"The heart of our political malaise is that the middle class, so long a powerhouse of US prosperity, is being crushed as never before"
The decline and fall of the American middle class | Paul Harris | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
let's look at some gems from this one:
The story contains some scary figures, such as the fact that the net worth of the middle fifth of American households has plunged by 26% in the last two years.
Gosh. I wonder if that has anything to do with the fact that housing prices plummeted, but
people dont' save.
Shows how out of touch you are with how bad it has been for the majority of the country, the redistribution of wealth over the last 30 years combined with consumer costs inflated beyond income gains resulted in less savings and more debt. As the facts showed "the income of the median American family, adjusted for inflation, is lower now than in 1998."
the situation of some Detroit auto-workers, pointing out that new hires can find themselves working opposite long-term colleagues who do similar jobs yet earn twice as much. The system is called a "two tier" wage structure.
Gosh. I wonder if that has anything to do with the massively unsustainable union compensation and benefits packages negotiated by UAW over the past few decades? Detroit is a little piece of the third world - right in the heart of America. It is the way it is because
unions made it that way.
You are indeed expressing the conservative perspective, that the middle class needs to learn to live on less, to enable the rich to get richer, as the study went on to say: it actually looks far more like the permanent shape of things to come. American society is bifurcating, squeezing the middle class out of existence. The ranks of the poor and low-income earners are growing and the rich are doing just fine – and no one is talking about it, much less doing anything about it."
this article doesn't even manage to draw logical lines of causality between the trends he thinks he is identifying and any kind of cause. It's like he googled "wealth inequality" and then just slapped on a sentence at the end about it being unsustainable (which is, of course, incorrect - wealth disparity is the dominant form of dispersion in human history).
Because you didn't read it, doesn't mean the logical lines of causality were not provided.
"The CEOs and high school teachers who got roughly the same number of years of formal education haven't exactly had the same growth in income over the past 30 years. So, there's this vast increase in inequality at the top. What do we think caused that?
So we've got skill bias and technological change, which is shifting demand towards highly educated workers. We've got growing international trade with increased imports of labor-intensive products further reducing demand for less educated workers. We have immigration, possibly similar in its effect to trade. We have the falling real value of the minimum wage contributing at the bottom end. We have some affected unionization driving the change in income distribution.
Finally, in terms of at least the after-tax distribution, we have changes in taxes which have, in general, reinforced rising inequality."
I am sure this plays a small part, but there is no evidence to back up the claim made above. Additionally, it is the GOP that has been opposed to family planning and abortion rights.
without even looking i know that this is largely because of age. Guess what - if you're raised middle class, when you start out, you're still generally starting out at the bottom of your respective ladder. You're not going to be making daddy and mommy's income straight out of college. yeesh :roll:
Yeah its kind of obvious that you didn't look at the Pew study:
"The study focused on people who were middle-class teenagers in 1979 and who were between 39 and 44 years old in 2004 and 2006. It defines people as middle-class if they fall between the 30th and 70th percentiles in income distribution, which for a family of four is between $32,900 and $64,000 a year in 2010 dollars.
People were deemed downwardly mobile if they fell below the 30th percentile in income, if their income rank was 20 or more percentiles below their parents’ rank, or if they earn at least 20 percent less than their parents. The findings do not cover the difficult times that the nation has endured since 2007.
Pew researchers said the study’s structure did not permit an analysis of whether upward mobility has become more difficult through the years. Nonetheless, some economists point to growing income inequality and widely stagnating wages as evidence that the American Dream is slipping out of reach for many people."
