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.

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.

PRESIDENT OBAMA, during a visit to Montgomery County on Friday, argued that allowing taxes to rise for the middle class would amount to a "lump of coal" for Christmas, while in Washington, Republican House Speaker John Boehner declared that negotiations to surmount a looming fiscal cliff are going "almost nowhere. " Obama took his case to an audience in Hatfield, saying that a middle-class tax increase would present a "Scrooge Christmas" for millions of wage-earners. Speaking at a toy factory, Obama said Republicans should extend existing Bush-era tax rates for households earning $250,000 or less and allow increases to kick in for the more well-off.

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.

Taking up Church's chalk Like art critic Edward Sozanski, I, too, am mourning the loss of long-time Barnes Foundation instructor Barton Church ("Sic Transit Gloria Merion," March 17). I knew Church because of my Barnes studies: first in Violette de Mazia's class, then in Angelo Pinto's, and finally many years later in his own class, "Traditions. " By that point, I was teaching for the Violette de Mazia Foundation and serving as its education director. Church encouraged me in class and on Sundays, when we were at the foundation preparing for our next class.

THERE WERE no champagne corks popping, no ticker tape down Broadway, and only muted cheers on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange earlier this month when the Dow - the supposed blue-chip barometer of America's fiscal health - bulled through its 2007 closing high of 14,164 and kept going higher. There may have been a sense of smug satisfaction up in penthouse boardrooms of corporations that have stashed away an astonishing $1.45 trillion in cash - more than half of that overseas - while average CEO pay continued to rise, even during the bleakest years of the economic crisis.

When the Philadelphia Electric Co. hired my father as an engineer in 1946, little did the freshly minted graduate of Tufts University and the Navy V-12 program realize that he had hit the jackpot. For the next 41 years, he and his wife would prosper from a rarity today: remarkable job stability, regular salary increases, and gold-standard benefits that enabled them - on a single "family wage" - to raise five children and send them to college. Moreover, his coveted compensation package was graced with a defined-benefit pension and health-care coverage at retirement for him and my mom, including survivor's benefits after he passed away.

Coolidge By Amity Shlaes Harper. 536 pp. $35 Reviewed by Bob Hoover   Amity Shlaes, a onetime editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal, is the author of The Forgotten Man (2007), an attack on the New Deal that sang the praises of Pittsburgh millionaire Andrew Mellon, secretary of the treasury under three presidents, for his pro-business, small-government policies. She now turns to another "forgotten man," Calvin Coolidge, whose presidency Mellon dominated.

Any member of Congress who refuses to compromise on the budget sequester this week should be given this mandatory assignment: Read Democracy in Retreat: The Revolt of the Middle Class and the Worldwide Decline of Representative Government . Author Joshua Kurlantzick examines the spate of retreating democracies over the last two decades and finds something startling. The middle classes - supposedly the bulwark of democracy worldwide - are often turning against it. As our governmental paralysis continues, the same thing could well happen here.

WASHINGTON - President Obama is concerned about the effect that looming, drastic across-the-board budget cuts will have on the middle class, his new chief of staff said Sunday. Congressional Republicans predicted the cuts would start as scheduled next month and blamed Obama not only for doing little to stop them but also for the idea itself. The cuts, called the sequester, would drain $85 billion from the government's budget over the next seven months. Actual cuts may be about 13 percent for defense and 9 percent for other programs, because lawmakers delayed their impact, requiring savings over a shorter period of time.

Excerpts of President Obama's State of the Union address Tuesday, as released in advance by the White House. "It is our generation's task, then, to reignite the true engine of America's economic growth - a rising, thriving middle class. "It is our unfinished task to restore the basic bargain that built this country - the idea that if you work hard and meet your responsibilities, you can get ahead, no matter where you come from, what you look like, or who you love. "It is our unfinished task to make sure that this government works on behalf of the many, and not just the few; that it encourages free enterprise, rewards individual initiative, and opens the doors of opportunity to every child across this great nation of ours.

WASHINGTON - Reviving his populist re-election message, President Obama will press a politically divided Congress to approve more tax increases and fewer spending cuts, during a State of the Union address focused on stabilizing the middle class and repairing the still-wobbly economy. The agenda Obama will outline Tuesday before a joint session of Congress will include more money for infrastructure, clean energy technologies, and manufacturing jobs, as well as for expanding access to early childhood education.

I LISTEN to presidential speeches with an ear to the parts about personal finance. In President Obama's second inaugural address, he made a few interesting points. The first came when he said, "For we, the people, understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it. " I immediately wondered: Do we as a nation really understand this? I don't think so. If we did, I wouldn't receive numerous emails from people criticizing programs that help those who fell into the housing sinkhole.