Middle Class America is dying

Work has been extremely hard to find here in American for the middle class, and especially the IT industry. It used to be that we could jump from job to job, but then all of a sudden, companies quit updating the IT department and software and also did not start any new projects. The Department of Defense run out of government grants to do projects, and millions of people have lost their jobs since Bush was “elected” into office. People who used to make around $60k and up are now losing their homes and have credit cards charged to the max trying to survive.


Today I went over to Safeway and I was absolutely appalled at the prices. I honestly don’t know how most families make it these days. I ended up paying over 140 dollars for about two-thirds of a cart of food. That was after I “saved” 67 dollars on sale items.

When the cost of the basic things that we need – housing, food, gas, electricity – go up faster than our incomes do, that means that we are getting poorer.

The America of a generation ago had multiple institutions for enabling worker incomes to rise with their rising productivity. More industries were regulated. The federal minimum wage was equal to about half the average wage; today, it is below one-third. The federal government actually enforced workers’ right to organize a union. Nearly half of U.S. workers were covered by decent, federally guaranteed pensions, instead of funny-money worker-savings plans. Wall Street was more tightly regulated, and corporate executives were not able to grab such an outlandish share of the total pie. Taxation was progressive, and ordinary workers paid much lower rates. We did not trade with countries that had something close to slave labor, like the Chinese factory system.

After you read the information below, it should become abundantly clear that the U.S. middle class is in a whole heap of trouble.

• The new ‘global economy’ means that middle class American workers have to directly compete for jobs with people on the other side of the world where there is no minimum wage and practically no regulations.
• If the socialism the Tea Party is shouting about means anything in the U.S. anymore it refers to the golden circle of the super rich, who are profiting at unheard of rates whilst the rest of this nation suffers.
• U.S. Corporations have grown massively rich exploiting third world labor pools, but middle class American workers have increasingly lost out.
• A certain someone who will remain nameless put out the idea that the rich represent the past, the poor represent the present and the largely self-made middle class represent the future. Their success is a barometer of the health of any country’s economy. By these lights, America is in a bad, bad way. Not everyone knows it, but everybody can feel it.
• 1 Today, only 55.3 percent of all Americans between the ages of 16 and 29 have jobs.
• In the United States today, there are 240 million working age people. Only about 140 million of them are working.
• According to CareerBuilder, only 23 percent of American companies plan to hire more employees in 2012.
• Since the year 2000, the United States has lost 10% of its middle class jobs. In the year 2000 there were about 72 million middle class jobs in the United States but today there are only about 65 million middle class jobs.
• 83 percent of all U.S. stocks are now in the hands of 1 percent of the people.
• The top 1 percent of U.S. households owns nearly twice as much of America’s corporate wealth as they did just 10 years ago. (Thanks George!).
• 66 percent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans. (Thanks George!)
• In 1950, the ratio of the average executive’s paycheck to the average worker’s paycheck was about 30 to 50.
• Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.
• The number of good jobs continues to decrease.
• The rate of inflation continues to outpace the rate that our wages are going up.
• American consumers are going into almost unbelievable amounts of debt.
• The number of Americans that are considered to be “poor” continues to grow.
• The number of Americans that are forced to turn to the government for financial assistance continues to go up.

The proof is all around us, the American Middle Class is dying – and once it is gone it will take decades to rebuild, if that’s even possible now, the way things are going.

http://www.thecomingdepressionblog.com/middle-class-america-is-dying/