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A growing class divide in America is a bigger threat than we may realize

Ryan Streeter
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America's working class is quickly going the way of yesterday's welfare class, and we hardly talk about it. In my monthly Indianapolis Star column, I highlight Charles Murray's new research showing the profound, and disquieting, trends that now define America's working class white population. 

The main points are these:

• Marriage is crumbling in the working class. In the 1960s, working class and upper middle class people married at high rates (in the mid to high 80% range). Now less than half of working class people marry.

• Unwed childbearing is taking over the working class. Half of births in the working class are now to unmarried women, whereas only 6% were 40 years ago. The percentage is still down around the 6% range for upper middle class women.

• Irreligiosity is on the rise. America is growing more secular overall, but moreso among working class people.

• Industriousness is declining. The ratio of working age men who are detached from the labor force is on the rise. This was a trend before the recession and was happening even in parts of the labor market that were booming.

• Rising crime hit the working class hard. Upper middle class people have experienced virtually no increase in crime rates and victimization over the years. The spike in crime in the post-1960s era hit the lower and working classes especially hard.

Our prevailing notions of "the working class" are practically the reverse of reality today. The solutions to these trends lie far beyond any neat and tidy policy proposal. We are in the midst of a long cultural transition that will be primarily addressed through cultural sources in civil society, our educational institutions, and even the media.

The first step is to raise awareness of just how different America has become in our lifetime.

The whole column is here.

Who is this middle class we've been hearing so much about? Not who you think

Ryan Streeter

What do Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, University of Virginia professor Brad Wilcox, and New York Times columnist Ross Douthat have in common? 

In the past 24 hours, right in the middle of the heated debate about "middle class tax cuts," they have injected a disquieting idea into our heads about what the middle class is.

Yesterday, commenting on the recent unemployment numbers, Bernanke said: "The unemployment rate we’ve been talking about. If you’re a college graduate, unemployment is 5 percent. If you’re a high school graduate, it’s 10 percent or more. It’s a very big difference.”

Wilcox, commenting on a new study his National Marriage Project has released, says: "From the 1970s to the 1990s, divorce or separation within the first 10 years of marriage became less likely for the highly educated (15 percent down to 11 percent), somewhat more likely for the moderately educated (36 up to 37 percent), and less likely for the least educated (46 down to 36 percent)." The "moderately educated" for Wilcox is the 58 percent of the population that has a high school degree and went to college without attaining a degree.

Douthat, commenting on Wilcox's study, points out that the more highly educated class in America has actually grown more socially conservative, less likely to divorce, and more religious, while the "moderately educated" and the less-educated are more likely to divorce and less likely to value the positive contribution of faith. He says that this "means that a culture war that’s often seen as a clash between liberal elites and a conservative middle America looks more and more like a conflict within the educated class — pitting Wheaton and Baylor against Brown and Bard, Redeemer Presbyterian Church against the 92nd Street Y, C. S. Lewis devotees against the Philip Pullman fan club."

Somewhere between the 5 and 10 percent unemployment range that Bernanke cites is an increasingly perplexing divide in America. It is NOT an economic divide. It's cultural and social. No one completely understands what's going on, but somehow higher education - one of the most secular and socially liberal set of institutions in America - is conspiring with the people it educates to produce more intact families committed to the values of family and faith. 

The middle class, meanwhile, is exhibiting traits that not long ago were commonly ascribed to the "welfare class." 

The lesson for policymakers is that access to higher education, regardless of the debate about how much smarter it actually makes us, is a key driver of social stability these days. And the lesson for everyone else, as Douthat so aptly puts it, is that "no religious body seems equipped to play the kind of stabilizing role in the lives of the 'moderately educated middle' (let alone among high school dropouts) that the early-20th-century Catholic Church played among the ethnic working class." 

Forget tax cuts for a minute. The situation of the middle class is much worse than any of us probably realizes. 

We can reform Social Security so it focuses more on the poor and works through spending constraints rather than tax hikes - if we hurry

Ryan Streeter

Chuck Blahous has a very good article at e21 detailing the winners and losers of the Bowles-Simpson proposals on Social Security.

He lists three winners and three losers.  Atop the list of winners are low-income workers, a striking aspect of the proposals. Blahous writes:

Low-income workers and those who advocate for them would achieve a great victory if Simpson-Bowles were enacted. This is far and away the single most striking substantive feature of the proposal. The program’s substantial fiscal shortfall would be closed without a toll on those on the low-income end, either on the benefit or tax side…Whereas today the maximum-wage earner receives more than three times that provided to a “very low” earner, under Simpson-Bowles this ratio would be less than 2:1 by 2050. In sum, benefit growth on the high end would be constrained while on the low end it would be accelerated. In addition, low-income workers would have added security via the reduction of the threat of insolvency-triggered benefit cuts.

This feature of Simpson-Bowles is so pronounced that advocates for the poor should be aggressively vocal in support of the plan. If they choose not to be, they will need to find a rationale based on factors other than the plan’s substantive impact on low-income workers.

Republicans should pounce on this, especially when one considers the second group of winners on Blahous’s list: fiscal conservatives.  Blahous writes that with a few changes, the proposal would effectively balance Social Security’s books through spending constraints rather than tax increases. He points out that this is especially the case if we act soon. The longer we wait, the more inevitable tax increases become.

The implications of these two groups of winners are significant:

• Social Security would and should be more generous to those who haven’t earned very much during their lifetimes. It would push the program more into the direction of a safety net for the elderly years, and encourage higher-income earners to be saving.
• Republicans can claim they want to focus increasingly on those in need in federal programs and oppose our growing arsenal of middle class entitlement programs. This should be part of a broader program that includes repealing Obamacare and focusing on creating growth for the middle class instead.
• Urgency has to be the name of the game in entitlement reform. Solvency through cuts is possible, but only if we start the ball rolling now. The GOP needs to capitalize on the public’s sentiments regarding public spending and show – complete with charts, graphs, and videos – how tax increases become more likely the longer we wait. 

(The other winner, by the way, is any supporter of bi-partisan reform; and the three losers are tax increasers, advocates of funded savings accounts, and those who would like to scare seniors for political advantage)