One cause of the cultural angst Americans experience is the Democratic Party’s failure to address the fact that most of us don’t make enough money. Instead of tackling income inequality, and the tax laws and policies that keep more than half of Americans poor, Democrats dish out homilies about race and gender relations, and lesson plans about the environment and globalization.
The homilies and lesson plans are important, and depressingly necessary. But they point to the national car’s flat tires and cracked windshield while failing to note that the car is out of gas. Even if Democrats fix the tires and the windshield, we’re not going anywhere. Nothing changes until Democrats get back into the business of creating taxpayers who earn enough to pay taxes for tires and windshields – and gas.
Republicans can call this “tax and spend” because the Democratic Party is AWOL on basic economic realities. Republicans, for example, have always been okay with right to work states – cheap labor states like Arkansas – stealing union jobs from the north. They didn’t bother telling voters their corporate masters would shift these non-union jobs to even cheaper labor in Mexico and Asia – one of the reasons why, Mitt Romney failed to explain, “47% of Americans pay no taxes.”
Republicans get away with it because their voters live in low cost-of-living rural states. Two full-time workers at Tyson, for example – with “good” local jobs – can earn $13 an hour for an annual gross of $52,000. But, as Economic Policy Institute studies show, young families need to earn $74,000 annually to tenuously grasp the lowest rung of the middle-class ladder. Sadly, Tyson production workers and their EPI cohorts are only a stroke of bad luck away from becoming Romney’s 47%.
Democrats need to start talking about wages and real tax reform. They can begin by enrolling in an Oklahoma teacher’s class to learn firsthand what guts and commonsense look like. Republicans will give teachers thoughts, prayers, and guns. That’s fine. But Democrats ought to be the party that gives teachers a living wage, wages paid for by the taxes of other workers who also earn a living wage.