Editorial: Where is the U.S. middle class?
Publisher’s note: This editorial is from the Oct. 21, 2013, Sacramento Bee.
Our Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal.” Over the years, Americans have removed many barriers to that great aspiration – with the Fourteenth Amendment, the vote for women, the civil rights acts, public education and more.
But since the late 1970s, the United States slowly has become the most unequal of the world’s developed nations in its distribution of income and wealth. Our middle class is shrinking.
A new film, “Inequality for All,” hopes to bring attention to this. The protagonist is the passionate Robert Reich, an economics professor at UC Berkeley, and a former labor secretary during the Clinton administration.
The timing certainly is right for a clear explanation of what has happened economically to the middle class in the last 30 years, and the impact it is having on our democracy. All to the good if it can begin a spirited conversation to consider remedies.