ziggy88 Loc: quincy illinois 62301

The Rape of the Middle Class
By Pastor Gary Boyd

It seems to me the middle class has fallen out of favor, is being short changed by our government with more rules & regulations, higher taxes, and little reward for their efforts. Small companies used to make up 80% of all businesses. A report by Bonnie Kavoussi, contributor for the Huffington Post says, “The nation lost more than 170,000 small businesses during the first two years of the recession, according to an On Numbers analysis of newly released federal data.

A total of 6.79 million small businesses operated within the nation's 938 metropolitan and micropolitan areas in 2010, the latest year for which official statistics are available.That figure was down from 6.82 million small businesses in 2009 and 6.96 million in 2008. The recession officially began in December 2007.”

Further Research

The Pew Research Center states, “ Middle-income Americans have fallen further behind financially in the new century. In 2014, the median income of these households was 4% less than in 2000. Moreover, because of the housing market crisis and the Great Recession of 2007-09, their median wealth (assets minus debts) fell by 28% from 2001 to 2013.”

The median wealth then has fallen 28% since 2001 with Americans of the middle class now earning $4,000 dollars less per year, paying more in taxes per year, employing far less employees per year due to health care costs, and are being squeezed to the max with arbitrary rules & regs.

What happened to the Stimulus Package?

Five years ago today, the President signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law. The $830 billion spending blowout was sold by the feds as a way to keep unemployment from rising above 8%. But the stimulus would fail on its own terms. 2009 marked the first of four straight years when unemployment averaged more than 8%. And of course the unemployment rate would have been even worse in those years and still today if so many people had not quit the labor force, driving labor-participation rates to 1970s levels. Shovel ready jobs promised was a farce, stimulus money went to union states, Washington DC union groups, and no real rebuilding of the infrastructure really happened.

Report Says

(CNSNews.com) - A record 94,708,000 Americans were not in the labor force in May -- 664,000 more than in April -- and the labor force participation rate dropped two-tenths of a point to 62.6 percent, near its 38-year low (Carter years), the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics reported.

When President Obama took office in January 2009, 80,529,000 Americans were not participating in the labor force; since then, 14,179,000 Americans have left the workforce -- some of them retiring and some just quitting because they can't find work.
So today in August of 2016 we have almost 95 million of people out of work and 45 million on welfare and food stamps. The middle class struggles to put their kids through college, but jobs after college are at a minimum. True unemployment when figuring in the ones who have retired plus people who have stopped looking for work is more like 29%. The middle class is in a world of hurt people.

Suggestions To the New President

The most obvious way to stimulate the economy is to issue tax breaks to the working poor. The middle class needs relief from burdensome rules & regs that encumber small business growth thus no new employees are hired to expand. Small business at this time is just treading water to meet payrolls.

Give tax breaks to married couples. Reward married couples with children with more deductions for their kids so they will see more bucks coming back to them at the end of the year. The cost of living has increased substantially, but not middle class income. This would also be a boost to the economy.

The new president needs to do audits on all the departments of government to see where our feds have wasted our money. Then I would suggest eliminating those departments that show the most graft. The Dept.of Education and the United States Environmental Protection Agency comes to mind. Then I would suggest giving that money recovered back to the states for job stimulus.

Create a real non-partisan stimulus package rebuilding of our roads, bridges, and infrastructure nationwide. It is time to start building the Keystone pipeline that would employ thousands. We can also put the people in the inner cities to work rebuilding their communities, like Detroit, Baltimore, etc.

Stop cartel drugs from coming across the border that kill our youth by building a wall that would also employ thousands. Get rid of the 23 sanctuary cities where the drugs go by stopping all federal money going there until them comply.

I suggest cutting back foreign aid to countries that support ISIS. I believe only sending money to our allies in the war on terror, then track the aid money to see where it goes.

Offer incentives to social media companies like Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and huge billion dollar online businesses like Amazon and Ebay to create online jobs to help jog the economy and get money flowing again. Tremendous opportunity here!

Allow companies that have moved abroad to return here with only a 10% tax on their assets. Then allow them five years to get their businesses back up and running by not taxing them. This would allow companies to hire new employees using the tax money they saved. Government grants, interest free loans to small companies would also be a great boom to our economy. Hey you know if this poor writer can think up these suggestions for improvements to our economy, how much more can the brainiacs come up with. Working until Jesus returns…..Maranatha

maureenthannon

Gary, You're absolutely right. But that's just the problem. If something makes sense, the government will have nothing to do with it. You're also even more correct about how to fix things, Maranatha is the only way anything good will or could happen.

PeterS

Higher taxes on the middle class? What higher taxes on the middle class.

lpnmajor Loc: Arkansas

Ok, here's American economy 101. The working poor do not make massive campaign donations, therefor, do not support the Government. The wealthy or well to do, pay less tax per dollar in taxes than the working poor, but that is , collectively, a paltry amount and does not count.

Now, if the working poor began hitting the polls in force, electing fellow working poor to the Congress and their State's legislature, they may revise the economic paradigm. Until then, they're just whining, just like fortune 500 companies whine about the huge corporate tax rate, that take advantage of lavish deductions, exemptions and credits, giving them an EFFECTIVE tax rate of zero.

vernon

well you must be in the 1%

lpnmajor Loc: Arkansas

Haha! Yeah, they'd be like "what? When did they make a middle class?".