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De haut en bas.(THE STRAGGLER)(middle class)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
'THROUGHOUT recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low.... The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low ... is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal."
Thus Emmanuel Goldstein in The Book, the one that Winston Smith reads while canoodling with his girlfriend in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Goldstein got the essentials right, but he failed to foresee the great success of meritocratic welfare capitalism. His schema needs a few adjustments.
These thoughts ambled through my mind while I was watching the Palin-Biden debate the other evening. Both vice-presidential candidates were terrifically keen to assure us folks in the Middle how wonderful we are and how firmly on our side they stand. Biden: "We're going to focus on the middle class.... The middle class needs relief, tax relief.... The middle class is struggling." Palin: "John McCain and I ... we're going to fight for the middleclass, average, everyday American family like mine."
Well, one thing's plain about the next four years: It's going to be great to be middle-class! Obama, McCain, Biden, Palin--these guys love the heck out of us! The federal political establishment regards the middle class as fondly as Marx did the proletariat.
Looking at the statistical tables put out by the IRS, it's not hard to see why. By far the biggest haul for the federal government comes from the middle class. The range of "adjusted gross income" from $50,000 to $1 million accounts for 65 percent of all income-tax revenues, and total receipts on either side of that, from the poor and the rich alike, drop off like continental shelves. Over 20 percent of the revenue comes from the range $100,000 to $200,000, and another huge slab--18 percent--from the $50,000 to $100,000 range. The middle class is fertile soil for tax farmers.
Politicians are also vote farmers, and here too the middle class is the place to go. These dutiful, rule-following, public-spirited habits that get us into, and keep us in, the middle class also prompt us to our citizenly obligations: taxes, voting, and (when demanded) military service. No wonder that one of the standard conceits of democratic politics is fetishization of the middle class.
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- THE MIDDLE CLASS YEARS.(Main)
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...community is formed by citizens of the middle class -(who) turn the scale and prevent...this. Yet surveys show that the middle class upon which a democracy relies has...are rushing en masse to woo the middle class with tax breaks, national health...