The Right's New 'Welfare Queens': The Middle Class

Posted by George Packer

Two weeks ago, I was invited to testify before the Senate Finance Committee on the subject of the economic problems of the middle class. Senator Ron Wyden, of Oregon, who became chairman of the committee in February, let me know that he wanted someone to bring news from outside Washington to the hearing. He wanted me to tell a few of the stories about hard-pressed Americans from my book “The Unwinding,” to help him steer the committee’s agenda in a new direction. This isn’t the sort of request I regularly receive, so I said yes.

There were four other panelists that Thursday morning at the committee-room table in the Dirksen Senate Office Building: the chief economist of the small-business lobby; the director of the left-leaning Tax Policy Center; an economist from a Chicago financial-services firm; and Lawrence Lindsey, who was a top economic adviser to George W. Bush and an architect of the huge 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, and is now a consultant in Washington. Looking down from the dais were Wyden and the committee’s ranking Republican, Orrin Hatch, of Utah, along with a handful of other committee members who were present at various points during the hearing: the Republicans Charles Grassley, of Iowa, and John Thune, of South Dakota, as well as the Democrats Debbie Stabenow, of Michigan; Sherrod Brown, of Ohio; and Michael Bennet, of Colorado.