Create Debate: Question Three

Survival of the Middle Class

For most American families, the loss of a job or one serious illness spells catastrophe. Stagnant wages, expensive health care and rising education costs are vital issues being ignored by the Congress and White House. A champion of working families, I will lead America into expanding opportunities, universal health care, restore our schools and strengthen Social Security and protections for private pensions.

Saving the Middle Class: A Real - not Rhetorical - Plan

"Every gun that is made, every war ship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are notfed, those who are cold and are not clothed."
--President Dwight D. Eisenhower

It is a shocking - and dangerous - trend in the United States over the last three decades: the plummeting rewards and respect for hard work.

As a result the middle class who has produced this magnificent American engine of economic growth is under intense pressure from the governing elites of both parties. Risk envelopes the life of the average American employee while the casino capitalists at the top prosper. Global elites scour the globe in search of slave labor while some of them earn 36,000 times the wages of the average American worker and 580,000 times the average Chinese worker. The middle class has watched as their jobs are being exported, health care costs are soaring, wages are being depressed, tuition costs are rising and retirement savings and pensions are disappearing. All while wars which damage their family's economic health and security are being waged in their name.

This U.S. slide towards banana-republic disparities in wealth and income threatens our very political and economic lives. Democracy and capitalism are at risk in a system where casino capitalists earn a billion dollars or more in a yearwhile wages and savings wither for the middle class. America's consumer-driven capitalism will die if these Great Depression era trends are allowed to continue.

Fortunately, the American Dream and the middle class have been resuscitated before. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) knew that it was his job to secure "Freedom from want" and "Freedom from fear" for the American people. So must the next president help America resume its glorious journey. To correct our current detour towards fear and greed. The next president must end our eight year nightmare by placing people beforeprofits, his country before corporations.

Corporate Democrats will not restore the middle class and our economy with the bold changes necessary. The reason corporate Democrats will fail is simple: There is little difference between them and the Bush administration. In The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future -- and What It Will Take to Win It Back author Jeff Faux is correctwhen he observes:

"But the difference between the Clinton neo-liberals and the Bush neo-conservatives over America's fundamental role in the world is quite small. The leadership of the two parties is in accord with notion that the American governing class has the authority and the obligation to police the world. They only differ on the question of tactics."

The middle class must look to someone other than the corporate fed and bred Democrats to initiate changes like those of FDR. We suggest that Dennis Kucinich will be at the end of your search.

Dennis Kucinich will:

1) Double the tax refunds and credits for Americans earning $80,000 andless by shifting the tax burden to where it belongs: on the financial assetsand windfall gains of those who have benefited most from our economic and legal system.

2) Deliver the only practical, proven plan to secure health care for all Americans. H.R. 676 co-authored by Dennis is endorsed by tens of thousands of doctors and nurses because they know the employer-based, for-profit system that comes between doctors and their patients must be retired alongside the Model-T.

3) Produce millions of middle class jobs with a new public works program combining the infrastructure and energy needs of our country. A Works Green Administration (WGA) will come from joining a Works Program Administration with the Environmental Protection Agency.

4) Save American jobs by withdrawing from job-killing trade deals like the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) and organizations like the World Trade Organization (WTO) and return to bilateral trade agreements based on securing workers' rights and the environment.

5) Provide universal education to all Americans from pre-school through college.

6) Restore robust, effective collective bargaining by repealing the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, rewriting the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) to remove the severely anti-labor sections and restaffing the National Labor Relations Board with pro-labor appointees.

7) Reward patriotic companies and employers who keep jobs and capital in the United States with tax incentives.

8) Pay for all these programs by eliminating waste from our bloated, inefficient military budget, shift the tax burden to those who can most afford it and saving hundreds of billions in health care costs by the money spent by the insurance industry excluding people from coverage and paying for profits and exorbitant salaries.

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