Who Lost the Middle Class?
A question for historians in the not-too-distant future

city-journal.org
by Fred Siegel
Autumn 2011

Forty years from now, politicians, writers, and historians may struggle to understand how America, once the quintessential middle-class society, became as socially stratified as Europe or even Brazil. Should that dark scenario come to pass, they would do well to turn their attention first to New York City and New York State, which have been in the vanguard of middle-class decline.

It was in mid-1960s New York—under the leadership of a Barack Obama precursor, Hollywood-handsome mayor John Lindsay—that the country’s first top-bottom political coalition emerged. In 1965, Gotham had more manufacturing jobs than any other city in the country. But as the city’s political elites expanded social programs to help African-Americans and Puerto Ricans and inflated the unionized public-sector workforce to incorporate minority workers, taxes went up and up to pay for the spending, joining global competition and higher crime to produce a massive exodus of manufacturing and middle-class jobs. Over the last 45 years, New York has led the country in outmigration. A recent study by E. J. McMahon and Robert Scardamalia of the Manhattan Institute’s Empire Center for New York State Policy notes that since 1960, New York has lost 7.3 million residents to the rest of the country. For the last 20 years, “New York’s net population loss due to domestic migration has been the highest of any state as a percentage of population.â€