Commentary: Life Gets Better For Middle Class

Not a week goes by, it seems, without another national headline about the (relatively) poor middle class. "Income equality higher than ever!" the pundits crow. Or maybe this week, it's a talking-head blathering on about how the "Middle class is worse-off now than it was 40 years ago!" Either way, the invariable grist of the story contains some statistics produced by some think tank or university explaining how the little guy just keeps getting an ever-rawer deal.

Well, in an effort of investigative journalism that would make Geraldo's mustache proud, I spoke with several people this week who were card-carrying members of the middle class in the 1970s, and what I learned may shock you. The halcyon days of bell-bottoms and Nixon may not have been as groovy as those pundits would have us believe.

I couldn't find one single person who had an iPhone in 1974. Not one! In fact, several people I spoke with didn't even have an Internet connection. Can you imagine? I didn't even dare broach the subject of how they accessed Netflix.

It turns out, in fact, that the average middle class family of 1974 lived in houses that averaged 1,500 square feet, owned 1.25 cars, and had 0.0 smartphones. By comparison, those numbers for today are 2,200 square feet, 2.28 vehicles, and 1.3 smartphones. And no disco music either, lest we forget.

Critics of our country's economic model like to point out that the earning power of the middle class has remained stagnant as the nation's GDP has surged -- the $11,100 the middle class was bringing home in 1974 is worth about the same as the $52,000 they're bringing home today. And I can't refute that, too bad at math even to try.

What all these Chicken Littles in the media seem to miss, though, is that our capitalist society has improved the lives of the middle class in myriad ways, and continues to do so at an ever-dizzying pace. It empowered Steve Jobs to create Apple and provided the foundation for Mark Zuckerburg to steal/make Facebook and created a lush, fertile environment for innovation that led to Al Gore's creation of the Internet.

But opponents of so-called "trickle-down" economics always seem to snivel when they use that term. It's utterly beyond the pale for them to think money left in the private sector through tax breaks for the well-to-do will eventually find its way into the pockets of the middle class. And often they use that aforementioned wage data as proof.

What nominal growth in wages fails to measure, however, is, well, everything else in the world. Maybe the money that a rich business owner gets to sit on instead of paying to the feds doesn't turn into immediate raises for all his employees. But while it's sitting there in his bank account, it's getting loaned out to tons of little guys with big ideas. And as a fraction of those ideas catch on with the public, life gets easier for everybody. The most talented and creative among that pool of loan-seeking idea-men and women get to matriculate up the economic hierarchy and become big guys themselves. And that spiral, in turn, leads to the next round of innovation, bringing with it more better, cheaper, important consumer products for the rich, middle and poor alike.

So while we in the middle class might not have any more money in our purses than we did in 1974, 65 percent of purses now contain an Internet-connected smart phone. And dollars-to-iPhones, the collective knowledge of all human history at the fingertips of the middle class is a pretty big feather in the cap of capitalism.

That, and Candy Crush.

NATE STRAUCH IS A REPORTER AND COLUMNIST AT THE SHERMAN-DENISON (TEXAS) HERALD DEMOCRAT.

Commentary on 05/09/2014

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