Visual source: Newseum
The New York Times on the middle class agenda:
The challenge for Mr. Obama is to translate the plight of the middle class into an agenda for broad prosperity. Congress’s inability to cleanly extend even emergency measures though 2012 — including the temporary payroll tax cut and federal unemployment benefits — underscores the difficulty. The alternative is continued decline.
Recent government data show that 100 million Americans, or about one in three, are living in poverty or very close to it. Of 13.3 million unemployed Americans now searching for work, 5.7 million have been looking for more than six months, while millions more have given up altogether. Even a job is no guarantee of middle-class security. The real median income of working-age households has declined, from $61,600 in 2000 to $55,300 in 2010 — the result of abysmally slow job growth even before the onset of the recession.
Economic growth alone, even if it accelerated, would not be enough to restore the middle class. Mr. Obama refuted the Republican notion that market forces alone can ensure broad prosperity, when the economic health of American families also depends on government action.[...]
Dana Milbank:
House Speaker John Boehner gave a spirited reply when asked recently about whether his party’s resistance to middle-class tax cuts risked making Republicans appear to be lackeys of the rich.
“I’ve got 11 brothers and sisters on every rung of the economic ladder, all right?” Boehner said. “My dad owned a bar. I know what’s going on out in America.”
So Boehner has his finger on the American pulse because his deceased father owned a saloon? What strange brew have they been pouring in the speaker’s office?
The Los Angeles Times:
It's only fitting that House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) would close the year with one more act of brinksmanship. Boehner announced Sunday that he opposed the bipartisan deal in the Senate on a stopgap extension of soon-to-expire payroll tax cuts, unemployment benefits and Medicare payment rates for physicians — a deal that he reportedly urged his caucus to accept, only to have other members of his leadership team oppose it. The Senate proposal was far from perfect, but it gave the House GOP a clear win on what supposedly was its top priority: the Keystone XL pipeline project. By not accepting the deal, House Republicans show again that they're unable or unwilling to stop moving the goal posts.
Robert Deneweth:
As two suburban grandfathers, we went to Grand Circus Park last month before Occupy Detroit moved out of its encampment. Painfully aware of not being able to leave a better world to our children than the one we inherited, we wanted to see what the next generation was up to. [...] It turns out that they were not just 20-somethings; we found great diversity in age, as well as in race and economic status. Among the occupiers we met were a health care worker from Warren, whose family is barely making it financially; a 43-year-old, unemployed construction worker from Downriver; a middle-class health care analyst; a grandmother of four whose son had lost his home to foreclosure; a 22-year-old student at Henry Ford Community College, and an ex-Navy man, married with a young child and living in the suburbs.
But if these were "the 99%," so were we. This theme has become both an identifier and a rallying cry, announcing the potential strength of the movement, sending a powerful "Join us" call to almost all Americans.[...]
Dan Weissman:
The present, special interest-laden federal and state tax codes are the product of lobbyists, big business, sports enterprises, lawyers, labor unions, financial interests and an array of specific publics who benefit from the myriad loopholes in the morass of whereas-es and insomuchas-es that fill the telephone book-sized code that is the proverbial “elephant designed by committee.”
Amid all the blathering about extending the payroll tax deduction for another year and the tug of war over a tax increase for millionaires, when the political powers vow to simplify the tax laws, close loopholes, reform entitlements and rein in unions, somehow the subsidy known as the business expense write-off always flies beneath the radar.
Welcome to the realm of the powerful special interests and their ability to protect what is theirs.