{"id":21486,"date":"2013-08-04T09:37:04","date_gmt":"2013-08-04T14:37:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=21486"},"modified":"2013-08-04T09:37:04","modified_gmt":"2013-08-04T14:37:04","slug":"who-speaks-for-those-neither-rich-nor-poor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/08\/04\/who-speaks-for-those-neither-rich-nor-poor\/","title":{"rendered":"Who speaks for those neither rich nor poor?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Victor Davis Hanson<\/a> on the forgotten people in the middle:<\/p>\n

There are more than 48 million Americans on food stamps, an increase of about 12 million since the beginning of the Obama presidency.<\/p>\n

At a time of record-high crop prices, the U.S. government still helps well-off farmers with some $20 billion in annual crop payouts and indirect subsidies.<\/p>\n

The Left mythicizes food-stamp recipients almost as if they all must be the Cratchits of Dickensian England.<\/p>\n

The Right romanticizes corporate agriculture as if the growers all were hardscrabble family farmers in need of a little boost to get through another tough harvest.<\/p>\n

Those in between, who pay federal income taxes and are not on food stamps, lack the empathy of the poor and the clout of the rich. Can\u2019t a politician say that?<\/p>\n

Illegal immigration is likewise not a Left vs. Right or Republican vs. Democrat issue, but instead mostly one of class.<\/p>\n

The influx of millions of illegal immigrants has ensured corporate America access to cheap labor while offering a growing constituency for political and academic elites.<\/p>\n

Yet the earning power of poorer American workers \u2014 especially African Americans and Hispanic Americans \u2014 has stagnated.<\/p>\n

The common bond between the agendas of La Raza<\/em> activists and the corporate world is apparently a relative lack of concern for the welfare of entry-level laborers, many of them in American inner cities, who are competing against millions of illegal workers.<\/p>\n

Given the slow-growth, high-unemployment economy, and the policies of the Federal Reserve, interest on simple passbook accounts has all but vanished.<\/p>\n

The poor are not so affected. They are more often borrowers than lenders, and they are sometime beneficiaries of federally subsidized debt relief.<\/p>\n

The rich have the capital and connections to find more profitable investments in real estate or the stock market that make them immune from pedestrian, underperforming savings accounts.<\/p>\n

In other words, this administration\u2019s loose money policy has been good for the indebted and even better for the stock-invested rich. But it is absolutely lousy for the middle class and for strapped retirees with a few dollars in conservative passbook accounts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Victor Davis Hanson on the forgotten people in the middle: There are more than 48 million Americans on food stamps, an increase of about 12 million since the beginning of the Obama presidency. At a time of record-high crop prices, the U.S. government still helps well-off farmers with some $20 billion in annual crop payouts […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,84,13],"tags":[645,554,91,315],"class_list":["post-21486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-government","category-usa","tag-corporatewelfare","tag-immigration","tag-poverty","tag-wealth"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5Ay","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21486"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21486\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21487,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21486\/revisions\/21487"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}