Digging Out

Five years ago, billionaire Warren Buffett warned: "The rich people are doing so well in this county, I mean we never had it so good... It's class warfare, my class is winning, but they shouldn't be... Right now corporate profits as a percentage of GDP in this country are right at the high. Corporate taxes as a percentage of total taxes raised are very close to the historical low."

For generations, it was the great American middle class that made our economy the envy of the world. It was the labor movement that helped secure so much of what we take for granted today - the 40-hour work week, the minimum wage, family leave, health insurance, Social Security, Medicare, retirement plans, those cornerstones of middle class security that all bear the union label.

It was that greatest of generations that built America into the greatest force for prosperity, opportunity and freedom the world has ever known. Americans, who as boys went off to war, but returned home men. American women, who rolled up their sleeves and worked in factories on the home front. When the war was over, they studied under the GI Bill; bought homes under the FHA; raised families buttressed by good jobs that paid good wages with good benefits. They valued jobs because to them it was about meeting their responsibilities to themselves, to their families, and to their community.

Presently, there are eight million Americans across our country, who are struggling to find a job and retain their dignity, because of this recession. Although, we've had eight straight months of private sector job growth, the new jobs haven't been coming fast enough. Unfortunately, there's no quick fix to the problem. It will take time to reverse the damage of a decade's worth of policies that saw a fortunate few prosper while the middle class kept falling behind and it will take more time to dig out of the hole created by this economic crisis.