The Big Squeeze

I just finished a cover story for this month's American Prospect magazine about how average Americans are getting squeezed in a whole host of economic areas. It is particularly relevant to today's release of a nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office report showing that the Bush tax policies have actually shifted more of the tax burden onto the middle class.

The bottom line: the major problem we face today is not necessarily that government spending is being cut (though that is a problem) - it is that the government no longer excercises its authority to regulate the market to protect average people. Laws that once protected the middle-class have either been gutted, or are going unenforced. And serious proposals to reverse that trend have been repeatedly shot down.

Read the story here.