Middle Class

He was picked up and brought in for questioning after a pollster provided a tip to the Media Patrol. They shoved him into a chair in an unused studio, aimed a bright light at his face, and a member of the Media Patrol said: "We have received a report that in response to a question from a pollster as to the level of your discontent, you said: 'I am quite happy.' Is that true?" The man smiled and said: "Yes, that's what I said, all right. " The interrogator glared at him, then barked: "Why did you say that?"

The economic slide of the 1990s is hitting middle-class America after a decade in which it ran harder to stay in place. That fact of economic life is causing considerable political discomfort for President Bush and the Republicans, as a growing body of research tarnishes the GOP's golden image of the '80s. Government statistics show that middle class has come to mean "middle crunch. " Widespread gains in prosperity were not to be had in the '80s. It was a decade in which middle-class families sent more workers into the labor force to maintain living standards, while the richest Americans accumulated more wealth than ever.

The Houston Housing Authority has been buying up foreclosed homes and renting them to low-income families. The novel program is, first of all, a clever attempt to reap some good from Houston's economic woes. In very few cities would it make economic sense to purchase middle-class housing for the use of the poor. In economically depressed Houston, the units are a bargain. Second, the initiative avoids one of the problems that has plagued public housing: the tendency to turn public-housing complexes into concentrations of failure.

Re: "She's Pro-Prez" letter: I am so sick and tired of reading liberal garbage letters like Barbara Ziccardi's, which puppet the same lie that Republicans, and Mitt Romney in particular, are only for the rich, and Obama is for the middle class. Mitt Romney has done more to help the poor and middle class than Obama has or ever will. Mitt Romney has taken many businesses with one foot in bankruptcy court — including many middle-class workers who would have had one foot in the unemployment line — and turned those businesses into surviving and thriving companies which not only saved jobs for many middle-class workers, but provided new jobs for other workers.

WASHINGTON - The richest 1 percent of Americans have been getting far richer over the last three decades while the middle class and poor have seen their after-tax household income only crawl up in comparison, according to a government study. After-tax income for the top 1 percent of U.S. households almost tripled, up 275 percent, from 1979 to 2007, the Congressional Budget Office found. For people in the middle of the economic scale, after-tax income grew by just 40 percent. Those at the bottom experienced an 18 percent increase.

The middle class in poor countries is the fastest-growing segment of the world's population. While the planet's total population will increase by about a billion people in the next 12 years, the ranks of the middle class will swell by as many as 1.8 billion - 600 million just in China. This is, of course, good news - but it also means humanity will have to adjust to unprecedented pressures. The rise of a new global middle class is already having repercussions. Homi Kharas, a researcher at the Brookings Institution, estimates that by 2020, the world's middle class will grow to include 52 percent of the total population, up from 30 percent.

Paul Krugman is a columnist for the New York Times By now, every journalist should know that you have to check out - carefully - any scheme coming from the White House. You can't just accept the administration's version of what it's doing. Remember: These are the people who named a big giveaway to logging interests "Healthy Forests. " Sure enough, a close look at President Bush's proposal for "progressive-price indexing" of Social Security puts the lie to claims that it's a plan to increase benefits for the poor and cut them for the wealthy.

Usually, when we think of fads, we think of something like pet rocks or coonskin hats, things that ultimately don't matter. There are fads that do matter. Like ruining the lives of working people, a fad of recent years. If you were a CEO who wasn't "downsizing," "outsourcing," "restructuring" or any of the other euphemisms for laying off workers, all the other big shots would shout "nyah, nyah" at you. It could be uncomfortable to go the the Rich Guys Club and feel an outcast because you kept together a happy, productive workforce.

There has been a great hullabaloo recently about an idea called "the vanishing middle class. " Simply put, the argument goes roughly like this: There are more rich people than before and the rich are getting even richer - and there are more poor people and the poor are getting even poorer. Therefore, it is said that the middle class is vanishing, shrinking, disappearing, squeezed or stagnating. You may choose your own adjective because no expert has ever come up with a definition of "middle class" that other experts will agree upon.

More than half of all Americans - about 160 million - think of themselves as middle class, according to a 2008 Pew survey. But recent events suggest officials in Washington have a much narrower definition, encompassing only the 16 million workers represented by a union. This definition gives new perspective to last week's first meeting of the Middle Class Working Families Task Force in Philadelphia. Headed by Vice President Biden, the task force certainly seems to be a high priority for the White House.

