Books: Two authors devoutly pro-government, but they find that their focus groups “think government is part of the problem”

The Middle Class and Its Enemies

FRED SIEGEL

Two books pose very different villains.

It’s the Middle Class, Stupid!, by James Carville and Stan Greenberg (Blue Rider Press, 321 pp., $26.95)

Spreading the Wealth: How Obama Is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities, by Stanley Kurtz (Sentinel, 221 pp., $25.95)

The Obamaphile columnist Jonathan Alter has written that “the collapse of the American middle class and the huge transfer of wealth to the already wealthy is the biggest domestic story of our time.” He’s right about the middle-class part, anyway: thanks to the most undemocratic economic recovery in American history, there are now more unemployed workers than at any time since the Great Depression. Further, the average household’s income has declined even more in the so-called recovery than it did during the recession.

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