Thirty years of wage suppression, union-busting, and offshoring have made the middle class dependent on public services normally associated with the poor:
This report shows that we have a sleeping giant on our hands. For the past eight years, even before the ‘Great Recession’ hit, middle-class families have increasingly counted on essential public health care and early education supports to safeguard their children’s well-being…But these programs can’t be taken for granted anymore. If they face the budget ax, middle-class and low-income families across the country will see the foundation for their children’s prospects dramatically undermined.
That’s Donald Hernandez, CUNY Professor of Sociology and author of a report tracking the Declining Fortunes of Children in Middle-Class Families, as the title says, over the last two dozen years. Among the major factors cited in the net loss of $4000 to average middle class family incomes from 2000-2008: lost family health care coverage. So many families have become dependent on S-CHIP and Medicaid in the last ten years that 33 Republican governors want to cut Medicaid and do that “dramatic undermining” of prospects for American children.
Not that the GOP wants to do anything about the affordability crisis, either: the first two orders of business for the House GOP majority have been (1) repealing the Affordable Care Act and (2) changing the legal definition of rape to prevent abortions. The middle class is being sacrificed on the altar of a right-to-life that ends at birth.
