Month: September 2018

Hollowing out of the Middle Class: a Second Look

Middle class hollowed out? Kind of. Unhappy? It depends . . .

Progressives like Bernie Sanders and Michael Moore are fond of excoriating the rich and powerful for the “hollowing-out of the middle class.”  What they fail to mention—either for lack of information or for political expediency—is that, money-wise, more families are leaving the middle class on the upside rather than the downside.  There’s plenty of evidence for this.  Check out the following, which is similar to other reports, but I especially like it because it is based on Pew research findings:

https://qz.com/1005068/the-upper-middle-class-is-the-new-middle-class/

A larger segment of the middle class, it seems, is rising into the highest  and upper-middle class than is falling into the lowest class (the lower middle has remained unchanged), and the net effect, dollar-wise, of “hollowing out” appears to be a positive.   Is this a Good Thing?  After all, can’t money buy happiness?

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Settled Law, Settled Liar: Mistrust Rising

When an evasion is really, dangerously, a lie

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s  dance around the question of whether he would overrule Roe v. Wade makes one wonder, on what other matter has one of his evasions, stripped of legalistic nuances, amounted to a lie.

Certainly Kavanaugh’s dodge around the Roe issue, that Roe is “settled law,” thus implying it was immune to being found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, is a lie.  This was the the lie told to Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a staunch supporter of Roe v. Wade, in what she characterized as a lengthy one-on-one discussion. She reported that Kavanaugh said he regarded Roe as “settled law.”

As one commentator on MSNBC or CNN (sorry I forget which, and who) quipped: “Well, settled law is settled until it isn’t.”

Now, thanks to the recent release of an email heretofore kept under Republican Senate Judiciary Committee wraps as “committee confidential,” we find Kavanaugh, back in 2003, saying “I am not sure that all legal scholars refer to Roe as the settled law of the land at the Supreme Court level since [the Supreme] Court can always overrule its precedent, and three current Justices on the Court would do so.”

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