Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Showdown at Income Gap?

Sometimes when driving home down Interstate 5 from a day of employment fun and thrills in the bludgeoning hub of the universe that is Medford, Oregon, I turn on a little news to see what might be on tap since I last checked the world's budding calamities earlier in the morning. I usually wind up listening to National Public Radio. Here I get a dose of depressing news from the war zones and the economic messines back stateside. I don't have satallite radio so I don't have much choice up here. Let me explain:

First off, most stations don't care about the news. Local commercial stations offer syndicated talk-radio as news, which of course it isn't. It's opinion. Hey, Westwood One or Clear Channel, I already got plenty of opinions. I can't even get around to updating some of my opinions and give them a little exercise. The last thing I need is some golden tonsil-ed whiz bang/pseudo member of the Fourth Estate giving me his/her bromides in between attempts by said sage to get me to put all my spare cash into gold futures from the "We-Rip-You Investments" of Dover, Delaware.

Media people's opinions are often like some nice thick book you might see at Barnes and Noble and be tempted to buy: that lauded popular biography of 19Th Century US President Rutherford B. Hayes by David McCullough ("Salt of the Earth: R.B. Hayes and Modern American Goody-Goodyness"), for instance, or the latest Stephen King novel with special glow-in-the-dark print. Or, for you real aesthetes, "The History of Macedonian Fresco Painting from the Bronze Age to Today". This sample of books I find similar to opinions: You know it would do you good to hear the opinions of some others , but just how much real good? Would you really learn anything useful?

I say facts are what the good doctor should order here!!! Give me facts, I say, and I'll make up my mind about immigration reform or AIDS research or if the Oregon 2008 Presidential Primary should be moved up to Labor Day, 2007.

One fact that I have picked up on (or thought I had) was that, for certain, the middle-class is shrinking and the USA is turning slowly but inexorably into a nation with greater income gaps between the top tier folks and those struggling at the bottom. What was even more alarming is the news from NPR and other sources that not only are the poor getting poorer and rich folks getting richer and all that, but that even families who are small business or professional-class level people cannot live in neighborhood that their middle class parents could afford. Having lived in the California Bay Area of San Francisco and San Jose, I can tell you I don't need to listen to the radio or read the news magazines to find how hard it is for well educated and dedicated people to find housing that even comes close to what their families could afford when they were growing up. I have friends and they have friends and the stories I've heard of economic dislocation and home-to-work commutes would rival the Long March of Chairman Mao's Brigades during the Chinese Civil War.

The anecdotes are sincere and cut across a spectrum of lives and professions. Reading about the dislocations in other parts of America is equally depressing. Reports from the Mississippi Coast, for instance, indicate that, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, more average income folks are unable to rebuild their homes and small businesses while high-rise condos and corporate-retired snow birds are driving younger people out of areas their families have deep roots in. Check out Debbie Elliot's story on Gulfport, MS., for instance:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10474685

But is everything as bleak as that? Turns out, as facts sometimes are, things are mixed. Perhaps it will be bleak for you or me, but that's not always or even usual for others. If you check out this editorial by Steven Pearlstein in the Washington Post, you can see reasonably reliable statistical information on "social stratification" that shows the picture is more complicated than personal anecdotes and what makes the newspapers and cable news/radio reports.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/29/AR20070529020...

It's not that people's direct experiences are to be discounted. Far from it. It's just that looking too narrowly at an area like the Bay Area or southern Oregon or the post-hurricane Mississippi/Louisiana coastal area isn't the whole story.

I hope these "stats" reflect enough reality that point to the future of the average American family being not so dark and cloudy. Perhaps partly sunny at times with only a chance of light hail in the afternoon.

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