Dobbs: Are you a casualty of the class war?

Lou Dobbs is an interesting character. He doesn't seem to fit into any mold. One time he sounds like a raving wingnut and the next a reasonable progressive. Anyway, this is a good piece.

<http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/10/03/Dobbs.Oct4/index.html>

btw, if this can be posted on the news thread that would be great of someone to do it. I'm just not sure if it qualifies.

Honestly, I was perfectly prepared to read him say, "How much is government hurting you by taking away your hard earned money to give away to the undeserving lazy?"

His perspective was a surprise.

On economic issues, he knows where the bread is buttered, and it's not on the poorer side. He connects well with voters on his anti-incompetence stance and his stance against simply leaving the border exposed and unprotected, and he knows workers all over the place are hurting because of free trade. He seems socially conservative, but I don't think he sits well with Christian fundamentalism as evident in his disdain for using social wedge issues becomes apparent when it competes with big issues like free trade, failing health care, failing public education, etc.

He bangs that drum pretty hard: People come here illegally because they know there are employers more than happy to pay them (little) and abuse the US system to save lots of money on wages, mandated safety, payroll taxes.

But not everyone is so lucky. The number of Americans without health coverage rose by 1.3 million last year, up to 46.6 million, according to the Census Bureau. What's worse, more than one in 10 American children are now uninsured. Fewer employers than ever are providing health care to their employees and those who are still lucky enough to receive employer-provided coverage are paying a much larger share: The Kaiser family foundation says the cost of family health insurance, in fact, is up 87 percent since 2000.

The same holds true at the pharmacy. Prices for the most popular brand-name prescription drugs this year rose substantially higher than the annual inflation rate, as has been the case every year this decade. The AARP concluded prices for the top 193 drugs climbed 6.3 percent over the last 12 months ending in June 2006, while inflation went up 3.8 percent. Generic drugs, however, rose 0.4 percent over that period of time.

The costs of higher education are also hurting middle-class families like never before. In this increasingly credentialed society, the total cost of tuition, fees, room and board at four-year public colleges and universities has ballooned 44 percent over the past four years. And the proportion of family income it takes to pay for college is growing for families everywhere. The biggest jump, according to the National Center for Higher Education, is in Ohio, where college costs now take 42 percent of the average family budget, up from 28 percent in the early 1990s.

And then there's the last bit:

Perhaps one of our nation's leading business magazines would like to create something called a Forbes or Fortune 250 Million list, which would reveal the dire financial pressures that our public policies have produced for working men and women and their families. It's time for all of us to focus on that deep chasm we have allowed to open between the wealthiest Americans and the middle class and those who aspire to it.

Otherwise, there will be 250 million casualties in what has become nothing less than class warfare.