Reviving the American Dream
By Mario Cuomo
This topic of the middle class is a vital one, not just for New York, but for the nation. It is badly under appreciated in today's political campaigns. I don't feel that people are eager to address it and to identify the hard questions and answer them.
Part of that might be semantic. It is hard to define what middle class is, although it's been a demographic and a political reality for more than 2,500 years. Plato's student, Aristotle, described society as having three parts: the rich, the poor and the people in between, who he referred to as the middle class. He said a strong middle class would be indispensable to a well-ordered society. It would help protect against the domination of the rich and the desperation of the poor. The middle class' strength would come from its numbers and its intense desire to achieve a good life, by working hard, forcefully advocating for adequate compensation for its labors and fighting for the opportunity to own property.
That was 2,500 years ago. But middle class is still difficult to define.
Some people go to numbers. Lou Dobbs uses income numbers -- $26,000 to $150,000 is middle class to Lou Dobbs. But numbers depend on where you are and what other circumstances surround you when you are there.
Fifty thousand dollars and a lot of overtime in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, may be pretty good income. But if you're a single parent with two school-age children looking for an apartment in Manhattan, the definition is dramatically different. Now in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, you could have a one-earner family, as we did, with a spouse who stayed home and raised five kids in a Cape-Cod house in a safe neighborhood in Queens with good public schools and convenient emergency rooms that were free with a new car every two years a $30,000-a-year income. In those years, you could expect to earn more than your father did because the labor unions and the economy saw to that. The mobility was upward.
Given all the variances of the middle class, I've decided to stay with my own definition. It's closer to Aristotle's than anyone else's. Here it is: The middle class is made up of people who aren't rich enough to be virtually free of economic concern, nor poor enough to warrant any subsistence payment from the government or from charity. They are people who work for a living because they have to, not because some psychiatrist told them it's a good way to fill the grim interval between birth and eternity.
Some of them are two-parent families, one-parent families, and some of them single. There are police officers, firefighters, nurses, emergency responders, teachers, secretaries, bus drivers, taxi and limousine drivers, and clerks. Without these middle-class New Yorkers, we could not have built, operated, or survived comfortably in what is now the greatest city in world history. And if these workers are not adequately paid and otherwise reasonably accommodated, the quality of our city's life is sure to decline.
How is the middle class doing today? You'll find arguments that say, "Oh you shouldn't say that the middle class is in trouble. So many wonderful things have happened in the middle class." That is absolutely true. They live longer. Home ownership is up. More people seem to drive new and expensive cars. In my era, there were jalopies everywhere. But not now. Everybody seems to have a reasonably new car. They all own computers and flat-screen televisions. They fly across the country, and they call relatives overseas regularly. All these things are now taken for granted. In my days, we would have thought of them as the prerogatives of the very rich.
On the other hand, despite all of those advantages, the middle-class prosperity level is lagging badly. The economic balance in our country has become radically skewed by gross disparities between the extremely rich and the rest of the population. Of course, in market system, there are going to be winners and losers; that is obvious. But this disparity goes far beyond what is inevitable in a market economy. And as a result of this disparity, the stability of this society that Aristotle hoped for and that my family and I lived is threatened. Perhaps dangerously so.
Today a CEO is paid 420 times what the workers are paid. Some say that is not really a lot: The corporations are so large now that hundreds of millions of dollar in salary to run them is not a lot. Well, it is a lot to a worker. When I was living in the period of the American Dream, that ratio was closer to 20 times.
Today, more Americans than ever average a million dollars a year in income. There are more billionaires than ever. And a lot of that has happened recently. That is all good. What is not good is that they are only the top one percent of the taxpayers.
At the same time, the number of poor people has grown significantly. And middle-class firefighters, police officers, sanitation workers are forced to live outside the city because they cannot buy a house or pay the rent in an area where they think the public school is good enough. A lot of them who love this city and love their jobs find that they have to get rooted in the suburbs.
We are having difficulty finding teachers to teach the skills that our high-powered economy demands at the kind of salaries our city supposedly can afford. For how long will we be able to ask our young men and women to risk their lives as police officers for a meager starting salary of $25,000 a year before taxes?
Our society is wonderfully rewarding for high-level executives and investors but punishing workers of moderate or low skills with the cost of everything the middle class needs most: housing, education, healthcare, retirement security, transportation. The prices of all these things are going up faster than their wages.
The distinguished analyst, Kevin Phillips, one of my favorite Republicans, wrote in 1994, "The fragmentation is incredible. And I'm a Republican, I'm a conservative. This is bad and it has to be stopped." For years I said, "Kevin, you have to write another book because it is getting worse." He said, "Nobody's listening, nobody cares, nobody believes it. Somehow the country's been conned into believing everybody is better off. They don't understand that there are no savings.."
So Phillips wrote a second book recently, Wealth and Democracy, and he said this: "The current of extreme economic disparities are simply not sustainable without serious damage to the country's productivity patterns and performance."
I agree. What then must we do to help stabilize our society by strengthening our middle class? We have to provide current middle-class New Yorkers with an opportunity to earn a good life while making room for the poor.
We have to prepare middle-class New Yorkers for life in these challenging days and we have to protect them from serious threats to their welfare. How do we protect them? Give them education. From pre-K to the end of their life. You can't stop because the world is changing rapidly and the complexity is growing.
It's fun to learn and to stay with the wave. That's what's necessary.
We are nowhere near doing what we have to do with education. How many years ago was it that this country decided that, in order to be successful as a nation, you'd have to have a certain minimum level of proficiency at reading, writing, and things like that? If you depend on the market, then only the rich people are going to get an education.
What about Mario Cuomo in south Jamaica, Queens, whose mother and father cannot read or write and were broke with a little grocery store that was not working? What do you do for him? Public schools. To when? Age 16, high school. Why? Because we need it. For what? For the good of the country.
http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/issueoftheweek/20070416/200/2149#6
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