taxpayers who earn $388,000 a year in the same bracket as those who earn $50 million."
Rep. Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney's running mate, submitted a proposed budget in 2012 that would reduce the tax brackets and lower the top rate to 25 percent. The authors write the rich insist to keep the tax code simple, saying there can't be too many rates, but what they really mean is the more rates the more the rich have to pay.
The book argues that the crisis talk about the national debt is just a smokescreen, an excuse to tear down the safety net of the poor and working class. "And there most decidedly is no good reason to even talk about cutting Social Security. It has not contributed a dollar to the debt. In fact, over the years, excess Social Security dollars have been used to pay for wars and ordinary programs and mask the size of the debt."
They also talk about fair trade, education and corporations that send jobs overseas and holding responsible the Wall Street crooks who break the law and get by with it. This has been the progressive mantra. The authors overlook that some countries send jobs here, auto manufacturers, for instance, and that a reason so much of what we buy is made offshore where labor is cheaper is that we rush to stores with the lowest prices.
That tax code with all the loopholes was made by people voters sent to Washington who keep getting re-elected. We're a part of the problem. We can't afford to wait another four years to stem the flow from middle class ranks. Whoever is elected Nov. 6 should make that a top priority for real.