Word: lowerers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Thus the working-class or lower-middle-class American hangs in anxious suspension above poverty and well below af fluence. Meantime, his wage gains are being eroded by in flation, rising taxes and the lure of easy credit for new cars and other luxuries. "This man feels himself more alone than any other member of society," says Saul Alinsky, a life long organizer of working-class movements. "He is almost out of his mind with frustration - call it hate. He sees his Government, with programs for blacks and for the indigent and programs for everyone except him, and he figures...
Trapped in a racial buffer zone between the black ghetto and white suburb, the white lower middle class is hit hard for revenue to finance welfare and all the other rising costs of big-city government. The middle class has the heaviest tax burden, but almost everywhere lower-middle-class whites feel that they are being forced to pay the real price of in tegration while assorted social planners and liberal moralists retreat at night to their suburban fastnesses. Such whites view bussing, for example, as a scheme to move their chil dren to worse public schools while rich children...
Legitimate Fears The overriding social task for the U.S. is to achieve ra cial justice and heal the most serious breach in American so ciety since the Civil War. The hard fact is that this will demand sacrifices by all white Americans, including the lower middle class. But no permanent domestic accord can be reached if the white lower middle class remains per suaded that it is being called upon for more than its fair share of those sacrifices. The Kerner commission cited "white racism" as the principal cause of racial violence. Up to a point, the charge is just...
What can be done for white lower-middle-class Americans? To some extent, many seem reassured by the mere fact that the Nixon Administration is in power. Nixon is their man in style, tone and convictions. Psychologically, at least, he has made some gestures in their direction. He has said and done less than his predecessor about helping blacks - which from the national viewpoint will probably prove to be a dangerous tactic in the long run. He has taken tough positions on law enforcement and student unrest - without, how ever, going as far as the forgotten American wants. Nixon...
...welfare system is a mess, though few agree on what should be done. The Ad ministration is now preparing reforms of the welfare sys tem, and may eventually work toward abolishing it - re placing it with an evenhanded guaranteed annual wage or family allowance that would clearly help the lower middle class as well as the poor. White workers, however, would have to be persuaded that such an allowance did not represent simply another something-for-nothing scheme...