The Pew Research Center has a new report out regarding the declining prospects for the US middle class.

I speculate that the large middle class — characteristic of the US since WWII — exists largely due to government policies contrived to funnel money to it. As we dismantle these policies in the name of efficiency, the middle class shrinks.

Question: Does it matter? Is it an appropriate goal of democratic government to promote the existence of a large middle class?

Oh? Hey, great; that’d be nice. I mean, when you find the time.

[Cue plaintive whines and periodic pawwing.]

Last March Landsburg took us through some cool hypotheticals about selecting two people for death out of a pool of two married couples. Maybe I’m just twisted, but I loved that stuff – I really don’t have much of a framework for thinking about these issues — and I suspected that Landsburg was building to some larger theme.

Was I mistaken? Or did I miss the larger theme here? I still don’t have much of a framework!

One of my good friends had his children at a later age. They bought a plastic, straight roller coaster than fit in their living room. It had two or three bumps, and the small children could put the car in the starting position and climb in by themselves.

My backyard is mostly used by my schoodle to run around, so there’s plenty of room for an adult size one. I even suspect I could rig a pulley system on a tree to manually lift up myself in the car. Hours of fun!