Is the middle class suffering anxiety?

Middle class anxiety?
U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., chairman of the Joint Committee of the U.S. Senate, thinks so. He plans hearings over the next two years beginning with the subject of “middle class anxiety.”
His reasoning is very simple: “They (the middle class) are not struggling to get by, but they are struggling to get ahead.
“They are unsure of their fortunes ... in an economy and world that is about to change.
“They feel they are alone ... and that government isn’t helping them where they need it.”
Big Brother has arrived and he and his other brothers of the far left in Congress intend to force their Socialist (and worse) policies on the American citizen.
Sen. Schumer’s statements and his announced actions for the future are but an indication of economic problems to come.
Establishing a false premise such as anxiety within the middle class and then offering oppressive solutions such as taxation on the rich, when everyone knows the middle class itself will be hardest hit, becomes nothing more than major government interference with the America’s present robust economy.
What is there to be anxious about?
The consumer confidence index is at 110.3 percent, one of the highest ever; retail sales were up 6.2 percent in January on an average from seven selected retail giants; gross domestic product (GDP) showed surprising growth of 3.5 percent for the fourth quarter, up from 2 percent in the third quarter; and U.S. business productivity rose 3 percent more than expected in the fourth quarter. Unemployment at 4.7 percent was the lowest in 30 years; more Americans own their own homes than at any other time.
What on earth could cause anxiety within the middle class?
Leading the real middle class, the baby boomers, Americans born between 1945 and 1964, account for about 39 percent of the U.S. population over age 18.
They built the modern day wealth of today’s middle class.
According to data collected by the U.S. Census and Federal Reserve, as of 2001, the baby boomers controlled 67 percent of the country’s wealth of $28 trillion. Households headed by the 55 to 64 age group have a median net worth of $162,048.
So where is the anxiety?
It is important to note, the baby boomers were not born into wealth. To the contrary, they were born into opportunity provided them by the “greatest generation,” the soldiers, sailors and marines who risked their lives in World War II to guarantee all Americans the liberty and freedom we enjoy today.
Their fathers and mothers got off the returning troop ships with literally the military shirts on their backs.
Their income in the service was on average about $60 to $70 per month. Buck privates were paid $21 per month.
But in a way, they possessed wealth — the wealth of a dream, carried in some cases, perhaps from a fox hole to a jungle tent.
That dream was of returning home to America, marrying, in some cases, the sweetheart they left behind when they went to war, raising a family in the little cottage with the white picket fence.
It was the American Dream.
They put up the ladders of opportunity that their children and generations since could climb in their ascending mobility to the middle class and beyond.
Ninety percent of today’s millionaires came from the lower levels of the economic scale, some from very poor families.
The present robust American economy, perhaps the strongest ever, rests on a foundation that has supported it, with the exception of two brief recessions, for the past quarter century.
That foundation was the brainchild of Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, described by The Economist as the “most influential economist of the 20th Century, possibly of all time,” and by Alan Greenspan as “having ideas sufficiently original to alter the direction of civilization.”
His political philosophy stressed the advantages of the marketplace and the disadvantage of government intervention.
His economic policies fell on deaf ears all during the “big government-welfare state era” of the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.
He would have to wait until 1980, at age 68, before he found his man.
That man was President Ronald Reagan.
President Reagan had the moral courage to adopt Milton Friedman’s philosophy into a program that became known as “supply side economics.” Simply stated, supply side economics involved an adequate supply of money, increased consumption and the increase in steady employment. Friedman referred to his refinement of the consumption function and the permanent income hypothesis (1957) as his best scientific work.
Milton Friedman was a close advisor and consultant to President Reagan during his entire administration (1981-88).
America has come such a long way in the establishment of an economy that has forward vision offering opportunity to all.
No economy can guarantee equal wealth to all.
That is a function of the initiative of each individual.
One of Milton Friedman’s most memorable quotes is: “If equality is placed before freedom, you will have neither; If freedom is placed before equality, you will have both.”
The far left liberals in Congress will use any means at hand to push economic equality ahead of economic freedom.
No matter how compelling their phony claims seem, such as “middle class anxiety,” they must be exposed and resisted.
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