Tear-jerking human interest stories and reviewing the latest polling data — such are the trademark news stories of the main stream media. How delighted the editor must be when a reporter can combine such swill into one story! So what was on the front page of today’s Washington Post? Here is the story, Hovering Above Poverty, Grasping for Middle Class.
Consider that we are in a recession — well, not really (see here), but the president is a Republican, this is an election year, and this is, after all, the Washington Post. So should we be surprised the Washington Post plans to run a front page series on the poor and the “recession” complete with polling data and human interest stories?
When you read Hovering Above Poverty, Grasping for Middle Class, please remember several things.
- Government cannot create jobs. In fact, the higher our taxes go up, the more jobs the government kills. And taxes often fall hardest on the middle class. Payroll taxes are taxes. Yet all the government can do for us is provide the law and order necessary for commerce (see here).
- Illegal immigrants work cheap. Lots of illegal immigrants will take all the low wage jobs. We have lots of lots of illegal immigrants. Because our political leadership will not enforce existing immigration laws, the wages of unskill workers have been depressed (see here).
- Government runs our school system. The worst schools serve the impoverished. Why? The rich and determined middle class parents send their children to private schools. Most other people try to live in areas where the government-run schools are at least decent. That leaves the poor with with little choice and no way to escape the government-run school monopoly in their neighborhoods. There is an alternative (see here).
- Trade serves the interests of the USA. Thanks to free trade aggreements, our economy is still growing, and that is due to exports (see here).
- Our modern economy runs on cheap energy, and the Democrats do not have a clue as to how how to get it. They just know how to stop the private sector from working. The Democrats call this economic planning. Everybody else calls it socialism. When a real problem materializes, the Democrats do not know what to do. That is why the Democrats went home on vacation (see here).
Tom, it sounds as if you are undermining the needs of the poor because they are caught in the fray between politics and the media. Am I reading that correctly, or are you merely making the point that government isnt’the solution?
kgotthardt – Government serves the needs of organized political constituencies with the means to elect and lobby politicians. The poor are not organized and they do not have the means to lobby politicians. Often the poor do not bother to vote. So the government does not serve the poor. At best the government serves those who are supposedly lobbying on behalf of the poor.
Consider a case in point. The middle class is not poor. The middle class votes, but the middle class does not have a coherent set of shared interests. The teacher’s unions, on the other hand, are well organized and funded. That is why the public school system more often than not serves the interests of the teacher’s unions rather than students.
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