A Progressive State Agenda to Give Millions of Americans a Pathway to the Middle Class
As we begin to slowly recover from the Great Recession, it۪s clear that our country needs a new model to guide our economic growth. Trickle-down economics of the past has failed to achieve the positive growth working families needed. Incomes have been stagnating, inequality has deepened, and it has become harder to gain a foothold in the middle class.
Government at every level can play a critical role in ensuring that Americans can rise into the middle class. Federal gridlock is making congressional action virtually impossible, but progressive state leaders have the opportunity to help reverse this decline.
Many families are moving farther and farther away from the American Dream. Nearly 12 million people are unemployed, and the unemployment rate has been 7.5 percent or higher for four yearsthe longest sustained period of high unemployment since the Great Depression. Even for those with jobs, the economy has, for the most part, failed to deliver. Income for the typical household has stagnated over the past few decades and has actually fallen over the past ten years.
And it is becoming harder for Americans to join the middle class. The likelihood that a child born poor will rise into the middle class has declined significantly. As a result, the United States has less economic mobility than almost every other high-income country in the world.
The economic opportunity deficit is even greater for communities of color. Communities of color suffer from elevated high school dropout rates, economic insecurity, and lack of quality healthcare, while wealth gaps expand to record highs between whites and communities of color.
Yet, the erosion of the American middle class is not just a problem for those struggling at the bottom. Its weakened state hurts all of us by stifling our country۪s economic growth and undermining our democracy.
A strong middle class is a prerequisite for robust entrepreneurship and innovationa source of trust that makes business transactions more efficient and a source of sustainable demand that encourages businesses to invest. A strong middle class also promotes efficient delivery of government services, greater political participation, and forward-looking public investments in education and infrastructure.
“States at Work: Progressive State Policies to Rebuild the Middle Class” a recent report from American Progress empowers state-level policymakers with an agenda to create a significant number of jobs, boost incomes for a large percentage of the population, meaningfully cut costs for working families, considerably lower the risks of falling behind, and increase opportunity and fair treatment for all.
Doing so will require state governments to take a comprehensive approach: undertake a diverse set of reforms to improve job quality, reduce the costs of healthcare, reform the tax code, fix the housing market, improve the quality of education, ensure civil rights are respected so that everyone can fully participate in the economy, rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, and strengthen local communities.
We include more than 100 policies that states can adopt to help those who are currently in the middle class as well as those who are struggling to join the middle class. Focusing on future members of the middle class is especially important, given existing racial and ethnic disparities and the dramatic demographic changes taking place over the next few decades, with immigrants and people of color on pace to become the majority share of the U.S. population before 2050.
Progressive leaders in state governments across the country are already leveraging their considerable power to stabilize and significantly grow the middle class by giving the working poor a real shot at moving up. Some of the policies detailed in the report are already in use by at least one, and often several, states, while others are promising new approaches. Many of the best practices have been enacted with broad-based bipartisan support. Even states that are progressive leaders in some arenas have much to learn from what other states are doing in other areas.
Taken together, the policies detailed in the report approach the scale necessary to provide millions of working families with a pathway to the middle class. This would allow states to form a groundswell that helps rebuild and grow the middle class, moving the country as a whole toward economic and social progress that benefits all Americans.
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David Madland is the director and Karla Walter is the associate director of the American Worker Project at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
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