OOTC: The Middle Class New Deal
L. Joy opens this lesson from the Office of the Citizen with a question she posed to her social media community: Do you consider yourself middle class? Although her respective timelines were hilarious with their responses, the humor revealed that for many folks who have degrees, careers, businesses, and what was once considered high income are no longer financially secure. For this conversation about the middle class, L. Joy brings professor and author A. Mechele Dickerson to the front of the class.
Level setting the discussion with a practical definition of being middle class, L. Joy states that being middle class should mean having enough stable income that allows one to afford education, decent housing, food, healthcare, childcare without relying on debt to survive. People should be able to have stability, dignity and the ability to weather life’s storms without constant financial fear.
Professor Dickerson, author of The Middle Class New Deal: Restoring Upward Mobility and the American Dream, and L. Joy break down how the traditional pathways to the middle class has changed. The things that used to afford one entry to the middle class like having a degree or even advanced degrees no longer guarantee stable full-time jobs with benefits. Recategorization of employees as contractors, temps, or gig workers has led to situations like people’s inability to meet rising housing costs resulting in less home ownership.
They continue the discussion challenging the way policymakers respond to these problems. Professor Dickerson stressed that public policy helped build America’s middle class before through the New Deal programs, the GI Bill, public education, as well as housing policy and the like. She adds that in we have seen this recent years with the government interventions during the response to the COVID pandemic. L. Joy and the professor agree that economic indicators like stock market price performance cannot be the only measurement of whether families are doing well or not and that we the people must establish a clearer standard and impress upon elected officials that policies created these conditions and they can do things differently to turn things around.
Do Now
As candidates ask for your vote during this election cycle, ask them to define affordability specifically.
Housing: What will you do to lower the actual cost of housing—not simply subsidize increasingly unaffordable rents?
Childcare: What policies will help working parents afford childcare without being forced to leave their jobs?
Jobs: What will you do to increase access to stable, full-time jobs with predictable income and benefits?
Accountability: How will you use the actual powers of the office you are seeking—whether through legislation, budgets, oversight, or executive authority—to strengthen pathways into the middle class?