Buy this house – IN MASSACHUSETTS – for $38,500 or less; just what is middle class, and why saving the American so-called Middle Class just is not enough

Per Athol real estate listings, this house is for sale with a 14,500 square foot lot for $34,500.  Your monthly payment, if you paid the full asking price would be about $200.00 a month.  Not bad.  But, in fact, there are other properties, both commercial and residential available for this price, or less.  For example, I even found one commercial property with an asking price of $800 (could that be a typo?):

Here is the link for this listing, at 34 Exchange Street, Athol at $800 dollars http://www.homes.com/listing/157106890/34_Exchange_St_ATHOL_MA_01331

Now, while some urban areas, parts of Boston, or near suburbs with MBTA access like Arlington or Cambridge have held their own and seem to be recovering, in fact rural areas without the MBTA like Athol or Orange are in a deep downslide.  Several thoughts come to mind, for example:  1)  What would the current MBTA plan do to real estate values in MBTA access downs; 2) Would expandging public transportation to Central Massachusetts reverse the slide in property values; 3) Why do we have abandoned properties AND homeless families AND unemployed veterans with construction skills?

It would make more sense to provide returning veterans with a voucher good for a sum certain (20k-40k) to be used to rehabilitate a property, which would put people to work, put veterans into housing, and avoid loss of housing stock.

What does this have to do with the so-called Middle Class?  Well, for starters, the whole idea of what is middle class has expanded like clothing sizes (you know, today’s women’s size 12 is yesterday’s size 16).  Take a look at this chart (and maybe one of the tech gurus can insert it, the best I can do is give you the link:

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/national/20050515_CLASS_GRAPHIC/index_01.html

Granted, this is 2005, but still.  Is $25,000 “middle class”  For the planet as a whole, it may be top 1%.  However, I would consider this level of income – say $25k-$45k working class.  Not a dirty word with me, at least, “working class”.  That was back when a wage job in the United States was expected to be a living wage job. 

Adam Smith, in his seminal work, sometimes considered “The Bible of Capitalism”, Wealth of Nations has this to say:

“A man must always live by his work, and his wages must be at least sufficient to maintain him.  They must even upon most occasions be somewhat more; otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family , and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation.”  Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Prometheus Books, 1991, P 72-73

Adam Smith goes on to explain that social stability requires that the base wage needs to be sufficient to allow for the maintenance of a family of four.  Otherwise, according to Smith, the result is social instability, the inability to marry or raise children in a two parent household, and declining population is the result.  It seem to me that the hard right capitalists citing to Adam Smith either NEVER read Wealth of Nations or totally missed the point.

Further, “saving the middle class” is not what we in fact need.  What is needed is a return to living wages that allow for families to maintain themselves as a family unit.  Destruction of the living wage combined with the rise of minority and veteran joblessness coincides with out of wedlock births, and population decline.    What those who trumpet “Save the Middle Class” seem to me to mean is something like “make sure college graduates get jobs and earn at least $60-$70k.  Sorry.  That leaves way too many people out, won’t fix the economy, and demonstrates a kind of obliviousness to what is actually going on around us in the USA and abroad.  Whether it is the destruction of 150,000 government jobs in Greeze, or the  “Hyatization” of labor in the USA – it is the working class that is being cannibalized and rendered economically invisible, and placed in a kind of finacial no-man’s land.

Remember the housekeepers, many of whom had worked for the Hyatt for 20 years, who trained their replacements to work for 1/4 of their wages?  You may have forgotten them, but they get what I am talking about, and have NOT gone away.

Photo courtesy of Wicked Local July 2011  These 35 unionists were arrested in July of 2011 – long before the Occupy Boston mass arrests.  This was not about “save the middle class” – but about saving the living wage.  A fan club for the high-end collegiate workforce won’t save the minority family, the working class, housing it Athol – or my kids future. 

If my generation (those born between 1936 and 1950) are to be remembered as anything other than the vampires who sucked the economic lifeblood out of the USA, the focus has to be on the well-being of the future generations in this country and on the planet.

Going back to housing prices in Athol – and Detroit – and Worcester – and Cleveland – how about it folks?  Can you come up with a better idea then mine?