The Despair of the Middle Class

WaPo reports on the disease of despair that is causing drugs uses, drinking, and suicide to increase among the working middle class.  I blogged about this yesterday but since then I have had and interesting thought. Perhaps the decline of the middle class is a systematic failure of our government to prepare people for the seismic shift of technology? If you look at the 70s (and the end of the Nixon presidency) as the height of working middle class, factor in the ineptitude (domestically) of Jimmy Carter with the Reaganomics of Ronald Reagan what you have is cutting programs that provided retraining and a safety net. What is needed is another New Deal, and the political causation is abandoning that mindset. This is just a random thought but it might be intriguing.