Answering Kennedy’s Call
I have a suggestion for a campaign motto I first wrote about in a 2017 Huffington Post piece that could give a boost to VP Harris’s presidential campaign.
Instead of Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again.” let’s “Make America More Equal Again,” just as it was in the 1960’s and 70’s, when we had a thriving middle class in which children could hope to exceed their parents’ station in life.
It was our thriving middle class as portrayed in the above graph of pre-tax income that kept the more extreme elements of both political parties and persuasions at bay, so that Republicans and Democrats talked to each other. A middle class will only thrive where there is less income inequality, something that most well-meaning Americans support.
But that was then and we live now, when most children of the baby boomers retiring do not hope to exceed the economic status of their parents, as income inequality has worsened to levels last seen in the 1920s. Household incomes have stagnated since the 1970s, and the top income earners since the Great Recession now have garnered almost all the increase.
The Great Recession was brought on by the deregulation boom of the Clinton and GW Bush presidencies and a greater inequality that peaked in 2012 per the Piketty-Saez graph. So why not create programs that Make America More Equal Again?
That is why two out of three Americans are dissatisfied with the way income and wealth are currently distributed in the U.S. This includes three-fourths of Democrats and 54 percent of Republicans, according to a Gallup poll.
Overall, the share of Americans living in middle-class households has declined from 61 percent in 1971 to 50 percent, reported a 2015 Pew Research study. The hollowing out of the middle class has been a source of consternation among many economists, politicians and the public at large, says those surveyed. They say as Americans move toward the economic extremes it is harder to find common ground, and a common sense of what it means to be an American.
Much of that inequality is in the Midwestern rust belt states that lost blue-collar manufacturing jobs during the globalization and multi-nationalization of US corporations that President Trump promised to bring back again.
President Trump was no dummy in recognizing this fact. Then how could Democrats become so blasé and oblivious to this fact among their former supporters? Everyone saw it coming; the disenfranchisement of whole segments of working-class voters that had descended into depression and drug use in those formerly blue and Democrat-voting states.
There were many suggestions of how to bring back higher-paying jobs during Trump’s term, but he only succeeded in enriching the top 1 percent of income earners with his tax cuts. He couldn’t pass an infrastructure bill, did slightly alter NAFTA by drastically raising import tariffs (even on Canadian lumber and dairy products, which raised their prices); built very little wall but imprisoned immigrants seeking asylum at the southern border in camps, and separated immigrant mothers from their children.
Trumps was also unsuccessful in recalling Obamacare that has benefited more than 20 million Americans.
VP Harris has a much better record to run on. For instance, Biden’s Inflation Reduction act is expected to fund $800 billion in green-energy projects, invest $50 billion to foster building computer chip factories, and $1 trillion to fund infrastructure projects that modernizes our public infrastructure; from roads and bridges to our energy grid and water and sanitation facilities.
There are many reasons for Democrats and even truly populist Republicans to support programs that increase income equality in the coming years. But they can’t be about building more walls. A robust and more politically temperate American middle class must include Americans of all nationalities and ethnicities.
A good start would be to bring back the Child Tax Credit that was first enacted in 1997. A better version recently passed the House with a huge majority but its renewal is now stalled in the Senate by Republicans.
The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 temporarily expanded the child tax credit for the 2021 tax year to $3,600 per child younger than age 6 and $3,000 per child up to age 17. The expanded child tax credit reached over 61 million children in more than 36 million households, and funds were primarily used for child care, food, housing and other basic needs. In 2021 child poverty fell to its lowest level ever in America, but in 2022 Congress did not renew CTC expansion, and child poverty surged by 41%.
Bringing back the middle class is a slogan of the Harris campaign. A corollary can be, "Make America More Equal Again.” Renewal of the CTC that decreases child poverty is perhaps the best way to boost our middle class; by giving hope to our youngest that they might again be able to better their lives.
Harlan Green © 2024
Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen
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