The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. It's a cliché. One that Republicans despise and have put forth considerable effort to disprove. They disprove it through a perversion of statistics. "Statistics can be used to prove anything that's remotely true." said the philosopher Homer. Homer Simpson that is.

    Bush got some good news on the economic front. That is, what we are told. A closer look reveals a mere continuation of the trend that the conservative deity, Ronald Reagan began. Either become a wide collared manager, computer programmer, analyst, or some other intellectual pursuit or prepare for a life of flipping burgers, selling shoes, or greeting people at Walmart.

    You can almost see the conservatives like Draginol and Anthony R who hang out with their smart friends arguing that the education possibilities in the United States are such that there's more than enough demand for the kind of intellectual white collar jobs that bring in the bigger bucks. Of course, it's also conservatives like Draginol and Anthony R that foist upon us books like "The Bell Curve" that makes a solid case that half of American society isn't going to be able to program computer software or figure out ladder logic Alan Bradley micro-controllers or sell integration services to insurance companies. What about them?

    What about them indeed. Historically, them, or as they used to be called, the Americans who live between the coasts, worked in factories making things. They worked with a material we called metal. Try saying that world meh-tal. Or maybe they worked in textiles. You didn't have to be a rocket scientist to work those jobs but they still paid really well. You worked hard at those jobs. Republicans know what that means? No? Working hard isn't about working long hours. It means using your arms and legs to do something quite unpleasant for long periods of time. You would get dirty. Grungy. Sometimes injured. But it was a job that produced real stuff and it made it possible for men and women to raise their kids in relative comfort. It paid for colleges that allowed their kids to find better work.

    But Republicans only give lip service to that kind of work. To save some money in the short term, they sent jobs to China by the millions over the years. Why pay an American $20 per hour when you could have someone in China do it for $2 per day? And folks, remember, Republicans are the ones who claim to be hard on Communism even as they blissfully transfer jobs, and wealth, to "Communist China".

    So the hard working men and women in the United States who once manufactured steel, cars or shoes are now, if they're lucky, selling shoes at a fraction of they pay they used to get. But unemployment is down right? Meanwhile the white collared people are doing just fine. You can see it in the luxury homes they live in. The marketing of fancier cars. The big 60 inch plasma TVs being sold for $10,000 at the store. They're doing just fine. So why should they care if that 40 some year old Walmart stocker was once making three times as much a year ago manufacturing plastic containers used for storing lubricant for engines (both now produced in China)?

    The big story today is how now these poor engineers are losing their jobs to India. Shocking. Just shocking. Not the job loss but the attention it gets that is. Oh poor guys. Welcome to the party, pal. This is what's been happening in the manufacturing sector for 30 years straight. You can think politicians like Bush and Reagan and their cohorts for this. They have only the vaguest notions of what the middle class is. To them, it's all about making goods cheaper for "average Americans" that they have no concept of.

    Instead of imagining what the "Average" American is, maybe they should start looking at what the "mean" American is. The typical. The example. They're not stock analysts. They're not IT managers. They're not engineers. They're hard working men and women who are increasingly being forced out of manufacturing into services. And not all services are the same. At the rate we're going, we'll have a hyper middle class that represents say 20% of the population that is doing "great". And then the rest of America that's stuck taking Pizza orders because of diminished opportunities that we can thank our Republican friends for.