Middle Class

Robert Chung has never been on welfare. Nor has anyone else in his extended family. They've never spent a food stamp or lived in public housing. But in the furious debate over welfare reform in Washington, their livelihoods are at stake.They all work in the family grocery store on Pennsylvania Avenue in Upton, a grid of worn-down streets and sagging facades that was once the cultural hub of black Baltimore -- the city's "Broadway."Where Billie Holiday once sang the blues, now teen-agers hawk crack cocaine.

BOSTON -- By the eighth week of the longest running un-morality play in modern memory, all sorts of bit players had walked onto the stage in reversible roles.One week we heard the Rev. Billy Graham forgive the president for his alleged infidelity, because "I know the frailty of human nature."The next week we heard writer David Brock ask the president to forgive him for starting a "witch hunt" because "what the hell was I doing investigating your private life in the first place?"The absolution and the mea culpa were just part of the plot of this so-called scandal -- an unpredictable drama that's stumped even those who make their living speculating.

America's fading middle classThe financial stability of this country will be in serious jeopardy because of actions taken in recent years by business and industry. Hardly a day goes by that we do not read about thousands of jobs being eliminated. Two years ago, this was done in the name of ''restructuring'' to be able to compete in the world. Now it is done via mergers.Many of the organizations doing this are enjoying banner earnings. Looking more closely at the details, the bulk of these jobs are well-paid positions held by the middle class.

Washington -- SEVERAL THEMES run through the Contract With America: promotion of free markets, objection to government regulation, concern for the middle class.But when it comes to the passage on reforming securities law, the contract is oddly in conflict with those objectives.Adam Smith, in the most famous sentence in economic literature, said that "it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."

Hoboken, New Jersey. -- This was America's deal with me:If I kept my nose clean and paid attention in school, I could go to college, even if I had to work in the summers and part-time during the school year to pay for it. Then, if I worked for a few years, I could afford to buy a house and one day make enough money to make sure my own kids got through college.And that's what happened, for which I am very grateful. That deal, and the fact that if one screwed it up the first time there was almost always a second and third chance in the land of the free, are a good part of the reason I have always thought this a great country.

As a card-carrying member of the middle class, I couldn't be happier.A few days ago, I was forgotten.Now, out of the blue, I'm hotter than a hunky TV emergency-room doctor.Suddenly, everyone in Washington wants to know not what he can do for his country, not what he can do for his party, but what he can do for me. Move over, Al Franken. This is my decade.(If you want to know the truth, what I desperately need right now is somebody to clean my gutters. Maybe I'll put a call in to Dick Gephardt.

The intensity in this room could lift you out of your seat. There are seven people here, five men and two women, all of them black, all vowing that the thing that has happened elsewhere in ** this city will not happen in Northeast Baltimore, because they will not let it happen.Listen to Emmanuel Holmes. He is president and executive director of this group, the North East Regional Tenant Community Association (NERTCA), gathered this morning in a little office in the 5300 block of Moravia Road.

That was quite a riveting speech Sen. Bob Kerrey delivered in casting the deciding vote for passage of President Clinton's budget bill. It was riveting, right-on in its moral message and quite wrong in suggesting that a president alone can overcome the political cynicism of institutional Washington.If Mr. Kerrey instead of Mr. Clinton had been elected president last year, would he still be on the "high road" of "shared sacrifice," or would he, too, have taken "the low road of the too-easy compromise or the too-early collapse"?

It's just before lunchtime at Shirley's Restaurant & Bar on Curtis Avenue. Waitresses serve up coffee and soup while two corner televisions compete with "Perry Mason" and "The Price is Right."Rose Brady, a 30-year-old waitress, is asked what price is right to get you into the middle class."At least in the 20s," she said.And where does the middle class end? "Probably about $28,000," she said. "Probably you're in the upper class, especially if two people are earning that."She is told that some congressional middle-class tax bills would reserve most benefits for those families with yearly incomes greater than $50,000.

If you're a member of the middle class -- and you probably think you are -- Congress, President Bush and the presidential candidates have two words for you: tax cut."Sounds great," you say. But are you really a member of the middle class?To the folks at Shirley's Restaurant & Bar, a corner tavern in the heart of Curtis Bay in South Baltimore, that's an easy question. The waitress says the middle class begins somewhere in the $20,000 range and ends at $28,000 for a single earner. Her boss says the middle class stops at the $50,000 mark for a family.

