Tag Archives: middle class

Americans just aren’t going to elect a woman as president

7 comments | Posted on January 5, 2012 at 7:27 am by Linda Grist Cunningham

By the time, Michele Bachmann pledged yesterday to rally round the eventual Republican nominee for president, I’d wearied of hoping she’d come front and center as a viable candidate. She just couldn’t do it.

There are a handful of analyses on the whys of Bachmann’s fall from the elephant, including an empathetic one from Washington Post conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin. Most everyone has turned their attention to the “Santorum surge” — I am hating  that word, surge.

But before Bachmann is little more than a footnote, three things did her in:

(1) Americans are not about to elect a …

Read more

Posted in Economy, Politics, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Tuesday’s ballot box message: Get back to the middle

Leave a comment | Posted on November 10, 2011 at 8:08 am by Linda Grist Cunningham

Americans are Bell Curve people. We live happily along that 80 percent bulge in the middle of things, and we’re open to learning new things from the strident fan-folks farther down the curve and out to its edges.

For a while. Not forever. Just about the time fan-folks think the rest of us have become their true believers, we say “that’s far enough; time for a deep breath.”

The middle needs fan-folks to get us moving, to introduce us to new ideas and concepts, to keep us from staying too long in one place. We need those extreme points of …

Read more

Posted in Economy, Politics, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

Friday Five: Econ 101, capitalism, Euro bailouts and other money

2 comments | Posted on October 28, 2011 at 9:08 am by Linda Grist Cunningham

Friday Five: If yours is a family inclined to Sunday dinner conversations, then you know there are a handful of subjects generally off the table: sex, religion, politics and money.

That leaves precious little about which to chat, except for the weather and your sibling’s awful spouse, that last one guaranteed to have someone leaving the room unpleasantly.

Inevitably one of those “no-no” topics slithers onto the table. Those are subjects about which everyone has an opinion — and about which most of us know little more than a couple headlines worth of facts.

This week has been bewildering for …

Read more

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Part II: Save the middle class; or, stop being sucked into the class bashing

4 comments | Posted on October 12, 2011 at 12:33 pm by Linda Grist Cunningham

Two veteran teachers in a household push their income beyond middle class. A veteran firefighter has a darned good chance of having an upper class income.

Ditto for a slew of folks who think they’re making middle class incomes, when, in fact, they are playing on that much-maligned “rich” spreadsheet. That ubiquitous “Joe the Plumber” made a heck of a lot more than a middle class income.

The typical middle class household annual income today is about $97,000, reflecting the combined income of the “typical middle class man” in the high $50,000 and the woman in the very low $40,000….

Read more

Posted in Economy, Education, Jobs, Politics | Tagged , , , , ,