Opportunity 08: Better Direction on Main Street

Transcript

BILL ANTHOLIS: Every candidate in the presidential race claims to be fighting for the middle class in particular, which is both good policy and good politics. Of course, there is a long tradition in America to define the middle class broadly, and I'm going to take two recurring minimum issues in American politics to give you a sense of that.

On the one hand, Americans who earn the minimum wage tend to think of themselves as either in the middle class or trying to get there. Yet at a 40 hour a week and 52 weeks in a year, that would net somebody just over $12,000. The other minimum issue out there is the alternative minimum tax, which the Congress needs to fix, because people, roughly 15 percent of people earning $75,000 to $100,000 a year are caught into this tax that was designed to catch the super rich from avoiding taxes. Yet many of those people feel that they're in the middle class.

So from the taxing -- from taxes to housing markets to education, all of those issues intersect across the two that I raised. The role of the government in helping the middle class is going to be a big issue in the campaign.

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