I’m Not Just Going to Take the Wheel. I’m Going to Reboot the GPS

What Robert Kennedy Jr. Will Do to Save the Middle Class

By Blake Fleetwood, The Kennedy Beacon

There is a profound gloom in America; the majority of Americans are not happy with what is going on. In the immortal words of Howard Beale in the 1977 movie Network,
“I am mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!”

There is good reason for this.

Income for the majority — the 62 % of Americans without a college degree — has fallen for 40 years, living standards have plummeted, and upward mobility has been cut in half. 

Stagnation. Middle-class workers can’t afford to buy a home. (mortgage rates are the highest in forty years). They can’t afford to pay for health care, medicines, stratospheric grocery prices, or gasoline. And they can’t afford a college education for their kids. High prices and inflation are destroying their lives. No wonder 70% of Americans feel financially traumatized.

They want a change, and they want it now!

The “Occupy Wall Street” protesters of a few years ago and the middle-class, blue-collar workers, who delivered Trump the presidency in 2016 (and refused violently to admit his defeat in the riots on January 6th), are strikingly similar in their predicament. Both groups feel that the government isn’t working for them and that they are getting shafted. They are right. They don’t know how or what is going on. They both want their fair share. But because of America’s outdated two-party political structure, and the dysfunctions of democratic capitalism, the two sides have never been able to channel their common grievances as one effective group.

But support for the beleaguered middle class is growing. Recently there have been more strikes than we’ve seen in a generation. The auto worker’s strike was supported by 75% of Americans, as was the screenwriters strike.

We have fallen into a state of “immiseration,” which is a fancy term that economists use when people are working harder and harder and falling further and further behind.

Robert Kennedy Jr. is determined to change this miserable 40-year trajectory.

“People who work hard should be able to afford a decent life.” This is the core of Kennedy's campaign to change America.

All politicians, Republicans, and Democrats, promise to help the middle class when they are running for office, but in the end, when they get the power, they resort to supporting the wealthy special interests, whose money got them elected. 

How did the middle class lose all their influence? The money spent on Washington lobbying is astonishing. In 2022, the influence players' spending skyrocketed to $4.1 billion, more than $7 million for each elected member of Congress. At least 13,784 organizations deployed 12,609 federal lobbyists throughout 2022.

Donald Trump promised to clean out the Washington Swamp, but when he was elected, it turned out that he was the swamp, as Kennedy observed. Trump lowered taxes on the rich and rejected any measures to help the middle class. The Democrats have been no better. 

“The system runs on inertia, year after year, decade after decade. It’s like a runaway bus full of teenagers fighting about who should take the wheel, not realizing that the driver merely follows the GPS set by the crooked insiders and corporate lobbyists,” RFK Jr. has said.

Kennedy will break this intransigent inertia by bringing about fundamental, lasting changes to the status quo, which is destroying the middle class.

Here is what Kennedy promises to do to make that a reality. He will:

1. Raise the minimum wage nationwide to $15 per hour, the equivalent of what it was in 1967.

2. Drop housing costs by a thousand dollars a year and make home ownership affordable by backing 3% home mortgages with tax-free bonds. This kind of mortgage support is already working well in Italy and Spain. Mortgage interest rates in Europe are not 7-8%, as they are in America. Most Europeans pay 3% or less for their mortgages.

3. Expand free childcare to millions of families with programs like that pioneered by the state of New Mexico.

4. Secure the border and bring illegal immigration to a halt, so that undocumented migrants won’t undercut wages or flood our cities.

5. Negotiate trade deals that prevent low-wage countries from competing with American workers in a “race to the bottom.”

6. Rein in military spending on forever wars and use the resources to fund infrastructure, universal health care, higher education, child care, and domestic prosperity.

7. Make student debt dischargeable in bankruptcy, as billionaire entrepreneurs do, and cut interest rates on student loans to zero, a big deal.

8. Cut drug costs by half to bring them in line with other nations.

9. Reverse the chronic disease epidemic that is a $3.7 trillion drag on families and the American economy.

10. Clean out the corruption in Washington, D.C., which funnels so much of our nation’s wealth to giant corporations and billionaires.

These changes will be a fundamental step in restoring our economy, our politics, and our flawed democracy: A democracy that has been hijacked by a wealthy elite and deep-pocketed corporations, which have taken over Washington’s regulatory agencies.

Republicans, and many Democrats, will ask, how are we going to pay for this?

These reforms are not radical or socialist, though they will be expensive. Most of the advanced industrial countries in the world have already implemented them to support their besieged middle class.

First, Kennedy says that one big source of savings would be to end the forever wars that have cost American taxpayers trillions of dollars. He will dismantle the power of the costly military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned us about.

“I will return the military to its proper function of defending the homeland,” he promised. He would push for a cease-fire to end the stalemate in Ukraine. The regime change wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya have already cost American taxpayers over $8 trillion. That’s $90,000 per family of four, enough to pay off all medical debt, and all credit card debt, provide free childcare, feed every hungry child, repair our infrastructure, and make college tuition free — with money left over. That’s enough to make Social Security solvent for another 30 years.

Second, Kennedy will end the corruption in Washington, the corporate giveaways, the boondoggles, and the bailouts of the too-big-to-fail banks and companies that leave the little guy at the mercy of the market. Corporations right now are sitting on $8 trillion in cash. Their contribution to tax revenues was 33% in the 1950s — it is 10% today. It’s high time they paid their fair share, and the middle class will pay less.

It is just a shift of priorities away from foreign adventures to solving our dire domestic problems.

Do we really need 750 military bases around the world? Our time as acting as the world’s policeman should be coming to an end. We can’t afford it anymore. We have urgent problems at home to deal with. 

The economy we operate in, and the wealth it creates, must be controlled by the citizenry. A democracy cannot just be about elections funded by wealthy elites and gigantic corporations

We cannot have a Democracy unless we have an Economic Democracy that includes and benefits our majority middle class.

Blake Fleetwood was formerly a reporter on the staff of The New York Times and has written for The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, The New York Daily News, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Village Voice, Atlantic, and the Washington Monthly on a number of issues. He was born in Santiago, Chile and moved to New York City at the age of four. He graduated from Bard College and did graduate work in political science and comparative politics at Columbia University. He has also taught politics at New York University.