The Middle-Class New Deal: Restoring Upward Mobility and the American Dream

An expansive policy blueprint for meaningfully expanding the middle class for the first time in a century

The US middle class was a product of state and federal policies enacted in the wake of the Great Depression. But since the 1980s, lawmakers have undermined what they once built, shredding the social safety net and instituting laws that virtually guarantee downward mobility for all but the most privileged. How can we restore what has been lost?

Rigorous and highly readable, The Middle-Class New Deal breaks down the policies that have decimated working families and proposes reforms to reverse this trend. As Mechele Dickerson shows, part of the problem is that politicians disingenuously conflate the middle class with the ＂White lower rich.＂ Such propaganda hides how state and federal lawmakers consistently favor education, labor, housing, and consumer-credit laws that erode the bank accounts of lower- and middle-income people--especially those who are not White and don’t have college degrees. Weaving together the latest research with the personal stories of Americans struggling to make ends meet, Dickerson provides a clarion call for political leaders to enact a bold agenda like the one that created the middle class almost a century ago.

A. Mechele Dickerson is Arthur L. Moller Chair in Bankruptcy Law and Practice at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law and author of Homeownership and America’s Financial Underclass.