The first time I met David Cay Johnston, we were both hanging around Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, where people kept mistaking us for each other. (It's the beards, I'd say.) He's got a pretty decent media presence, but he remains one of those people in our national dialogue to whom people do not necessarily listen because Joe Scarborough is the only person in America who really understands economics. Anyway, Johnston's came out with a new analysis last month that concluded, basically, that we've all been getting hosed pretty hard since even before Ronald Reagan and the lads rolled into town. Of course, it sank like a bowling ball heaved into a vat of oatmeal. But it did illustrate a fundamental truth about the way economics is lodged in our politics: when Republicans talk about their love for a "pro-growth" economy, and when the Democrats talk about their love for "the middle class," they're both pretty much lying to you. The entire economic debate right now takes place in a tightly circumscribed universe of options, and there simply is not enough in that universe to rescue a crumbling middle-class from the forces that are taking it apart, piece by piece. There is nothing being debated that will do fck-all about income inequality, or about the geyser of money that has spouted upward during the period Johnston describes. Instead, we're fighting over how austere we have to be. This is goddamn insane.

Why this is goddamn insane is illustrated by a terrific Monica Potts piece in The American Prospect in which Potts describes the lives of formerly middle-class residents of the suburbs outside of Denver who have been forcedinto living week-to-weekin budget hotels.

Across the country, suburban poverty rose by more than half in the first decade of the new century. Families now find themselves navigating landscapes that were built around wealth: single-family houses that are sold, not rented; too few apartment buildings; and government agencies hidden at the far edge of the suburban ring, more responsive to trash-pickup complaints than rising hunger rates. The Ramada families became homeless because they could no longer pay rents and mortgages and found little help to slow their fall. In 2011, Colorado ranked eighth in foreclosures nationwide. When families in Jefferson County, which encompasses Denver's western suburbs, lost their home in the recession, they flooded a market that had the lowest number of rental vacancies in ten years. The Section 8 program in the area dispenses vouchers through a random lottery that typically has about 2,500 applicants; in any given year, only 30 to 40 spots become available. The school system, which keeps the best records of homelessness in the county, says the number of homeless students rose from 59 in 2001 to 2,812 in the current school year. Unable to find another home and unable to find space in the county's shelters, which hold fewer than 100 beds, the new poor disappeared into the suburban landscape wherever they could find a roof. With nowhere else to go, they turned the Ramada Inn into an impromptu SRO.

Potts is most remarkable in her ability to demonstrate the subtle ways in which people not only become poor, but also how they begin to start thinking of themselves as poor people, including the inherent terror of anyone with any kind of authority over their fragile lives.

The hotel's residents know who Bruce is, though. They've seen him come by on Sundays to collect money from the washers and dryers, and they know he issues commands that affect their daily lives. From the perspective of the Ramada families, he has one rule that he wants observed above all others: no children in the lobby or hallways. If he drives up and one of the nice clerks is on duty, she'll yell, "Bruce!" and whoever is in the lobby runs back to their room. Once, he told a clerk that she should tell Andy to shave his scraggly gray beard. Drew is so terrified of him he rarely ventures out. "These people have rooms," a guest once heard Bruce say.

Potts's piece is best read as a companion tothe terrific HBO doc — which featured my old college friend, Anne McCarthy, and her husband — a few months back about the economic devastation wrought on some of the people in the financial-services industry when the fraud hit the fan in 2008. There is a useful trope still floating around that goes, "If X were happening to middle-class white people, we'd have a revolution." Well, X is happening to middle-class white people and, I guarantee you, a substantial number of other middle-class white people, no matter how tenuous their own personal economic circumstances are, will blame the people living in the Ramada Inn for what happened to them. Revolution, hell. We can't even get the president to shut his yap about "entitlements." Another day in a nation of suckers.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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