The importance of a middle class

Read these words and guess who said them.

“My job is to put food on the table for people…creating a middle class….It’s the right thing to do….What keeps me up at night is poverty and unemployment”

Do you think President Obama or some other high-profile Democratic Party official said these words?  Maybe it was some top official representing a workers’ union.

No, none of the above.  In fact it wasn’t even a U.S. Citizen talking about our country.

The person giving an interview, which aired on National Public Radio yesterday, was Jordan’s King Abdullah. 

He sees the building of a middle class in Jordan as the way to move the country toward democracy with divergent political parties.

“We have in the past 10 years managed to establish a credible middle class but any shifts in oil prices—economic challenges—that middle class becomes very fragile.”

Today the middle class is becoming very fragile right here in the United States.  Middle class families are seeing their incomes reduced, assets diminished and the government continuing to take actions to favor the wealthiest and big corporations at their expense. 

As King Abdullah says the middle class is the basis for a competitive political system.  It is also the underpinning of a vibrant small business economy. 

We need more King Abdullah’s speaking out forcefully for our middle class.