What can we do to strengthen the middle class?

[Craig234]

Ultimately it boils down to keep jobs in America.

If you offshore jobs for short term profit and lay off the American workers, then it creates a ripple effect which causes people to buy stuff less over time.

The most easy thing to do is start penalizing companies that offshore jobs to produce goods sold in America to stop the bleeding. The more jobs leave the US, the less purchasing power Americans will have, and the worse it will become. It's short term gains for long term losses and a myopic vision of the future that has done irrevocable damage to the economy.

There's a lot of truth to that.

I tend to take a global perspective - I'm not crazy about the idea of the US having a very high amount of wealth and just leaving most of the world to terrible poverty.

I appreciate the economic efficiencies and the moral benefits to 'globalization', where more of the world - the masses of poor - get to participate more.

But simply opening that labor market up - where a few gain huge profits at the expense of American workers who are drug down to low wages - is a bad approach.

Among other things it reverses the gains by American workers and a strong middle class.

We need some better approach that tries to pull the world up, not American workers down.

At a minimum, the American workers need to better share in the gains from that outsourcing to cheap labor, not simply create plutocracy here.

 

[rudder]

I think the US business climate also strongly favors the top big businesses. The tax code\health care\regulatory compliance\legal\patent areas all favor large corporations that have the money and manpower to navigate them and have gotten progressively more complicated

http://www.uschamber.com/press/releases/2013/july/us-chamber-releases-q2-small-business-survey

Given that small businesses made up half the GDP but their share has been declining I don't think we focus nearly enough on how we can make small businesses more viable

This.

And it does not help that these larger corporations are able to purchase congressman. These congressman then put in new legislation that further squeezes the small business. Small businesses account for 50% of private sector employment.

There are probably quite a few industries where you will likely never see small start up companies because they would need to raise an insane amount of VC to even be able to wade through the burdensome regulations.