Closer to home, we eat out at an unprecedented rate, regularly patronizing elegant restaurants or shopping center food courts several times each week. The average American household now spends $2,634 on meals away from home—a sharp increase of more than 10% (in inflation-adjusted dollars) in just the three years between 2003 and 2006. As Lou Dobbs himself ruefully admits (in his latest book, INDEPENDENTS DAY, 2007): “Americans are spending as much on meals outside the home as we do for health care- a little over $2,600 per family. We spend almost as much to buy and operate our cars as we do to pay for our homes – about $8,000 a year on each.”

These priorities don’t necessarily represent wise economic decisions ---nor does the $426 per year on “alcoholic beverages” or the $319 on “tobacco products and smoking supplies,” or all the hundreds of not thousands a year in gambling losses at Vegas, Atlantic City, Indian casinos, or heavily hyped state lotteries. Obviously, Americans sometimes harm our own best interests with the decisions we make in spending our money: restaurant meals can contribute to obesity, gambling represents a gigantic waste of both time and money, while our refusal to use public transit (to the frustration of countless liberal social planners) only increases consumption of petroleum and raises the prices for everyone.

Nevertheless, the fact that Americans feel free to make even frivolous or self-destructive spending decisions contradicts the portrait of a helpless, choiceless middle class in the grip of powerful, exploitative elites, perversely bent on destroying the very public that makes possible corporate prosperity.

CONTRARY TO BOGUS CLAIMS, ECONOMIC MOBILITY IS ALIVE AND WELL

The press indulges a destructive and dishonest instinct to portray America’s poor, working class and minority citizens as locked into hopeless and permanent misery—despite abundant and undeniable evidence to the contrary.

On November 13, 2007, a Washington Post story by Michael A. Fletcher offered an especially baleful example. When the report appeared in the Seattle Times it bore the alarming headline, “Many Blacks Earn Less Than Parents, Study Finds.” Meanwhile, anyone who took time to read the article (based on three different reports from the Pew Charitable Trusts) encountered the following revelation in paragraph seven: “Over all, four out of five children born into families at the bottom 20 percent of wage earners surpassed their parents income. Broken down by race, nine in 10 whites are better paid than their parents were, compared with three out of four blacks.”

If 75% of low income blacks are better paid than their parents (and another 15% earn the same as their parents), then how could any responsible news outlet utilize the headline “Many Blacks Earn Less Than Parents, Study Finds.”? The answer involves an anomaly in the original study. Only a tiny percentage of black families counted as “solidly middle class” (in the language of the study) in 1968, with inflation-adjusted median income of $55,000. Among children of this small group, a surprising number (45%) did indeed fall to the lowest fifth of the nation’s earners, with a median family income of $23,100. But the disappointing performance of a handful of offspring in a major study did nothing to invalidate the most important conclusion: that 75% of African-American children (and 80% of the overall sample) who began life in poverty ended up with higher incomes (and often dramatically higher incomes) than their parents.

A similar distortion occurred in yet another misleading story featured on the front page of USA TODAY on November 17, 2007. The headline and subhead manipulatively twisted the results of a Pew Research Poll to emphasize despair and discouragement, with the announcement “POLL: BLACKS GROW MORE PESSIMISTIC” and then the bold-faced explanation, “Fewer Than Half Expect Their Lives to Improve.” Actually, by a ratio of two-to-one the African American respondents did expect their lives to improve: with 44% saying “life for blacks will be better in the future” and only 21% guessing it would be worse. With 31% saying life would remain the same, that means 75% who are convinced that circumstances for American blacks will either remain unchanged or improve.

Similarly, the lead sentence in the article (by Marisol Bello) emphasized the negative: “Black Americans are more dissatisfied with their progress than at any time in the past twenty years....” In response to the question, “Are blacks better off than five years ago?” a total of 69% agreed that they were doing either “the same” (49%) or “better” (20%). Meanwhile, the article quoted experts who talked about a “great deal of anxiety, cynicism and pessimism today” while barely noting that the majority of those surveyed in the study say “that blacks who don’t get ahead are mainly responsible for their own situation.”

A much more extensive, revealing and encouraging study by the U.S. Department of the Treasury (of 96,700 tax returns from 1996 and 2005) received vastly less media attention – precisely because it failed to fit the preconceived notion of a stratified, static, unjust economic order. In fact, the Treasury report (dated November 12, 2007) discovered that 58% of filers who found themselves in the poorest income group (the bottom 20%) in 1996, had moved into a higher income category in just 10 years. In fact, after inflation median income of all tax filers increased by a solid 24% in the decade. Two out of three workers had a real income gain since 1996--- contradicting the common charge that the working class has steadily, inevitably lost ground.

