The middle class is poor, but it has all the disadvantages of poverty and none of the advantages.
Its workaholic efforts leave it at a disadvantage when it comes to competing with the idle rich and poor who launch Green Energy companies that are meant to fail and stand in line waiting to cash their latest government check every other week. The middle class just doesn’t have the time or energy to do anything about the trap that’s in. Unlike the rich and poor, it can’t even get politically organized.
The Obama vision is a “Cloud” America where all the money is in the government cloud and each family is given support according to its needs and is taken for whatever its abilities earn. That vision is already true on the $4,955 scale and is coming true on the $110,729 level as well.
The government money “Cloud” works about as well as Healthcare.gov. Its brand of central planning has failed everywhere it’s been tried. But the experiment won’t completely crash until the middle class does. Margaret Thatcher famously said that Socialism works until it runs out of other people’s money. The “other people” are the middle class who have the most money and the least ability to protect it from the cloud dwellers. There are two Americas; the America of the working class and the Obamerica of the government class. Measuring poverty in net worth is relevant in only one of these Americas. To measure poverty across both nations, we must speak of the poverty of freedom, the poverty of family and marriage, the poverty of economic security and the poverty of leisure time.
These are the true measures of modern poverty in an America where some people are living in a postmodern government cloud that uses social capital instead of personal income and others are scratching out an uncertain living to support the “Cloud Dwellers” who manage the government bureaucracy, work at non-profits and squat in the $4,955 space.
Our postmodern economy punishes personal aspiration and rewards the surrender of economic independence to the government. More Americans are vanishing into the government cloud, going on disability, dropping out of the system and entering the cloud until the cloud is too heavy to keep on floating in the sky and sinks down to earth or until the New Poor get tired of living fearful lives to subsidize the utopian fantasies of the 1% and the Polynesian lifestyles of the $4,955.
An American workers’ revolution will not be a Socialist revolution, it will be an Anti-Socialist revolution of the new poor of the middle class.