I started Lou Dobbs' 2006 book, War on the Middle Class: How the
Government, Big Business, and Special Interest Groups Are Waging War on
the American Dream and How to Fight Back.
Here are some items:
1.
On pages 5-6, Lou Dobbs talks about how the Bush II Administration
imposed a four-year embargo on White House staffers appearing on Dobbs'
show. The reason? Dobbs criticized the Bush II Administration for
using the term "war on terror" rather than highlighting that the war is
against "radical Islamist terrorists". This stood out to me because I
recalled Newt Gingrich arguing that President Barack Obama's
Administration boycotted Fox News because it did not like Fox's
coverage. Apparently, Lou Dobbs thinks that George W. Bush's
Administration did the same sort of thing to him! But I'm puzzled as to why
the Bush II Administration did that, for I thought that the Bush II
Administration publicly acknowledged that the U.S. was at war with
radical Islam.
2. On pages 6-7, Dobbs says that he criticized the
U.S. Justice Department for indicting Arthur Andersen's Enron auditing
firm rather than Arthur Andersen alone. Dobbs did so because he was
concerned for the "twenty-eight thousand innocent employees" who were
put out of work because the entire firm was indicted. Dobbs notes that
the Justice Department later adopted a policy of indicting individuals
rather than firms, and that the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the
conviction of the firm.
3. On page 14, the book has a moving
passage about how not all of the signers of the Declaration of
Independence were from the elite. Some of them were, but there were
others who were millworkers and small businessmen.
4. On page 19,
Dobbs criticizes legislation to "roll back the estate tax", a tax that
affects hardly two percent of Americans and brings in over $20 billion
annually in taxes. According to Dobbs, rolling this tax back will
result in higher tax rates for "you"----which I take to be the middle
class. There is debate about who has a greater tax burden, the rich or
the middle class. Many conservatives have argued that the rich pay a
lot of taxes, whereas there are many others in America who pay no
federal income taxes. But there are people on the left who contend that
the rich pay less taxes as a percentage of their income than do the
middle class.
5. On page 20, Dobbs says that "less than a third
of the richest people in the United States started out their lives in
the middle or lower classes on the economic scale" (page 20). For
Dobbs, there is not much economic mobility in the U.S. these days. And
Dobbs thinks that a significant part of the problem is free trade
policies, putting U.S. workers into competition with poorer workers in
the world, tax cuts resulting in less funding for education, and lack of
government concern about health care. And, like Arianna Huffington,
Dobbs criticizes the bankruptcy law, which robs middle-class people of
the refuge of bankruptcy.
Dobbs says that free trade policies are
"for the benefit of U.S. multinationals that remain uncompetitive in the
global marketplace", but I wish that he'd explain how the
multinationals are uncompetitive yet are benefiting. I thought the
problem was that we could not compete with cheaper foreign labor. Maybe
Dobbs will explain later in the book.