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SustainableMiddleClass.com

Sustainable Middle Class

To build and maintain a strong, prosperous, sustainable middle class by developing and adhering to a Sustainability Ethic: Economic Vitality, Environmental Quality, and Equal Opportunity.

This site is about making a good life in the American Middle Class. It is about bringing more of those who are economically distressed into the Middle Class, and sustaining a high quality of life for our children, their children, and us. Native American leaders believed as they walked on the soil, they tread over the faces of their people who were yet to be born. Their system required them to plan seven generations into the future. We need to plan more like that.

Gifford Pinchot, the top official of the early US Forest Service described effective stewardship as planning for "the greatest good, to the greatest number of people, for the longest time." This is the idea of sustainability. This site will examine the "Three E's" of Sustainability: economic vitality, environmental quality, and social equity, and how they are inter-related. It will look at how America's economy is allocated and suggest ways to rebalance our national investment portfolio.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote a story called Harrison Bergeron that described a futuristic society and its absurd attempts to make everyone equal. That is not what this is about. This is about basic fairness and a bright future for our kids. Those who produce goods services should profit from their efforts as well as the wealthy venture capitalists that stimulate growth through investment. This is about having access to the tools and conditions necessary for each to achieve one's full potential.

Over recent years, the top five percent of income earners have seen their fortunes soar while middle and lower income earners have seen their pay, in real terms, flat or actually decline, despite a steady rise in worker productivity and growth in the economy, which has been led by corporate profits. The Middle Class has less in savings and more debt. Our children face their future burdened with debt. This is unacceptable.

It seems that mechanisms and processes are now in place favoring a shift in capital from the lower and middle to the upper income level of the economy. The Gini Coefficient is a statistical measure of income inequality that indicates the income gap in the United States is getting wider. Recent state and federal tax cuts and the inevitable budget deficits that have followed have suppressed funding for education in lower and middle-income communities, shifting more of the funding onto the local communities. Wealthy communities have great schools while the less fortunate ones fall behind. Prison populations have grown.

Investments in renewable energy systems and big civil projects to modernize our infrastructure, badly needed projects that create living-wage jobs, for workers with a wide range of skills, from sweepers to A-list engineers, planners and designers, have languished. President Franklin Roosevelt (Democrat) and New York Mayor LaGuardia (Republican), together managed to build enormous civil projects to make New York City a world class metropolis. And they managed to do it during a depression! They were visionaries with a lasting legacy of investment in the future.

This site examines national health care policy, the role of private insurance, living wage, inflation, real average hourly earnings, renewable energy, environmental quality, civic responsibility and whether we should extend voting rights to Sixteen-year-olds. It also examines data that may serve as "societal health indicators" in the so-called "Red States" and "Blue States." All of the issues will be discussed with the fundamental inter-related "Three E's of Sustainability" in mind. They are economic vitality, equal opportunity, and environmental quality.