Unless Forbes has written an article about you, you should be concerned
American Families at Risk
An Overview
By Richard C. Leone
Issue Date: 05.04.04
Since the Great Depression, there has been a strong national political consensus supporting policies that help middle-class families cope with the multiple risks in our market economy. These include the risks of illness, destitution in old age, hazards from defective products, polluted natural resources, industrial accidents, corporate frauds, high unemployment, and other assaults largely beyond the individual's control. Such policies are not, by and large, targeted redistributions to the poor but protections for the broad middle class. Many government activities reflect this concern, including social investments financed by a progressive tax code and a wide array of regulatory protections, almost all the result of necessary responses to past abuses by the market. Such essential services as electricity, water, telephone, and, for that matter, private insurance of various kinds have also been secured by government investment and regulation. Without these diverse government activities, ordinary middle-class families would be extremely vulnerable. With them, America both preserves the dynamism of a market system and defends innocent individuals from avoidable economic calamities.
Today, the radicals in charge in Washington are targeting regulations that protect middle-class consumers from financial swindles, monopoly pricing, unsafe food and drugs, and environmental hazards. They are undermining social outlays that serve mostly the middle class, such as unemployment insurance, college-loan programs, Medicare, Social Security, public education, and much more. They have warped our fiscal priorities in ways that will affect the nation for decades. Shifts in the tax code further shrink the share of taxes paid by the highest-income groups and corporations and thus transfer the burden to the wages of working Americans. Because the shifts also add to the nation's debt, they lock in high taxes for future generations of middle-class workers.
The right, of course, applies labels to its "reforms" that sound very appealing: ending "death taxes" and double taxation; offering medical savings accounts, new personal investment accounts, and school vouchers; enacting tort "reform"; reducing the burden of regulation. Yet, like the tax cuts, the effect in each case is to overturn practices that, by and large, have greatly benefited Americans across the income spectrum.
