<As the wealthiest citizens have received tax cuts, the tax burden has shifted to middle class folk like Tom.

Hello? By current definitions, I AM one of those "wealthiest citizens." Check out this chart and you see I fall into that "top 20 percent." that everyone is talking about.

The Democratic definition of "rich" is any selfish bastard who has more money than you do.

Particularly amusing is their use of the term, "working man," used as a buzzword for anyone who is not rich. The rich, of course, never "work" for their money. I would love to know exactly at what income level I get to stop working, so I have something to shoot for.

Just for the record, my tax burden has increased not because of tax cuts to the rich, but because the government has an endless appetite for money. The current budget, in constant dollars adjusted for inflation, is TWICE what it was in 1974, at the height of the Cold War. I don't remember any starving elderly in the streets back then. We certainly don't have twice as many roads, twice as large a military, twice the elderly and poor, twice as many schools and school kids. Where the hell is the extra money going? Massive waste is the simple answer. This is something else the government hopes you don't notice.

Also, as unions have been beaten down, by not protecting US industries from unfair foreign competition, allowing massive illegal immigration, etc., the real wages Tom used to enjoy have fallen.

I wouldn't know, as I have never held a job vulnerable to some uneducated person who can't speak the language who snuck across the border late at night. One would be surprised at the minimal levels of education and ambition required to avoid this job bracket.

Now the foreign competition, generated by skilled and educated people located in other countries and willing to work for a lot less money, is another matter. This competes directly with the lower middle class, the classic blue-collar worker, with a high-school degree and maybe some vocational school.

The question you need to ask yourself is how much more are you willing to make consumers--including the poor--pay for the necessities of life to keep American industries in business? This is not a simple question, and believe it or not, I don't have a simple, pat answer. A free trade situation where we are balancing a couple hundred million middle class against billions of industrious and ambitious low-income people does not bode well for the artificially-high income levels in this country. We are already long past the time when a blue-collar worker could make a good middle-class wage, buy a house, and send his kids to college, standing on an assembly line and turning bolts.

When I was in high school, there were two acceptable career tracks that could make you a living. Some kids went to college. Some kids went to vocational school. I don't think the latter track has a lot of prospects any more.

The free market, of course, would sort this out eventually to everyone's long-term benefit, with a world-wide middle class eventually emerging. The process will be far from painless.

Also, housing prices have risen, as fleeing to the suburbs is the one of the few ways of obtaining decent education for your children.

Housing prices have risen primarily because it is a lot more difficult getting permission to build houses nowadays without inconveniencing either some rare snail or a local zoning law. Here in California building a housing development requires a note from God--in triplicate.

As for the difficulty of obtaining a decent education from the government school system, you do NOT want me to go there.

So Tom doesn't have only one chip on his shoulder, he has 3, and he is absolutely clueless as to how they got there... and he's about to receive a few more of them, as Armey leads this country into an economic depression.

Au contraire, I know PRECISELY how those chips got there, down to about five decimal places. And as anyone who reads this board knows, I have a lot more than three. As for Armey's economic plans, please throw me into that briar patch.