This is not to say that the economic battering of the American middle class—a true scandal—has received anything near the attention commensurate with its importance. That’s for another post. But it is to acknowledge the sporadic good work that occasionally fights its way to prominence in the publications that purport to monitor the nation’s economic life. It is also to point the way forward for the fall campaign. As far as domestic issues go, this is the one.

Among the more valuable work:

Peter Gosselin, now a fellow at the Urban Institute, laid the foundation for much future reporting with his extensive probes for the Los Angeles Times on the fraying middle-class safety net.

The Journal’s David Wessel in April 2004 pointed out what kind of jobs are being created as a result of outsourcing and other trade-related phenomenon. He says jobs have been breaking down into two categories—the high-end stuff and this category:

One sort requires physical contact — nursing-home aides, janitors, gardeners, dentists. Foreign-born workers may do them, but they’ll have to move to the U.S. A 2000 survey found that the average starting salary of graduates of community-college dental-hygiene programs was $41,900.

A hot program at many community colleges these days is massage therapy….

The story points to where all this is heading:

One unpleasant possibility, acknowledged even by those firmly in the trade-is-good camp, is that jobs will proliferate at both ends of the barbell — and fewer in the middle. The result would be an ever-wider gap between well-paying jobs and poorly paid jobs.

Actually, I found this excellent point underplayed. It’s clear that this phenomenon is not only a possibility, but has been happening for a long time. Second, this “barbell” is going to be so lopsided—many people on one side; only a few on the other—that the image doesn’t work. “Giraffe,” or some such, might be the better.

A BusinessWeek report in 2006 reinforced the point, finding that the only sector that produced any net new jobs in the U.S. economy between 2001 and 2006 was health care. That’s nuts.

The Journal in 2004 documented the growing phenomenon of bankruptcy among the middle-aged and formerly middle class. (1)

The New York Times in 2005 told how strapped homeowners are draining their home equity lines to pay off credit card balances and other day-to-day expenses.

The Journal expanded on the point just this month with a piece that explains how strapped consumers are selling their life insurance policies at pennies on the dollar and finding other expensive, non-conventional methods of raising cash; they have already tapped out on credit cards, to the tune of nearly $1 trillion, up by a third in the five years ended in 2006. (For a review of the reporting on credit cards, buy a copy of the March/April issue of the print version of the Columbia Journalism Review, or, okay, just click here.)

The New York Times’s Louis Uchitelle last November documented the scrambles of the erstwhile middle-class of Newton, Iowa, following the closure of the Maytag plant there.


Mr. Winchell, 46, having earned $24 an hour as a skilled electrician, seems paralyzed by the disappearance of his employer. He imagines that there is work for electricians in central Iowa but he hasn’t looked. ”Lisa is always on me because I’m so angry,” he said. ”She says, ‘What would your mom have said?’ My mom would have said, ‘Worrying is not going to help.”’


Likewise, the Journal’s Mark Whitehouse documented Detroit’s unraveling in the subprime catastrophe, including on West Outer Drive, an area of middle-class strivers. (2)

“It was like when you made it to Outer Drive, you’d made it,” says Deborah Herron, 52, a former administrative assistant who lived in the area for 35 years…

Over the past three years, three people on the 5100 block have used subprime loans to buy homes. In at least two of those cases, though, the experience has not gone well. Raymond Dixon, a 36-year-old with his own business installing security systems, borrowed $180,000 from Fremont Investment &Loan in 2004 to buy a first home for himself, his wife and six children…. After all the papers had been signed, he says, he realized that he had paid more than $20,000 to the broker and other go-betweens. “They took us for a ride,” he says….


Mr. Dixon defaulted on the loan after the monthly payment jumped to more than $1,500 from $1,142 — a rise he says put too much strain on his income from his security business. The foreclosure process began in late November, and Mr. Dixon says he expects an eviction notice this week. A spokesman for Fremont said the company, which is in the process of exiting the residential mortgage business, has taken measures to reduce defaults but does not comment on specific customers.

For a helpful primer on middle-class financial stress, I recommend, as always, The Two Income Trap, which documents how a typical two-income family then, after paying for housing, education and health care, had less disposable income than its counterpart in the 1970s. Warren and Leo Gottlieb, another Harvard law professor, found that health care expenses have added to middle-class pressure. In congressional testimony last year, they demonstrated that nearly half of bankruptcies came in the aftermath of serious medical problems.


Demos, a New York-based advocacy group, last year produced an eye-opening study that found that the overwhelming number (80 percent) of middle-class families don’t have enough assets to cover three months’ worth of expenses should they lose their jobs and that more than half of middle-class families, counting debt, have net financial assets of zero or less.

This is the middle-class here.

BusinessWeek shows how gas prices may be the last straw for consumers, while the Times picks up on what I saw in the South.

So, here are a few things to think about as we enter the general campaign