Sounding Off:

As a young engineer, several decades ago, I learned that the most important criterion in seeking a solution is to define the problem as accurately as possible. Very often, solutions are addressed to symptoms rather than the disease.

The current nasty debate, conducted in 10-second sound bites, on what ails this nation is a classic example of this. Eschewing heavy mental lifting, we are told by self-styled pundits that the crucial issue facing this nation is the massively unbalanced budget with deficits as far as the eye can see. This merely is a symptom of a much larger problem.

The fundamental cause for the steady decline in American industrial and economic might is the steady decline of our middle class. It was the American worker (not the hedge fund managers, not the Wall Street brokers) who built the mighty industrial state and was well rewarded for his contributions.

There was a time, long ago, when the adage “what is good for General Motors is good for America” made sense. In those days, being an American company meant good American jobs, a good tax base including corporate taxes and a thriving middle class.

Today, American corporations take their jobs overseas, pay little or no taxes and enjoy all the protections of being American, including the right to buy elections. Over the past three decades, corporate money has been able to buy a “corporate friendly” Supreme Court, which will be hard to displace for several decades.

According to a recent Harvard Business Review study, chief executives at the largest U.S. companies earned about 35 times as much as the average worker in 1978. Thirty years later, that figure is an obscene 300 to 1. This represents a huge shift in income and benefits from the working middle class to management and capital, to people who manufacture worthless paper and export jobs overseas. And the beneficiaries of this plunder, aided and abetted by a pliant and complicit media, have been orchestrating hysterical cries of government takeover and impending socialism.

The destruction of America’s middle class, along with the American dream, has been enabled by two factors: irresponsible tax policies and the rise of unfettered corporate power through globalization.

The unraveling of the middle-class started with that genial master of make believe on the celluloid screen, the Great Communicator, who convinced a gullible nation that a shining city on the hill can be had without ever paying for it.

That started the era of voodoo economics with a disastrous stampede to tax cutting, with one of the largest transfer of wealth away from the working class, except for a short duration in the ’90s.

Today, someone self-employed for minimum wage pays almost 15% for Social Security and Medicare alone. The slightly better off get hit with Alternate Minimum Tax, bringing their total contribution to more than 30%, whereas the hedge fund manager gets away with paying a mere 15% as Long Term Capital Gains on his billion-dollar salary.

Even as this tragedy is unfolding, there are loud voices in our midst crusading to abolish even that minimum contribution from those who benefit the most. With the ever increasing clamor to cut spending, the ax inevitably falls on “education” — the fundamental building block for a highly productive middle class. The share of expenditure on prisons zooms while education is progressively starved.

We need leadership that is bold enough to make a case for paying for what is essential, through an equitable tax structure. Those who promise tax cuts are charlatans who do not have the well-being of our nation at heart. Tax cuts, as a slogan, sells at the ballot box while shamefully selling the nation short.

This is not about an honest difference in philosophy or opinion. This is thuggery, plain and simple.

JAMSHED H. DASTUR lives in Newport Beach.