How Obama and Biden Buried the Middle Class

Ed Morrissey @ The Fiscal Times:

Michael Kinsley once defined “gaffe” as the accidental telling of a political truth. That definition aptly describes the jaw-dropping admission from Joe Biden on the campaign trail this week. Thundering against Mitt Romney’s economic plan, which Biden erroneously claims will raise taxes on the middle class, the Vice President proclaimed his outrage. “How they can justify raising taxes on a middle class that has been buried the last four years?” Biden asked.

Perhaps Biden missed a memo or two, but for most of the last four years, his running mate, Barack Obama, has been President. For two of the last four years, his party controlled Congress by large majorities, as well as the two years that preceded those, and Biden’s party has controlled the Senator for all six years.  In fact, both Biden and Obama sat in the Senate previously, Obama for four and Biden for decades.  If the middle class has been buried, it’s been on their watch.

Is this a political inconvenient truth?  Has the middle class been “buried” the last four years?  By any measure, the middle class has certainly lost ground. Median household income has declined each of the last four years, a decline which has accelerated during the Obama “recovery” that started in June 2009.  Median household income dropped 2.6 percent during the Great Recession, but has dropped 4.8 percent in the three years since.

That is one reason why the Census Bureau reported three weeks ago that the middle class had declined to“an all-time low” in 2011, as the Washington Post headlined their article on the subject. By the third year of Barack Obama’s presidency, poverty had leveled off at a near all-time high as well, while the middle class continued to lose ground on income.  But that wasn’t the only measure on which the middle class found itself moving backward; their average work hours also declined, as did the average pay rate, while home values continued to decline. The percentage of Americans with jobs fell to a 31-year low in August at 63.5 percent, another symptom of a decline in the middle class.

All of this occurred during the Obama/Biden administration, a point that the Democrats had tried to avoid during the 2012 campaign. Biden’s admission that the middle class has been “buried” will certainly resonate with voters who have experienced the decline first hand. It will also force the media to give some attention to that decline, writes Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post. “On the Biden remark, the media sure seemed miffed to have to respond to the Romney campaign,” Rubin notes, and “that was the reason, of course, the Romney-Ryan ticket pounced on Biden.… At least they got the media to report that the middle class has lost ground under Obama.”

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