In terms of the American dream of steady, reliable advancement, there’s been no nightmarish transformation. The Treasury Department explains: “The basic finding of this analysis is that relative income mobility is approximately the same in the last ten years as it was in the previous decade.” In other words, despite terrorist attacks and war expenditures, and hysterical denunciations of the Bush administration’s alleged devastation of the working class, ordinary Americans retained the same ability to climb the economic ladder that they enjoyed between 1986 and 1995—the last years of the Reagan boom and the opening years of the Clinton expansion.

A report by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office reached similar conclusions in May, 2007. Covering a fifteen year period, CBO found that low wage households with children had incomes after inflation that were more than one third higher in 2005 than in 1991. Among all families with children, in fact, the poorest fifth had the fastest overall earnings growth—with increases even higher than the richest 20%. The median family with children saw an inflation adjusted 18% rise in earnings from the early 1990’s through 2005 – representing $8,500 in additional purchasing power.

THE MIDDLE CLASS DOESN’T PAY AN UNFAIR SHARE OF TAXES

According to the most recent Congressional Budget Office figures (from tax year 2004), the poorest fifth of the population (with average annual income of $15,400) pays only 4.5% of their income in federal taxes. The middle fifth, with income of $56,200, pays 13.9%. The highest fifth (with reported income of $207,200) coughs up 25.1% -- some 600% of the rate paid by those at the bottom. The richest one percent of taxpayers (earning lavish salaries of $1,259,700) pay even more: 31.1% of overall income to the federal government.

With these higher tax rates, high income tax payers shoulder a hugely disproportionate share of the overall tax burden. The CBO figures indicated that the top 10% of all taxpayers (those earning more than $87,300) paid 70.8% of all income taxes. A quarter century ago, before the Reagan and Bush tax cuts that allegedly favored the rich, this top 10% paid much less of the overall burden--- only 48.1%.

In other words, conspiracists who rail against the “War on the Middle Class” are flat-out wrong when they suggest that part of that assault involves a bigger share of the tax burden. “While corporations are paying lower taxes than ever before, and tax breaks for the wealthy are expanded,” Lou Dobbs falsely fulminates, “the middle class is forced to shoulder ever more of the tax burden…”

Actually, the middle fifth of the income scale paid 10.7% of the nation’s income tax in 1979 (under Jimmy Carter) but only 4.7% in 2004 (after two rounds of Bush tax cuts). This contrasts with the nation’s top 1% of wage earners: whose share of the overall tax bill more than doubled (from 18.3% in 1979 to a startling 36.7% in 2004).

TRUTH, HAPPINESS AND THE CHANCES FOR SUCCESS

Rejecting the self-pitying lies about middle class oppression and powerlessness isn’t just a matter of defeating demagoguery for the sake of the political health of the country; grasping the essential truths about today’s American economy also represents a prerequisite for personal contentment and future advancement.

Professor Arthur Brooks of Syracuse University cites a fascinating question asked by the General Social Survey, with respondents given the chance to agree or disagree with the following statement: “The way things are in America, people like me and my family have a good chance of improving our standard of living.” An encouraging two-thirds of the population agreed with that statement, and this group was “44% more likely than the others to say they were ‘very happy,’ 40% less likely to say that they felt ‘no good at all’ at times, and 20% less likely to say that they felt like failures. In other words, those who don’t believe in economic mobility – for themselves or for others –are not as happy as those who do.”

This happiness matters not only in a personal and familial sense (greatly increasing the chances, for instance, of marital stability) but also brings economic consequences. As Jim Holt argued in the New York Times Magazine (January 21, 2007), a wealth of psychological data suggests that pessimism produces poor commercial outcomes, whereas optimism helps to insure success. He writes: “In a recently published study, researchers in the Netherlands, found that optimistic people – those who assented to statements like ‘I often feel that life is full of promises’ – tend to live longer than pessimists. Perhaps, it has been speculated, optimism confers a survival advantage by helping people cope with adversity.”

In other words, politicians and pundits who rail endlessly (and dishonestly) about “The Two Americas” or “The War on the Middle Class” may end up doing serious damage to the prospects of precisely those hard-working folks they claim to want to help. Misleading whining about falling living standards and the end of economic mobility may serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy for those who embrace the underlying message of powerlessness and self-pity. If you buy the idea that corporate exploiters and corrupt politicians have poisoned your life and stolen your ability to create a better life for your family, you’ve obviously damaged your own ability to get ahead.

Meanwhile, the demagogues and deceivers try to advance their own well-paid careers with increasingly shrill expressions of their gloomy and desperate messages. Fortunately, hard-working Americans in the real middle class are too smart, and too busy counting their blessings and opportunities, to make the mistake of believing them.