NYT celebrates the demise of the middle class

Two stories in the New York Times spiked the ball on the demise of the middle class.

The first was "The Shrinking of the Middle-Class Neighborhood. Americans are increasingly living in areas that are either much richer or much poorer than the regional norm."

The story was a concern-trolling look at East Nashville. 

The story said, "Like many other Americans, Nashville residents are increasingly being buffeted by economic tides that push them into neighborhoods that are either much richer or much poorer than the regional norm, a New York Times analysis has found. A smaller share of families are living in middle-class neighborhoods, places where incomes are typically within 25% of the regional median.

"In Nashville, the share of families living in middle-class neighborhoods dropped by 15 percentage points between 1990 and 2020. But the portion of families in wealthy ones jumped by 11 points, and the segment living in poor neighborhoods grew by four points."

The story pointed out that in the last 30 years, each of the top 25 metro areas in the United States has seen a noticeable drop in the middle class. For example, only 36% of NYC lives in a middle-class neighborhood.

The past 30 years are the post-Reagan era which saw the rise in high tech companies and the deportation of American factory jobs to Red China and other formerly third-world countries.

Marybeth Shinn, a Vanderbilt University professor who studies homelessness and social exclusion, told NYT, "People are getting pushed out, and that is breaking up some historically sort of working-class neighborhoods.

"You gradually convert a neighborhood from a pretty modest kind of neighborhood that a lot of people could live in to one where only people that have a little more means are able to live in."

Like I said, it was a concern-trolling story.

The destruction of the middle class is part of the Democrat attack on the USA. The elitists want a nation where the 1% rule and 99% drool.

The second NYT story was "California Plans to Quit Oil. Resistance Is Fiercer Than You Think.

"Dozens of state and local budgets depend heavily on tax revenue from oil, gas and coal to fund schools, hospitals and more. Replacing that money is turning out to be a major challenge in the fight against climate change."

Democrats have loathed the oil industry ever since Edwin L. Drake built the first successful oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania, on August 27, 1859. Oil saved the whale by ending the use of whale oil for lighting. And of course, a man named John Davison Rockefeller decided to use a waste product from oil refining to run the internal combustion engines in his refineries. We call it gasoline.

This story covered California's plan to stop drilling for oil in 2045.

It said, "Disentangling communities from fossil-fuel income poses a major obstacle in the fight against climate change. One study found that if nations followed the urging of scientists and cut emissions from oil, gas and coal deeply enough to avert catastrophic warming, United States tax revenues from oil and gas production, currently about $34 billion per year, could fall by two-thirds by 2050.

"While Kern County produces 70% of California’s oil, it is also the state’s largest supplier of wind and solar power. But renewable energy doesn’t generate as much tax revenue as fossil fuels, partly because California exempts solar panels from property taxes to spur construction. And jobs in the wind and solar industries generally don’t pay as much or last as long as those in the oil fields." 

What?

We were told windmills and the like would lead to better-paying jobs. Do you mean to tell me that higher-skilled oil workers make more money than the solar panel installers?

Kyle Meng, an economist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told NYT, "California is about 10 years ahead of other places on climate policy, but I expect we’ll see similar issues pop up across the United States.

"When you look at how deeply oil and gas is woven into the fabric of many communities, providing money for schools and hospitals and roads, the shift to clean energy can get really complicated, really fast."

Of course, energy is only one of the uses for oil. California is banning plastic as well under the mythology that we are filling the oceans with plastic straws.

You know what is a renewable source of energy?

Whale oil.

Maybe we should go back to hunting whales.

Judy Collins would be pleased.