THE PLIGHT OF AMERICA'S LOWER MIDDLE CLASS - PAST ERRORS, PRESENT WOES AND A PROPOSAL FOR FUTURE FIXES

An open letter to America, introducing the POPE (Point of Pay Equity) system to those interested in how new strategies the Obama administration might adopt couls create movement toward a sustained state of social equity in the country.

In the interests of getting straight to the point, permit me to skip explaining who I am save that, like Barack Obama, I'm connected to Africa by birth and also trying, in my own small way, to make democracy work better for all of us here in America.

Originally, my intent in writing this essay was to present something that the Obama campaign might use in the presidential campaign. That was way back in 2007. Ironically, though that connection is way past being useful, the relevance of the content of this essy to the condition of the economy has only deepened.
The way the race unfolded, I realized that what I had to say would not be applicable to that process. Now that Barack Obama is president and the real work of repairing the social fabric of the country continues to lag behind the challenges we presented, it's a little frustrating to see how few truly brilliant ideas are being deployed out of the White House. Many faces familiar to us from times gone by have reappeared, from time to time, among those closest to the president, harkening back to the insufficient approaches of the past. I guess that's to be expected. Still, at this juncture, it won't be experience or personality power alone that gets us out of the current jam we're in: bold new ideas, precisely articulating the method and metrics to be used, are desperately needed; not just ideas, mind you, but also the will to see them implemented, regardless of the considerable resistance to change that will inevitably arise to oppose them.
One thing is for certain: we can no longer afford that old "poke-something-with-a-stick-and-see-if-it-does-anything" mode of governance we've used so often in the past, the kind that's given us fifty different ways to deal with one kind of issue throughout the states of the nation. The rational way to deal with any given problem - particularly with respect to economic policy - is seldom found through bureaucratic improvisation. Far more exigent approaches are demanded in an age when things can go so wrong so quickly and so mightily.

The set of proposals outlined below, I believe, make a decent effort to rise to that higher measure.

But first, a short prologue is in order, along with a review of the evolution in the nation's economic processes over the past thirty years.