When World War II soldiers returned home, they had an astonishing and fitting opportunity awaiting them - their tuition, books and even a monthly stipend paid in full by the United States government, ensuring that the veterans who risked everything for their country had every opportunity to prosper. There is no more fitting memorial to the Greatest Generation, with apologies to the stirringly beautiful monument recently erected on the National Mall, than a continuation of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the GI Bill.

For three generations, Baltimore's Meyerhoff family has enriched the cultural and civic life of this city through innumerable philanthropic gifts to its schools, hospitals, museums, parks, libraries and the magnificent symphony orchestra hall that bears its name. But now, as leadership passes to a new generation, the family has set itself an even more ambitious goal: to help Baltimore's beleaguered middle class by encouraging more such families to move to the city and stay here. The effort, if successful, could be the Meyerhoffs' greatest legacy and one that would go a long way toward reversing Baltimore's long-standing ills.

The Joseph and Harvey Meyerhoff Family Charitable Funds, a Baltimore-based philanthropic organization that for years aided high-profile causes in Israel and cultural institutions in the United States, has turned its focus to a problem closer to home: Baltimore's struggling middle class. The organization's disbursements - currently at $5 million a year - will soon pay for better computer access at public libraries, improvements at city parks and college tuition for students from families with good jobs.

WASHINGTON - President-elect Barack Obama's top advisers said yesterday that they won't back away from a promise to cut taxes on the middle class and raise them for the wealthiest Americans, as they made the case for a huge new stimulus package geared toward reviving the slumping economy. Speaking on Sunday talk shows and in a newspaper opinion piece, Obama aides stepped up a drive to build a broad political consensus behind Obama's core economic proposals: a two-year spending package that could exceed $775 billion, coupled with tax policies weighted in favor of the middle class.

Through a long campaign, President-elect Barack Obama made a mantra of his pledge to raise taxes on the wealthy and cut them for the struggling middle class. But now it seems likely that the rich won't be paying more, at least for a year or two, because any tax hike would be bad for the country's morale in the current economic struggle. That's what Mr. Obama's aides have suggested. That may be a campaign promise not kept, but ducking the tax issue is a convenient bit of recession theory that fits seamlessly with what appears to be the Bush administration's economic game plan.

President-elect Barack Obama's aggressive plan to deal with the worst economic crisis since the Depression will be expensive but is vital to putting more than 2 million unemployed workers back on the job and giving an economic boost to the middle class. Mr. Obama laid out highlights of his proposal Friday when the scale of America's economic trouble was bleakly apparent by the latest jobless figures - the unemployment rate had jumped to 6.5 percent with the loss of 240,000 jobs in October.

Obama's proposals * Swift passage by Congress of a new fiscal stimulus bill either before or soon after he takes office in January. * Immediate extension of unemployment benefits for those who can't find work. * A rescue plan for the middle class that invests in immediate efforts to create jobs and provides relief to families watching paychecks shrink and life savings disappear. * Efforts to address the spreading impact of the financial crisis on other sectors of the economy, including small businesses struggling to meet payroll and finance holiday inventories and state and municipal governments facing budget cuts and tax increases.

When Mondawmin Mall in West Baltimore opened in 1956, it was one of the first indoor shopping centers in the country and a marvel for consumers, who flocked to its stores from across the region. Anchored by two major department stores, Sears & Roebuck and Hochschild, Kohn & Co., it boasted two pharmacies, three shoe shops, a barbershop, a bakery, a hardware store and a florist among its 40 tenants. In the years since, however, the fortunes of the Rouse Co. development on a former estate of Baltimore businessman Alexander Brown have gone up and down with the city's changing demographics and competition from trendier suburban malls.

Making mass transit an attractive option Several paragraphs into Michael Dresser's column "Gas pain might be changing our ways" (April 7), we read: "For many Marylanders, using mass transit is equated with slipping from the ranks of the middle class." If this assertion is true, one must ask what makes Marylanders different from other mass transit riders. Do the millions of mass transit riders in Boston, New York City, San Francisco, Denver, Portland, Chicago, Atlanta, Philadelphia and in and around Washington worry about slipping from the ranks of the middle class?

It's judgment day again. Every year, generally shortly after noon on the second Sunday of April, I carry a messy stack of documents into the guest bedroom, close the door and settle in the worn swivel chair before the computer. I've delayed as long as I can, and now I must once again assess my life in the way we all keep score in America - by counting dollars and cents. It's income tax time, and the question that looms in the moment, of course, is whether money must be paid to Uncle Sam and a check written to cover a shortfall from last year.