Wanna be re-elected? Rebuild the middle class

Press file photo: If these guys can figure out how to rebuild the middle class, they can keep these costumes.

Ah, election day. The wheels of democracy turn. Hope rings anew. Birds chirp. Sun shines. And today's governor's race should be a doozy. Will Gov. Corzine get a new mop to clean up the mess? Will Chris Christie get a chance to throw every last one of them in jail? Whoever wins gets the second worst job in America, right behind the governor of California.

Some brief items ...

from the business world:

*A day after campaigning for Corzine, President Obama had an economic summit where, from my vantage point at a desk in Neptune, NJ., he made the most important statement of his presidency: "What we're going to talk about is, are there mechanisms that we can start putting in place where we see the kind of growth that used to characterize the U.S. economy -- export-driven growth, manufacturing growth, growth that pays high wages and provides high living standards for a broad-based middle class," he said.

*That's the ballgame. You want to know why there has been so much anxiety in this country for the past year or two? Because the living standards of the middle class have gotten lower, not higher. Workers lost their jobs when their employers went overseas. Workers who were fortunate enough to keep their jobs didn't get big enough raises to keep up with the cost of living. The leader who figures out how to reverse that trend gets to rule for life. Every other issue is window dressing.

*Until then, we can pretty much guess how the reaction will be toward stories such as this one: "One hundred percent of credit cards offered online by the leading bank card issuers continue to include practices that will be outlawed once legislation passed in May takes effect next year, according to a new report by the Pew Health Group's Safe Credit Cards Project..."

*...There's more. "The report also found that advertised credit card interest rates rose an average of 20 percent in the first two quarters of 2009, even as banks' cost of lending declined." 

*It's no wonder then that it was Pew's health group that had to do that study.

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