Is the Middle Class being wiped out in America? Here are 22 statistics that suggest it is.

[Karmadillo]

This is from Business Insider. Interesting charts & statistics. They include concentration of wealth figures with the top 1% with lots, the bottom 50% with relatively little, people living paycheck to paycheck, banks owning a greater share of residential housing net wealth than all individual Americans put together, the rise in those of us on food stamps, the joys of globalization, 21% of all US children living in poverty (but they don't vote!), and finally, a call for the workers to rise up, break their chains, and smash the--Oh. Wait. I made that part up.

http://www.businessinsider.com/22-statistics-that-prove-the-middle-class-is-being-systematically-wiped-out-of-existence-in-america-2010-7

The 22 statistics that you are about to read prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence in America.

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer at a staggering rate. Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, but now that is changing at a blinding pace.

So why are we witnessing such fundamental changes? Well, the globalism and "free trade" that our politicians and business leaders insisted would be so good for us have had some rather nasty side effects. It turns out that they didn't tell us that the "global economy" would mean that middle class American workers would eventually have to directly compete for jobs with people on the other side of the world where there is no minimum wage and very few regulations. The big global corporations have greatly benefited by exploiting third world labor pools over the last several decades, but middle class American workers have increasingly found things to be very tough.

The reality is that no matter how smart, how strong, how educated or how hard working American workers are, they just cannot compete with people who are desperate to put in 10 to 12 hour days at less than a dollar an hour on the other side of the world. After all, what corporation in their right mind is going to pay an American worker ten times more (plus benefits) to do the same job? The world is fundamentally changing. Wealth and power are rapidly becoming concentrated at the top and the big global corporations are making massive amounts of money. Meanwhile, the American middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence as U.S. workers are slowly being merged into the new "global" labor pool.

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[DJ13]

1. middle class American workers would eventually have to directly compete for jobs

with people on the other side of the world where there is no minimum wage and very few regulations.


A lot of people tried to warn that would be the result, even Perot was telling people, but the MSM was already co opted by their corporate owners by that point, so it never got the attention it deserved.

[RKP5637]

8. I recall having more arguments with people (not here) trying to tell them

outsourcing, etc. would have devastating effects on most Americans, but with no success in changing their minds. Frankly, I think most Americans are a pretty lame bunch. Many have their heads in the sand or up their butts and don't react 'till something hits them squarely in the nose.

Now it's different, but I bet many are still complacent, because it hasn't hit them yet. They think their jobs they currently have are going on forever and forever with good wages in this global market... that somehow they are special.

It really doesn't take an Einstein to see what have been happening over the past decade or so... The problem is many are too gullible and believe the politicians of their choice and the BS propaganda from them and the MSM.

It will take decades for this country to come back to what it once was, if ever. Obama can't wave some magical wand, none can. Oh, I forget the R's have a solution, let's cut more and more taxes on corps. and the extremely wealthy, yep, that sure will fix everything. What a load of BS.

Frankly I often think Americans deserve what they get for having been so asleep at the wheel and taking so damn much for granted.

[Curmudgeoness]

2. Frightening statistics. When the middle class/working class is gone

it will be too late, but the powers that be will finally understand that this is what made the USA such a great and successful country. They will realize that it is not the uber-rich who create jobs, it is the masses with a few extra bucks. Saying "I told you so" will be a hollow victory for me.

[patrice]

3. It's not just the "few extra bucks" it's also their belief that hard honest work results in the

opportunity to do more hard honest work.

That's gone.

We do not live in a meritocracy. We live in an aristocracy.

[RKP5637]

11. Advanced degrees, impeccable resumes, talents, hard work over the years and

age will NOT get one back into the job market these days. Some will succeed, depends on the niche they were in, but many will not. I know many of them, now at minimum wage or severely underemployed. Any not seeing this are really not very observant, but IMO many Americans are very slow learners.

And those without those credentials will have probably an even rougher time of it... the employment landscape of this country is changing rapidly and I don't think what we once had is coming back at least for decades under our current economic system.

Our economic system today is gamed against the majority of citizens. It's damn obvious what is going on... And the goals of the G8/G20 are pretty obvious too... as well as NAFTA / CAFTA.

[dkf]

4. Americans can't compete with illegal immigrants either.

The situations that we can control we decline to. Just think how impossible it is to fix jobs going to other countries when we can't even enforce our own existing laws to keep American jobs In American hands at minimum wage pay levels.

[kelly1mm]

7. Agreed - it amazes me how few here can connect the dots. nt

[dkf]

14. Yup there is a huge disconnect here.

I really don't get it. The evil part of me thinks they want to buy the amnestied immigrant vote.

