[Dialogue] FW: Hillary and the struggling middle class

[Charles or Doris Hahn]

Hey Jim,  An apology is in order.  I sent a thank you
to another person for sending this timely news item
about Hillary and the Middle Class.  I turned on my
computer yesterday, clicked on the first Re: Hillary
and etc.  I slid down to the News Item, read it, and
zipped back to the top. Anyway I appreciated the WSJ
article and your comments.
Charles Hahn
--- Jim Rippey <jimripsr at qwest.net> wrote:

>  
> 
> I am not particularly a fan of Hillary's but some of
> the information in this
> column of Judith Warner's is fascinating.  The Wall
> Street Journal
> information she quotes is particularly interesting.
> It confirms my growing
> suspicion that most of the happy talk about our
> "healthy economy" is a
> product of well-to-do people talking to each other
> and ignoring what's going
> on in a great many people's lives.  For instance,
> translate the Journal's
> statistics this way:
> 
> Take 100 people and distribute the nation's total
> income among them.  If the
> national total income is 1000, then the one richest
> person would get $212 of
> it. The next highest 49 people would, on the
> average, divide up $660.  That
> figures out to $11.34 each.  The bottom 50 people,
> on the average, would
> divide up $128.  And that figures out to $2.56 per
> person.
> 
> Put another way, the one person at the top would get
> almost 19 times as much
> as the average income of the next 49 people.  And he
> or she would be getting
> almost 83 times as much as the average of the bottom
> 50 people.
> 
> On that basis, it makes sense for Judith Warner to
> write:  "More and more
> people are being priced out of a middle class
> existence."  Warner thinks
> that an increasing number of those people realize
> what's happening to them.
> Therefore, Hillary's message appeals to them.  That
> would explain "Clinton's
> surprising levels of popularity among lower- and
> middle-class women."
> 
> 
>  
> 
> Read Warner's article and see what you think.    
> Jim Rippey in (FINALLY)
> sunny Bellevue, NE.
> 
> PS:  Thanks to those persons who suggested I not
> back off from Dialogue.
> 
> ------------------------- 
> 
> The Clinton Surprise, by Judith Warner, in her
> Domestic Disturbances column
> on the  NY Times blog, Oct. 18, '07  
> 
> (You can see the original article and a picture of
> Warner by Googling
> "Domestic Disturbances.)
> 
> The shocks just keep on coming:  Hillary Clinton
> leads the Democratic field
> with 51 percent of the vote.  She beats Barack Obama
> by 24 percentage points
> among black Democrats.  She is projected now to beat
> Giuliani - or at the
> very least to be in a statistical dead heat with him
> in the general
> election.
> 
> This wasn't supposed to happen. According to the
> received wisdom of those
> in-the-know here in Washington, Hillary was supposed
> to be divisive,
> unelectable, "radioactive."
> 
> It was the fault of Bill and Monica, and the fact
> that you never knew when
> there was going to be another Bill and Monica. It
> was the fault of Hillary -
> for not taking the hard line on Bill and Monica the
> way a woman of her
> stature and standing was supposed to do. And it was
> the fault of voters -
> those people out there who would never, ever elect
> another Clinton. 
> 
> Why? Because . everyone said so.
> 
> ("I think the one thing we know about Hillary, the
> one thing we absolutely
> know, bottom line, [is] she can`t win, right?" is
> how MSNBC host Tucker
> Carlson once put it to New Republic editor-at-large
> Peter Beinart. "She is
> unelectable.")
> 
> The "we" world of Tucker Carlson knew what they knew
> about Hillary Clinton -
> right up until about this week, I think - because
> they spend an awful lot of
> time talking to, socializing with and interviewing
> one another. 
> 
> What they don't do all that much is venture outside
> of a certain set of zip
> codes to get a feel for the way most people are
> actually living. They don't
> sign up for adjustable rate mortgages, visit
> emergency rooms to get their
> primary health care, leave their children in
> unlicensed day care or lose
> their jobs because they have to drive their mothers
> home from the hospital
> after hip replacement surgery. 
> 
> Hillary Clinton's supporters, it turns out, do. 
> Alongside the newest set of
> poll results showing Clinton's surprising levels of
> popularity among lower-
> and middle-class women, white moderate women, even
> black voters, was another
> story this week, based on a new set of data from the
> I.R.S. 
> 
> It showed that America's most wealthy earn an even
> greater share of the
> nation's income than they did in 2000, at the peak
> of the tech boom. The
> wealthiest 1 percent of Americans, the Wall Street
> Journal reported, earned
> 21.2 percent of all income in 2005 (the latest date
> for which these data are
> available), up from the high of 20.8 percent they'd
> reached in the bull
> market of 2000. The bottom 50 percent of people
> earned 12.8 percent of all
> income, compared with 13 percent in 2000. And the
> median tax filer's income
> fell 2 percent when adjusted for inflation (to about
> $31,000) between 2000
> and 2005. 
> 
> More and more people are being priced out of a
> middle class existence.
> Because of housing prices, because of health care
> costs, because of tax
> policy, because of the cost of child care, The Good
> Life - a life of
> relative comfort and financial security - is now, in
> many parts of the
> country, an upper-middle-class luxury. 
> 
> Given all this, you would think that Clinton's big
> policy announcement this
> week on improving life for working families would
> have been big news.
> 
> After all, it contained a number of huge new middle
> class entitlements: paid
> family leave and sick leave, most notably. There
> were a number of
> tried-and-true triggers for outrage from the right
> wing and the business
> community like government standards and quality
> controls for child care.
> There could have been debate stoked among the many
> childless workers who now
> feel parents are getting too much "special
> treatment" in the workplace
> (Clinton supports legislation to protect parents and
> pregnant women from job
> discrimination). At the very least, someone could
> have accused Clinton of
> trying to bring back welfare. (She supports
> subsidies for low-income parents
> who wish to stay home to raise their children.) Or
> someone could have
> questioned how realistic it really is to pay for all
> that - to the tune of
> $1.75 billion per year - simply by cracking down on
> the "abusive" use of tax
> shelters, as Clinton proposes to do. 
> 
> But there was none of this. Clinton's family policy
> speech in New Hampshire
> all but sank like a stone. If it was covered at all,
> it was often packaged
> as part of a feature on her attempts to curry favor
> with female voters.
> ("Clinton shows femininity," read a Boston Globe
> headline.) It was as though
> the opinion-makers and agenda-setters, waiting with
> bated breath for Bill to
> slip up, just one more time, couldn't see or hear
> the message to
> 
=== message truncated ===>
_______________________________________________
> Dialogue mailing list
> Dialogue at wedgeblade.net
>
http://wedgeblade.net/mailman/listinfo/dialogue_wedgeblade.net
>