Re: "She's Pro-Prez" letter: I am so sick and tired of reading liberal garbage letters like Barbara Ziccardi's, which puppet the same lie that Republicans, and Mitt Romney in particular, are only for the rich, and Obama is for the middle class. Mitt Romney has done more to help the poor and middle class than Obama has or ever will. Mitt Romney has taken many businesses with one foot in bankruptcy court — including many middle-class workers who would have had one foot in the unemployment line — and turned those businesses into surviving and thriving companies which not only saved jobs for many middle-class workers, but provided new jobs for other workers.

Destiny is a funny thing. From Day 1 to Day 24 - and the months before and after a four-week shoot in Ghana - Deron Albright's first feature film, The Destiny of Lesser Animals , appeared doomed. "It was just the relentlessness of the challenges," said Albright, 42, of Narberth, a director and associate professor of film at St. Joseph's University. "Any one given bad day is doable. This was day upon day. . . . It has been an exhausting process. " On more than one occasion, everyone involved - from the L.A. cameraman who slept on Albright's couch to the lead actor who paid his own airfare to Ghana - wondered whether the film four years in the making would ever see the big screen.

"I have some great friends that are NASCAR team owners. "   - Mitt Romney, Feb. 26 "Ann drives a couple of Cadillacs, actually. " - Mitt Romney, Feb. 24 TAMPA, Fla., Aug. 30, 2012 - Fellow Republicans, as I accept your nomination for the presidency tonight, I feel like a million bucks. Actually, I feel like between 150 and 200 some-odd million bucks. It's hard to say with certainty because some of it is in the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, and a Swiss bank account.

MOSCOW - Vladimir Putin has won his third term in an unfair election, and the new Russian opposition seems confused about what to do next. Its first postelection demonstration was much smaller than any of the huge, unprecedented gatherings that erupted in December after a rigged parliamentary ballot. Yet, it would be a mistake to conclude that a brief "Moscow spring" has already ended. A week in chilly Moscow has made me optimistic that political change here is inevitable, whether or not Putin wants it. To paraphrase Bob Dylan: Something is happening, Mr. Putin, and you don't know what it is . Let me explain.

Charles Murray thinks I live in a bubble, and it worries him. He believes that people like me are influential but detached, and that the level of isolation in which we live jeopardizes the well-being of society. When he looks at me, here is what he sees: Main Line home, Ivy League law degree, kids in private schools, a Stairmaster in my office, and no domestic beer in my fridge. I tried to convince him that he is mistaken, highlighting that I grew up in Doylestown in a three-bedroom, one-bath home (with only a tub, no shower)

Republican State Sen. Joe Kyrillos has set a lofty goal for 2012: Break the 30-year Democratic monopoly of New Jersey's two Senate seats in Washington. Kyrillos, 51, of Middletown, launched his campaign for the GOP nomination this week, ignoring potential primary opponents and going straight after Democratic U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez, who is running for his second full term. A 24-year veteran of the Legislature and a close friend of Gov. Christie's, Kyrillos bashed Menendez as a tax-and-spend liberal, going so far as to blame him for the ballooning national debt and the nation's unemployment.

Shelley Adler, the widow of former Democratic Rep. John H. Adler, will seek her party's nomination to run for the seat her husband lost in 2010, she announced Monday. The lawyer and former Cherry Hill councilwoman hopes to run as the Democratic candidate in the recently redrawn Third Congressional District, which covers much of Burlington and Ocean Counties. She would likely oppose Republican Jon Runyan, the former Eagles player, who defeated her husband and faces his first reelection bid. Adler, 52, said she had considered becoming a candidate "for the last couple of months.

My late father, a skilled tradesman who ended his career pushing a broom, often said there was no shame in honest labor. He and my mother raised six kids while holding down a total of three jobs, which taught me something about the necessity - and dignity - of hard work. That life lesson is one reason I admire Camden Mayor Dana L. Redd, who is devoted to a job that's among the toughest of its kind anywhere. But although I also consider Redd hardworking, capable, and caring, that doesn't mean I buy the rosy performance rating (9.5 points out of a possible 10)

For decades, Philadelphia's middle-class institutions have been going down like bowling pins. There was the Navy Yard, which once provided 60,000 solidly middle-class jobs, now arguably best known as the chic headquarters of Urban Outfitters. Budd Co. left in 2002, Sunoco will pack up later this year. And now the latest body blow; 49 Catholic school closings and mergers, including 18 in Philadelphia alone, affecting about 21,000 students. Even for non-Catholics, that sort of assault on an institution as long-lived and stolid as parochial school is unsettling, as though another fissure had opened in the region's social bedrock.