Third Way Dispatch

For six years, we have lived in a through-the-looking glass world of faith-based governance. The President and his administration have led the country on a hunch and a prayer. Just yesterday, the Director of NASA (presumably a rocket scientist!) was suggesting that it was “arrogant” to presume that our present climate is “the optimal climate,” or that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn’t change.

My father-in-law is 77. My son is almost 2.

Thirty years ago, having this combination of aging parents and very young children would have been unusual. Today, it’s increasingly the norm. A number of demographic trends are driving this rise in “sandwich generation” families. On one end is the fact that women are marrying and bearing children later in life; on the other is that people are living longer in retirement. In 1975, the average birth mother was 24; today she’s 28. In 1989, fewer than two in three adults between the ages of 41 and 59 had at least one living parent. Today, it’s nearly three in four.

In our report, The New Rules Economy, we noted that one of the most significant new challenges faced by modern families is the challenge of balancing work and family. Adding to this complexity is that a growing number of families are caring not only for young children but for aging parents. And because public policy has yet to catch up with this phenomenon, sandwich families are largely making do on their own.

The New Rules Economy of today demands that individuals and families increasingly take charge of their own financial futures. It’s a major challenge and source of anxiety for middle-class families, who are coping with the shift away from traditional pensions toward 401(k)s, and for whom real wealth now means owning a stock portfolio as well as a home.

It’s an even bigger challenge for low-income families, for whom having even a small amount to save is a far bigger concern than how to save it.

Helping progressive leaders develop effective middle class policy and messaging is a consuming passion for us at Third Way.

That’s why we are thrilled by the recent introduction of a middle-class tax relief package by Senator Charles Schumer and six freshmen Senators called the Middle Class Opportunity Act of 2007. The bill is based on proposals developed at Third Way.

The middle class is anxious.

Despite reams of good economic news from Wall Street, there’s an underlying anxiety that belies the objective numbers of low unemployment, low inflation, rising stock prices and job growth.

Many progressives are responding to this anxiety by jumping on the bandwagon of what we call “neopopulism.” They interpret this anxiety as a sign of genuine crisis and decline for both the middle class and our nation – a situation that demands economic policies that look inward and backward.

When you go from the majority to the minority, the little indignities are almost imperceptible. That’s why Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, one of the most conservative Republicans this side of Orrin Hatch, might have been a little bit puzzled about why an op-ed he wrote for the Washington Post was published mid-week between Christmas and New Years. As anyone in this town knows only the lonely are in DC during that desolate week.