Future Grim? An Internet poll yesterday on iWon.com, an Ask Jeeves site, asked visitors about their expectations for the future.

Will They Do Better?

According to recent polling by the Marguerite Casey Foundation, rich and poor Americans differ over the causes of poverty — but both groups are optimistic about the financial future of their children. (AP)

Are you confident that your children/grandchildren will be financially better off than you?

36% - Yes
39% - No
14% - I don't plan on having any children
12% - I'm not sure

I found this poll result interesting for a couple of reasons, the first being the fact that little more than a third of respondents think their children or grandchildren will be better off than they are. I went to the Marguerite Casey Foundation's own website to see if their poll's results differed, but, oddly, those results are not given on that site. A nonspecific summary appears, but no specific questions nor percentages are shown.
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My second item of interest is that 14% of the respondents to the iWon poll don't plan to have children. As with all Internet polls, this is skewed toward people of higher incomes because only they are likely to have computers in the home and thus the leisure time to take webpolls. People of lower income, who may have access to the Internet at work or a public library, are less likely to use their computer time for leisure.
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The overall population of the United States keeps rising due mainly to immigration and the high birthrate among the poor. Moreover, the bulk of present immigrants, legal and illegal, are poor. The middle and upper classes are not replacing themselves. That suggests that the striking disparity in wealth that the Casey survey addressed is likely to become ever wider, with fewer and fewer people controlling more and more of the Nation's wealth, as the rich become less numerous and the poor have ever more mouths to feed from their meager incomes so become less and less able to give their children the education that alone is likely to empower them to do better. The poor usually do not have health insurance, so are unable even to protect their children from debilitating chronic conditions, fully repair injuries, etc., as may leave a significant number of them unable to function at a high level in school and in life.
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Higher education and healthcare are the two most prominent areas of the economy in which costs are rising much faster than the overall rate of inflation. The high costs of both impact the poor far more adversely than the rich.
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The only thing the poor have in abundance is votes. Alas, they generally don't vote, but that can change if they are motivated to do so by a campaign that speaks powerfully to their issues.
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A column in the New York Post yesterday anticipates trouble for the Republican Party in next year's congressional elections. Recalling the 1994 "Contract With America" that helped Republicans to increase their share of seats in both houses of Congress, Ryan Sager says:

Democrats are already running the numbers on a Democratic Contract With America.

A strategy memo released Monday by James Carville and Stan Greenberg, using just such language to describe their project, shows voters responding to a Democratic "contract" centered on universal health care, lifetime education, raising fuel-efficiency standards, canceling tax cuts for the rich and beefing up homeland defense.

Let's hope the Democrats have finally wakened to the fact that their base is the poor and middle class, and they must address the anxieties of those groups. Conspicuously absent from the list Sager gives of issues to be incorporated into a Democratic Contract With America, however, are debt relief and outlawing usury. If Demmies remain Dummies and don't wake up to the crushing burden that debt and usury inflict upon the poor and middle class, nothing else they do is likely to raise them from perpetual minority status in Congress. Nor should it.
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But if Democrats offer a "contract" that is headed by debt and usury, then moves on to lesser concerns, we might just have a Democratic Congress in 2007 and Democratic President in 2009. Wouldn't that be a nice change?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,987.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:50 PM