Boiling Point: Democrats, Republicans, and the Decline of Middle-Class Prosperity

by Kevin Phillips

Overview

From the bestselling author of The Politics of Rich and Poor, a scholarly examination of the steady decline of America's middle class--the book President Clinton singled out as the source that should help him solve the middle-class dilemma.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679404613
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/26/1993
Edition description:	1st ed
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 1.50(h) x 9.50(d)

Editorial Reviews

Phillips's hard-hitting analysis of the middle-class decline in the U.S. is a worthy sequel to The Politics of Rich and Poor , in which he predicted a populist revolt against Reagan-Bush policies that favored the rich. Here the onetime Republican campaign strategist spells out in painstaking detail how the Reagan-Bush agenda benefited the nation's wealthiest 1% at the expense of a middle class battered by inequitable taxes, deteriorating public services, increasingly unaffordable health care and education, shrinking employee benefits, job cutbacks and declining household net worth. Clinton tapped middle-class frustration using populist rhetoric, but unless his administration delivers on its promises to the eroding middle class while revitalizing the economy, the Democrats will be voted out of office in 1996, suggests Phillips. He stresses that the Democrats must replace yesteryear's internationalism with greater emphasis on domestic issues and must curb the abuses sponsored by financial elites and welfare statists alike. An urgently important book. Author tour. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Phillips's first book, The Emerging Republican Majority (1969. o.p.), was called ``the political bible of the Nixon era,'' and The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and the American Electorate in the Reagan Af termath ( LJ 5/15/90) documented the economic consequences of the so-called ``Reagan revolution.'' With comparative data and unrelenting force, his latest book demonstrates how ``voodoo economics'' shafted the middle class and put America's future at risk. The frustration of middle America resulted in the Clinton presidency. This latest book establishes Phillips as America's Aristotle, the first advocate of a strong middle class to assure a stable society. Boiling Point may become the political bible of the 1990s. It deserves the widest possible audience. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/92.-- William D. Pederson, Louisiana State Univ., Shreveport

Library Journal

Although its prose is often about as exciting as your old college econ text, the latest book by political trend-spotter Phillips may become one of the most talked about this year. A companion to his "Politics of Rich and Poor" (1990), it thoroughly documents the middle-class decline and the trickling-up of American wealth that together brought middle America to the boiling point of political dissatisfaction, which in turn made the 1992 campaign, with its presidential field full of major-party populists and its unprecedentedly successful independent populist candidate, so interesting. Moreover, Phillips compares the present U.S. predicament to those of previous superpowers on the skids--seventeenth-century Spain, eighteenth-century Holland, and Britain during the first half of this century--and doesn't come up with much to indicate the U.S. has learned from history. In presenting both the numbers to support his economic observations and the facts and events to bolster his historical argument, Phillips performs yeoman service as a nuts-and-bolts contemporary chronicler, and anyone who wants to know how the U.S. got into its current malaise and why the situation is genuinely dangerous really must read him.

Ray Olson