Their parents cry over them, a lot, but they don’t invest too much in them because no single child represents their future.
The offspring of the $4,955 family are more likely to be shot, stabbed, locked up or die of a drug overdose, but the $110,729 family is more likely to be left childless. It’s almost completely certain that the $4,955 family will extend into the third generation and will be several times larger. Meanwhile the $110,729 family may not even have a third generation or its third generation may see the four grandparents shrink down to two or three grandchildren.
Since the $110,729 family is actually funding the lifestyle of the $4,955 family, that’s a problem, but it’s a problem that no one talks about. And when social capital gets tight, Medicare for the $110,729 family’s grandpa is more likely to be cut than the endless community grants that help keep the $4,955 family and all their many kids comfortable and voting Democrat early and often.
The $110,729 family is responsible. It understands that money is finite and that the government can only do so much. The $4,955 family doesn’t understand that and won’t accept it and has a lot more free time and energy to do something about it. The $110,729 family looks at a variety of factors before voting. The $4,955 family is practical, it looks only at its own bottom line.
No money, no vote.
On paper, the $4,955 family is poor. But so were the Polynesian beach combers. Poverty is relative. From the perspective of a white male capitalist, the $4,955 family is ridiculously poor, but its life is actually comfortable and worry-free compared to the $110,729 family.
On paper, the $4,955 family is poor. But in a society where hundreds of billions of dollars go into funding social capital, the old dollar-and-cent household values no longer apply.
A 1913 family that had less than 5% of the net worth of the average household would have been living a grim existence complete with patched clothing, hungry children and a ramshackle hut that they were paying an outrageous weekly rent for. But a 2013 family with 5% of the net worth has just dropped out and is letting the average household carry it.
There are still plenty of working poor in America, but the broken families that pad out the bottom of that $4,955 statistic rarely work for a living. They work for extras. Social capital has freed them of the need to work for anything except luxuries. And when they work, they don’t pay taxes, usually they get someone else’s taxes back as Earned Income Credits.
On paper, the $110,729 family has an impressive household worth, but much of that worth comes from a mortgaged home that it is struggling to keep up the payments on. The $4,955 family lives in a housing project that they can’t lose no matter how many payments they miss on their high interest credit cards. If the payments get too hard, they’ll drop $199 on a hole-in-the-wall lawyer to declare bankruptcy.
The middle class has become the new poor. The old economic uncertainties of the households at the bottom of the ladder have fallen squarely on it– with none of the sympathy, which is still reserved for their welfare wards.
The middle class is trapped by its own aspirations. Those aspirations are weighed down by a political system that exists for the benefit of the upper and lower classes. Though the middle class still has the majority of the vote, it has the least political influence because it has the least disposable time and wealth, and lacks a dedicated political class to represent its interests
The United States is no longer a middle class country. It is a country whose political establishment answers to the operatives of the very rich and the very poor, the donor class and the welfare class. Politicians have a vested interest in catering to very rich donors or welfare voters because they have the time, money and organizations to get their way. And what they want is wealth redistribution upward and downward from the middle class.
The middle class is being looted by crony capitalists and welfare clans. The liberal Robin Hoods who direct billions in stolen money to Green Energy companies and ghetto voters do their best to convince the middle class that it should vote for them because it’s actually poor.