[Bloofer_Lady]

5. It's going to be a country of the rich and of service workers

There really isn't going to be a middle ground between the two. When politicians talk about job growth it is normally in the service industry, which pays unlivable wages.

[Better Today]

6. Is that still a question? I'm pretty sure the answer is in, we were hoping Obama

would be able to do something about all of this, but alas, he's turned coat.

[EFerrari]

9. Joan Didion, in "Where I Was From" has an essay about

the rise and fall of a middle class community in southern California. It was brought into being by defense contracts and it began to dissipate when those contracts ended.

I remember being shocked at her suggestion that the American middle class was a momentary anomaly.

[Karmadillo]

17. "It's a book about Didion's old idea of California, and how she stopped believing in it..."

I would imagine many of us are in the process of no longer believing in the old idea of America. The reality seems a little harsher than one might have hoped. "Where I Was From" is a great book. Thanks for the post.

http://www.bookforum.com/archive/fall_03/suro.html

<edit>

I mention all this because unless you know how Didion used to write about California, it's difficult to make sense of the way she writes about the state in her new book, Where I Was From, a curious blend of memoir, reportage, and historical speculation. For although it contains some of her most trenchant writing on California, including a sharp account of the state's tortured relationship to the railroads in the nineteenth century and the federal government in the twentieth, if you come to this book expecting to get a picture of California in all its blooming confusion, you will be disappointed. Didion writes about small-town residents convinced that economic salvation is just around the corner (perhaps in the form of a new prison), middle-class engineers whose jobs are disappearing, and farmers clinging to an imaginary past. But she has little to say about property-tax revolts, recall elections, immigration, race, or even Silicon Valley. But that's how it should be, because Where I Was From is not, in fact, a book about California. It's a book about Didion's old idea of California, and how she stopped believing in it. The title "Where I Was From" (as opposed to, say, "Where I Came From") gives this away, as if Didion were saying she is no longer a native daughter. Throughout the book, she deconstructs the mythology of California that she grew up on and that she herself obliquely propagated in her earlier books, the mythology of pioneer toughness, frontier independence, and that "finest hour" that had supposedly been outlived. She reads her own first novel, Run River, diagnosing its "tenacious (and, as I see it now, pernicious) mood of nostalgia." She shows how California's supposedly self-reliant farmers, the ones who in Frank Norris's The Octopus stood up to the railroads and challenged speculators, were themselves speculators (if failed ones) whose entire wealth was dependent on the railroads to begin with. The heirs of those farmers, meanwhile, would come to depend for their livelihood on massive water subsidies underwritten by taxpayers. As for that wagon-train morality, Didion has come to see that crossing the Sierras "might not after all be a noble odyssey, might instead be a mean scrambling for survival." The pioneers did not always try to retrieve their casualties. Sometimes they left the sick and weak behind in order to make it through. Perhaps California was built not on toughness but on ruthlessness. And, as Didion asks, "When you jettison others so as not to be 'caught by winter in the Sierra Nevada mountains,' do you deserve not to be caught? When you survive at the cost of Miss Gilmore and her brother, do you survive at all?"

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[WinkyDink]

10. Yes, they did tell us. i recall from the '80's hearing that Americans would love getting jobs in

Mexico.

[pampango]

12. Tax cuts for the rich, financial deregulation, shredding of the social safety net, a horrible

health care system, and union emasculation all played a role in the hammering the middle class. Europe has more "free trade" and as much "globalization" as the US but its middle class benefits from all of the protections that we lack. Rather than blame poor foreign workers we need to fight the Americans who stand in the way of us achieving "European" protections for ourselves. If Germany can export more than China (which has 15 times the population) so can we.

[girl gone mad]

15. German factory workers are the highest paid in the world.

I've bought 4 major German-manufactured appliances in the last few years because I want things that will last and I support fair wages for labor.

[Karmadillo]

16. In the US, the immense productivity gains of the past thirty years went to owners, not workers.

If they had gone to the workers, maybe we'd be more like Germany. As Wolff points out, at least the owners were willing to loan us some of that money to make up for the stagnant wages of the last 30 years. That sure worked out well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8ZH1ejtIFo&feature=player_embedded
Capitalism Hits the Fan: A Lecture on the Economic Meltdown - Preview by Richard Wolff

[JNelson6563]

13. Wow!

How long can the grand delusion go on?

Julie

[Hissyspit]

18. kick nt

[laughingliberal]

19. K & R nt