Herald News (Passaic County, NJ), April 3, 2006, Monday

OPINION
HERALD NEWS
A simmering crisis for the working class
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The American Dream is not only becoming harder to attain, for thousands of New Jersey residents it has become nearly impossible to even imagine. Such are among the alarming truths gleaned from recent reports examining the working poor in New Jersey and across America. Collectively, the signs are not good: they point to an ever-growing income gap across the country.
Perhaps most troubling are data that show a middle class that is rapidly disappearing.
"The middle is shrinking," Lawrence Kahn, professor of labor economics and collective bargaining at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations, told the Herald News. "Not drastically, but it's shrinking in that the jobs in the middle are a smaller share," of the job spectrum, he said.
It is tempting to blame the income gap and manufacturing job loss on the policies of the Bush administration and its willing partners in the Republican-controlled Congress, which has cleared the way for repeated tax cuts for the wealthy while doing little to ease the burden of the middle class and working poor. Yet as the studies suggest, income disparity has been a trend for better than 20 years, dating back to Ronald Reagan's second term. Neither political party is blameless in putting the nation's working classes in such a bind. Sad to say that disparity between the haves and have-nots has reached record proportions in New Jersey.
According to the data presented by the Association for Children of New Jersey and New Jersey Policy Perspective, the gap from top earners in the state to those on the bottom has expanded in recent years. While income for the bottom 20 percent of earners grew by 24 percent since the 1980s, from $16,397 to $20,391, yearly income for the top 20 percent over the same period increased by a whopping 79 percent, from $85,802 to $153,362.
Overall, the national report on the issue, "Pulling Apart: A State-by-State Analysis of Income Trends," shows New Jersey foremost among states with a large income gap between its lowest and highest wage earners. The authors cited numerous contributing factors in these trends: globalization, weaker unions, the stagnation of the minimum wage, to name a few.
Worker dissatisfaction is growing among lesser paid employees, and not just among undocumented immigrants. The bottom line is that low-wage earners are falling further behind, while the richest, particularly in places like New Jersey and Connecticut, keep getting richer.
In the Garden State, the problem is exacerbated by property taxes that are among the highest in the country, and where an ordinary Passaic family of four, the studies show, must earn a combined $46,412 merely to scrape by, without state or federal public assistance.
One doesn't have to be a scholar of the French Revolution to understand the possible implications in all this, if these economic trends continue unabated. A stable and just society, especially one founded on basic freedoms of the individual, cannot function by effectively disenfranchising the buying power of the great majority of its citizens -- i.e., its lower and middle classes.
Simply "buying American" might save a few jobs here and there, but it will do little to stem the tide of a now-record U.S. trade deficit that has mushroomed during the Bush years. It is so much more complicated than that.
A place to start would be a change of thinking in Washington, where pure greed, as personified by lobbyists, politicians and the giant corporate interests they represent, is not just a deadly sin but is all too often the first talking point of governance.