America's high anxiety
If Kerry can find a way to connect the federal budget deficits to those at the state levels and show how cuts in the state programs that affect the lives of ordinary Americans are a direct result of President Bush's tax cuts--and if he can find a comprehensible way to capture the fear and resentment of the middle class--populist politics will catch fire. Howard Dean tried to capitalize on a different kind of anger, over the war with Iraq, but economic anxiety is much the more combustible issue.
The biggest swing group here will be women because middle-class mothers who enter the workforce to give their families an economic leg up now find they are in the workplace just so their families can mark time. As Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi point out in their outstanding book, The Two-Income Trap, "This middle-class mother is trapped. She can't afford to work, and she can't afford to quit," and she finds their "family life [is] less, not more, financially secure." The pressure on the middle class, the authors point out, is driven by the search of millions of parents for a nice house on a safe street, with good schools nearby. But the soaring cost of that home has brought families to face the need for a second income, or, alternatively, to take on bigger mortgages and assume debt loads that were unthinkable a generation ago. Today, the portion of income for families with kids that is earmarked for mortgage payments is up almost 80 percent since 1980. And then there's all the other stuff--the car payments, the medical bills, and the like. No wonder so many women feel they're "in a trap." They can't leave their job, for if they do, the family stands to lose everything.
Parents may be working harder and harder, but two-income families are much more vulnerable to the risk of living without a paycheck, in a business climate that regularly closes plants and lays off workers. The Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan, noted recently that a million American workers leave their jobs each week, but the economy creates more than a million new jobs each week. Yet the odds that someone will be laid off, downsized, or otherwise left without a paycheck have more than doubled for the average family. Add to this the dramatic increase in healthcare costs, never mind the millions of families forced to take care of a sick relative who has been discharged quicker and sicker from the hospital, and you can appreciate the day-to-day, week-to-week pressures facing middle-class America. Now, instead of looking ahead to a brighter future with rising incomes, many middle-class families worry about slipping into a lower income bracket.
Middle-class Americans' anxiety is growing because their incomes have stalled while medical costs, gasoline prices, local and state taxes, and the like are increasing. Their anger is growing because they see too few winners and too many losers and blame some of this on the role of Washington. The Democrats will inevitably seize this issue as a way to trump the president's strength on the issues of national security and terrorism. The presidential election hinges on who can convince the country which issue is more important.
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