The headline in the Christian Science Monitor reads: "US poverty rate steady at 15 percent, but 'lower class' is booming". According to the Monitor:
[T]he Census Bureau report released Tuesday shows that the Great Recession and its aftermath have been hardest on the poorest one-fifth of Americans. Their mean income fell 3.3 percent, while the mean income for the top one-fifth of earners dropped 0.5 percent. That means inequality has increased since the recession, and that income losses among the poorer is primarily responsible for the wider gap.
So what is the political, religious, business, and civic elites' solution to this situation? Is it to stop the bleeding and to give lower-class Americans time to recover from the recession by finding jobs and earning higher wages?
Nope. It is to demand that the House pass the Senate amnesty bill that legalizes millions of low-income illegal aliens and brings in millions more low-income workers both legally and illegally. That will work wonders for lower-class Americans.
And these elites are excited to do this in spite of the fact that the Congressional Budget Office has determined that the Senate-passed amnesty bill will result in still lower wages for low income workers by 1) increasing the size of the workforce, 2) decreasing average wages through 2025, and 3) slightly raising the unemployment rate through 2020.
At a time when millions of Americans, including 5.8 percent of college graduates, describe themselves as lower class, the president of the United States, the United States Senate, faith leaders, high tech billionaires, labor organizers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Republican luminaries such as Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) are determined to drive still millions more Americans into the lower class.
Isn't it time that the elites end their war on lower class Americans? And isn't it time that they stop doing everything possible to hold them down by bringing in more foreign workers to compete for the jobs they need, to further drive down their wages, and to push them onto the unemployment rolls?
