There are times when it is hard to be a proud Democrat. As Will Rodgers famously said, I don’t belong to an organized political party, I am a Democrat. One of the challenges is that our party is a big tent and we seem to have a pathological aversion to getting on the same page, especially when we find a winning message.
Take the Op-Ed post in this mornings Washington Post by Bill Knapp, the managing director of SKDKnickerbocker (a political messaging machine that has done a lot of work for weak Democrats like Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana).
If you did not know that Knapp was a right leaning strategist who mostly works for Democrats, you might think that he was auditioning for a spot on Mitt Romney’s messaging team. The premise of his longish post is that the middle class is not only fine but actually moving forward in the America of the early Twenty-First Century.
Take a little look at this:
There is a lot of talk about the “99 percent” vs. the “1 percent.” The rich have always been disproportionate owners of the total wealth. But an entire intellectual and political infrastructure is used to exaggerate and distort income disparity. A fact from the 2010 Census: Since 1967, median household income has grown in all income levels above $75,000 and has decreased in all income levels below that threshold. The largest increase is among those making $100,000 to $149,999 a year — a threefold increase. Those in the highest quintile account for 50.2 percent of total U.S. household income, with a mean of $169,633. That share of household income was 43.6 percent in 1967 and in 2001 broke the 50 percent mark. Should we be concerned by this consolidation of wealth? Maybe. But we’re not quite in need of the French Revolution.
Mr. Knapp is right, we are not yet at the level of wealth concentration versus poverty that found the people of France ready to rise up and overthrow their entire system of government. But that is a far cry from saying that it is only “maybe” a problem.
In 2011, 46.2 million people were living in poverty, the highest number in the 52 yearsthat the Census Bureau has been publishing that number. 2.6 million people had joined the ranks of those living in poverty.
Then there is the issue of loss of wealth. The housing crisis has stripped Americans of 7.4 trillion (yeah, as in 7,400 billion) dollars in wealth and there is an additional 700 billion in negative equity. In 2009 there were 2.8 million homes foreclosed on, in 2010 there were 3.8 million, that number dropped in 2011 (mostly because the robo-signing fraud scandal forced a slow down) to 2.7 million but it is expected to bounce right back to 2010 levels this year.
Still things must all be rosy because we’ve increased the numbers of women in the work force and come closer, while still failing, to close the wage gap between men and women. Those are good things, there is no doubt. And while Knapp is correct that incomes have risen from the 1960’s that is does not have a lot to say about the state of the middle class in this century.
From a New York Times article in October of last year:
The full 9.8 percent drop in income from the start of the recession to this June — the most recent month in the study — appears to be the largest in several decades, according to other Census Bureau data. Gordon W. Green Jr., who wrote the report with John F. Coder, called the decline “a significant reduction in the American standard of living.”
That reduction occurred even though the unemployment rate fell slightly, to 9.2 percent in June compared with 9.5 percent two years earlier. Two main forces appear to have held down pay: the number of people outside the labor force — neither working nor looking for work — has risen; and the hourly pay of employed people has failed to keep pace with inflation, as the prices of oil products and many foods have jumped.
I am not an economist by trade, but even I know that when incomes don’t keep pace with inflation, the standard of living of everyone who is not ultra-wealth falls. Maybe someone could explain this to Mr. Knapp.
Another thing that gets right up my nose about this piece is the way that Knapp uses the Republican trope about electronics as a way to show that things are hunky-dory for the middle class.
Now, let’s look beyond IRS and Census data to other telling facts about our economic growth and future. According to Pew Research Center, 83 percent of American adults owned a cellphone last May, up from 66 percent in January 2005. In 2008, 71 percent of teenagers had cellphones, up from 45 percent in 2004. This is a telling statistic because when more teenagers own luxury electronics, it means there are more families with disposable income — indicating a stronger and wider middle class. In 2008, 77 percent of teens also owned a video-game system, 74 percent owned an iPod and 60 percent owned a computer.
You know what, cell phones have increased and so has the ownership of computers with broadband access. But that is not solely due to good economic times a Knapp suggests. It has a lot to do with Moore’s Law that says that computing power and storage will get larger and cheaper in 18 month cycles. This means that what was once a luxury item becomes a common one.
There are also trends, especially among younger folks where they are not having land lines as much as they did in the past. My household has two cell phones and no land line by choice. Having a cell phone means that I don’t need a land line and I get all of my calls all of the time, wherever I am.
But here is the thing that has my blood boiling. This dingus Knapp is making an argument that helps the Republicans. They are setting themselves up to be the defenders of the ultra-wealthy and the corporations at a time when populist anger is coming to a deflection point.
The way to win for Democrats in 2012 is to channel Teddy Roosevelt and start talking about trust busting and level playing fields. It is not to say “You middle class folks have it good so stop bitching”.
As the stats I quoted show, the middle class does not have it good and all those gains we have made from the 1960’s and earlier are in danger, and we know it. 1/3 of kids born into the middle class fall out of it, and that number is likely to increase as we try to pull out way out of the economic ditch that an unregulated market drove us.
When there is real pain, there is only one political benefit from telling people that they should see the sunny side and that is to garner lots of corporate cash for your reelection.
Mr. Knapp ends with a sentence that shows how freaking out of touch he really is:
So take that, pessimists.
It is not about pessimism you Blue Dog supporting twit! It is about the fact that there is real and constant economic pain for vast swaths of the nation. To try to dress it up as anything else is political malpractice and should prevent any thinking Democrat from giving any business to SKDKnickerbocker.
The floor is yours.