Who Is Standing Up For The Middle Class?

The point is that a party committed to small government and low taxes on the rich is, more or less necessarily, a party committed to hurting, not helping, the poor. Will this ever change? Well, Republicans weren’t always like this. In fact, all of our major antipoverty programs — Medicaid, food stamps, the earned-income tax credit — used to have bipartisan support.

And maybe someday moderation will return to the G.O.P. For now, however, Republicans are in a deep sense enemies of America’s poor. And that will remain true no matter how hard the likes of Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio try to convince us otherwise.

The vast majority of the population is not poor – but middle class. How have the political parties done in making their middle class constituents’ lives better. Unfortunately, the only proxy that even comes close to establishing a metric would be median income.

The chart below overlays the incumbent Presidential Party with median income.

There are several obvious “buts” relative to the above chart.

• for starters, the President is not responsible for fiscal policy – Congress is. The President has some executive regulatory ability but most of the policy rests with Congress;
• it can takes years for fiscal or regulatory policy to positively or negatively effect the economy.

So taking the same median income chart, I have overlaid the party in control of Congress.

There is little evidence either political party has been good for the middle class. It is not the rich or the poor which drive a consumer economy – but the middle class. It follows that to ramp up the economy, a consumer driven economy must increase the ability of the middle class to spend. One party seems to believe it is their duty to protect the poor (using transfer payments from the government to fuel spending), while the other seems to protect the rich (as the rich have the ability to fuel the economy through investment). Both believe in trickle economics – feeding a weak economy using the government to transfer funds that will trickle up or feeding the rich to trickle down. There is no evidence that trickle anything works except for short periods of time. There is only one way to fuel the economy – and that is to fuel the middle class directly by increasing its ability to produce income, and lowering regulatory hurdles so the middle class can directly embark in capitalism.

• lower tax burdens;
• remove regulation for small business;

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Having spent much of my life living in countries which have limited social safety nets, it always amazes me to see individuals make a living through small business endeavors. This is capitalism. Small business in the USA has been in a down trend for years.  From Click here to view the scorecard table below with active hyperlinks

Written By: Econintersect LLC