Middle Class Lifeboat Blog

The plight of the middle class is finally in front and center with a national administration.  This week Obama  told the nation: It’s time for the rich to lighten the load on the middle class.

He will attempt to shift the tax burden for our flailing economy from the backs of the middle class to those who are not suffering as significantly as most. But while this may make one more mortgage or credit card payment possible, this is not going to save us from slipping into a society of rich and poor.

Obama is still speaking optimistically of how our nation will return to a growth economy that sounds like renewing the consuming and borrowing that led to this economic calamity.  With shrinking resources, this is not going to happen and as long as we in the middle class keep “waiting out” the current economic situation,  we and our families will sink right along with a dysfunctional  way of life.

But there are some very encouraging signs of late that indicate larger numbers of us are waking up to the fact that we’ve got to change the way we live. On our Middle Class Advocacy Institute website, for months we’ve posting updates of news reports on middle class peril and we’re seeing a  significant shift in the nature of the articles.

For some time reports have focused mainly on bad economic news across all sectors: jobs, daily life, housing, education, retirement, and so forth. Lately, however, you’ll see there’s a growing focus on the ways people are simplifying, adjusting their lives, and living more within their means.  Defying, so to speak, the siren call to shop, shop, shop, spend, spend, spend, and if necessary borrow to do it.

Many of the features are still cast in a downbeat light and posed as something people are having to do temporarily until “things get back to normal.” We must resist this take on the adjustments we’re making. 

Steps like turning to home cooking instead of eating out, enjoying entertainment in our own homes and communities instead of traveling, planting food gardens in our yards, line drying our clothes, sharing households, swapping and trading services instead of shopping at the malls, each are the subject of a recent update on our site. They may seem like signs of bad times, but in fact, they are signs of what works. Signs of what healthy, sustainable local economies will look like in the future.

For over a decade at least, a wealth of experts familiar with climate change, peak oil and other indications of resource depletion underlying our current economic crises have been urging us to take steps just such as these, including making plans to rely more on marine transportation, another trend we just posted as an update on today.  Now what have advised for so long is happening.

Granted a sustainable economy that doesn’t entice us into living beyond our means while working longer hours, sometimes at multiple jobs is going to seem labor intensive, time-consuming and inconvenient. And for some time it will be. It is difficult to adopt a simpler life while having to juggle all the bills, complexities and responsibilities to stay afloat in a declining economy.

That is our plight for now. We must do double duty. Work at a job,  if we still have one, at the same time building a more locally based, self-sufficient life we can actually afford and  eventually enjoy. 

Taxing those who have far more than most will help greatly to speed up this shift, because as is already happening, they too will be called upon to start living more sustainably. That’s the subject of another recent update. This will keep the gap between the rich and the poor from growing, level the playing field, bring us together in a mission to find a new way to live.

So here several temptations we must resist: “waiting this out,” spending money we don’t have, borrowing to spend for things we don’t need, pretending none of this is happening, thinking this too shall pass, feeling sorry for ourselves that things aren’t the way they used to be, and thinking that the government will “fix” things.

Only we can fix things, not individually, but by coming together in our own local communities. Figuring out together how we can grow our own food locally, produce our own renewable energy, buying things we need locally, enjoying local entertainment, and providing services and products our friends and neighbors need.

Seems like an impossible, unpleasant task? Think again. To see how folks in your and other communities are doing just this and feeling good about their emerging lives, visit Transitions USA, read their stories, see if there’s a group in your area and if not, contact us for how you can get one started. 

by Paul Edwards, JD, and Sarah Anne Edwards, LCSW, PhD

Economists worry that Americans will use their tax rebates to pay down bills instead of buying more iPhones and plasma TV’s.  Certainly, decreasing personal debt is a pressing and important need for many Americans, but the best way to spend our rebates might be on neither consumer goods nor debt but on securing our economic futures in a perilous changing economy. 

While a “Recession” is an election year worry, with painful consequences for many people, something bigger is happening with implications for the standard of living and hopes of most Americans and their children’s future — changes that make the more important “R” words (more…)

                            
  Middle-Class Concerns Rise
  by Sarah Anne Edwards, PhD
  co-author, Middle-Class Lifeboat

  The latest opinion polls suggest that we in the  
  middle class are getting ever more concerned. A
  recent national Pew Research Center survey 
  Inside the Middle Class: Bad Times Hit the Good
  Life, reports that 80% of the population who define themselves as middle class now believes it’s harder for them to maintain their lifestyle. One in for feel stuck (25%). One in three perceive themselves as slipping backwards financially.

Nearly half are tightening their belts and about the same number expect to make more cutbacks in the year ahead. That’s more than twice the number in 1983.

They worry about losing their jobs if they one have and whether they will be able to make their next mortgage payment.  Half of families have a debt load exceeding their annual income and credit is tighting fast. Even seven out of ten in the upper class feel things are getting worse!

But the Pew poll says we’re still optimistic. Most are confident their quality of life will be better in five years  and they expect their children’s lives will be better yet. But should we be?

Will the economy get better soon or will our economic circumstances become even more strained in years to come? (more…)