The middle class’s missing $1.6 trillion

[Jesus Malverde]

The United States was the world’s first middle-class nation, which was a big factor in its rapid growth.  Mid-19th-century British travelers marveled at American workers’ “ductility of mind and the readiness…for a new thing” and admired how hard and willingly they labored. Abraham Lincoln attributed it the knowledge that “humblest man [had] an equal chance to get rich with everyone else.”

Most Americans still think of themselves as middle class.  But the marketing experts at the big consumer goods companies are giving their bosses the unsentimental advice that the middle class is an endangered species. Restaurants, appliance makers, grocery chains, hotels are learning that they either have to go completely up-scale, or focus on bargains for the struggling and budget-conscious.

Current income surveys, for statistical reasons, usually segment families by broad categories, which obscure the recent radical shift of income to a thin stratum of the super-rich. Well-to-do people may buy $100 coffee pots, but the lion’s share of the income growth has been going to folks with five houses and staff to make the coffee.

For the last 15 years, an international consortium of economists has been building data bases on the income shares of the richest people in the developed countries, based on pre-tax market income including capital gains and tax-exempt income, and excluding government transfers. The American data reveals the greatest inequality by far, followed by Great Britain.

Read More: http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2014/02/12/the-middle-classs-missing-1-6-trillion/

[defacto7]

1. K & R

[Jesus Malverde]

2. The numbers are stunning...nt

[BlueMTexpat]

3. The two I consider to be most responsible for this:

Ronnie Raygun and Milton Friedman.

But they had plenty of help from all sides, I'm afraid.

[Larry Ogg]

9. Before being elected Reagon was quick to point out the corporate CEO's in the Carter White House...

And sure enough.

http://www.newswithviews.com/Wood/patrick9.htm

In 1978, this writer's book Trilaterals Over Washington revealed the global strategy of the Trilateral Commission and it's co-founders David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Brzezinski, in particular, provided the intellectual reasoning and political strategy for the "New International Economic Order".

Brzezinski was also an astute political operator. He is credited as the first person to take interest in Jimmy Carter, to mentor him in globalism starting in 1973 when Carter was chosen to be part of the Trilateral Commission. Upon Carter's election victory in 1976, Brzezinski was appointed National Security Advisor. By the end of 1976, Carter had appointed no less than 19 members of the Trilateral Commission to high-ranking government positions. These 19 members represented just under 20% of the entire U.S. delegation of the Trilateral Commission.

The stage was now set for their power to become permanently embedded. Each successive Administration has been disproportionally dominated by members of the Trilateral Commission: George H.W. Bush, William Jefferson Clinton, Richard B. Cheney. Each administration filled top posts from the Trilateral Commission. Think-tanks connected to the Trilateral Commission cranked out volumes of studies that droned on and on about the New International Economic Order, interdependence and the need for political change.

Looking backward to Brzezinski, however, is necessary because he most clearly and lucidly embodied the heart and soul of the rush to globalism. He created the watershed that initiated the plundering of America and the buildup of the global corporate elite. This issue intends to quantify the extent of this plundering.

<snip> http://www.newswithviews.com/Wood/patrick9.htm

It's funny how Reagon, as a part of his campaign strategy, condemned Carter for using so many corporate CEO's in his administration, and once he (Reagon) got in the White House the place became a corporate CEO resort, and it has been that way ever since, and Clinton and Obama are no exceptions.

In fact if your not a pro Corporation political candidate, who has taken a party line oath to not rock the boat, the American voters will, as if there's a little voice in their head, magically begin to parrot how unelectable you are. And then they will turn around and elect or reelect the same criminal corporate sycophants that they love to complain about, saying, "We had no other choice but to vote for a lessor evil".

Wala, the best parts of our two party pretend democracy is that the cash flow coming from the rich fucks at the top of the pyramid, into the campaign coffers of both parties, buys the mental programming that the majority of voters will use, via the M$M, as the premises, aka the little voice in their head, for who is electable and who is not.

Unfortunately, far to many of the poor schmucks down hear at the bottom of the pyramid, i.e. the ones who labor more for less, as a means to make the wealth that makes the rich fucks even richer, absolutely refuse to see just how bad their minds are being manipulated over social issues, into voting against their own financial interest. Hence the saying, "If your looking for the guilty, you need only to look into the mirror".

[blkmusclmachine]

4. Shipped offshore, to further starve the economy and provide "justification" for austerity measures.

Pallets of $100 bills stacked 10 feet high, and disappeared overseas with nary a care in the world during the GWB years. And it happened more than one time, too, I remember. Stolen???

[another_liberal]

5. "War means more!"

Just call it, "Supporting our troops in the field," and any kind of graft or fraud you're able to imagine will be accepted by most Americans without question.

[fasttense]

6. Look how hard you and I have to work to get a dollar

and the bushes were giving away our money like it was candy.

I think workers need to remember the inequality of France in 1792 and rise up and revolt. I think we should use the Guillotine as a symbol of the new revolt. But this time the revolt should be nonviolent.

[another_liberal]

7. ". . . this time the revolt should be nonviolent."

Mahatma Gandhi was brilliant, no doubt; nevertheless, I would not trust too much that his tactics of nonviolence will work on the Koch brothers. America's wealthy and powerful will not be of a mind to change their greedy, thieving ways just because of petitions and sit-ins. They saw those methods succeed in the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, and that is why they have instituted our current militarized police departments and secret surveillance agencies.

It will most likely take at least a believable threat of personal violence or, at the very least, long term imprisonment to convince our self-satisfied one percent to give up some of their power, let alone some of their ill-gotten wealth.

[jtuck004]

16. Tactics of non-violence didn't free their colonies. That honor, ironically, belongs to the Germans

who blew the hell out of England, who then could not support all their far flung pursuits and had to leave. Else he would likely have been hung along with others of that time and before who tried to fight them. He did some good things, but people have assigned credit to him that has to be looked at in context.

In our case, however, violence of the sort that people seem to envision would do nothing except get a bunch of people killed. They want the bad guys to quit acting like bad guys and have a heart, and they are incapable of it. Even if they all went away tomorrow I'm not convinced that their replacements would do any better, and we would very likely be back where we started.

And, frankly, you won't have much of a revolution in this country as long as cable still works. Some revolutionaries we have here, eh?

Most likely the only way to fight them is to deprive them of assets, get our own, and work toward some kind of plan which eventually moves our lives away from them. How that might be accomplished I don't know. I do know that all they have they got from someone who actually worked for it, and if we take that away we take everything from them. Kind of like the people who started the Mondragon Cooperatives in Spain years ago, or perhaps what the Industrial Unionists were trying to accomplish before business, the government, and Business Unions destroyed them.

The alternative to either of those is to use the power of the government, but that's already been sold.

[pampango]

8. "All three are within a few decimal places of the previous highs — which occurred in 1928..."

1928's unmatched record of of income skewed to the top 10%, 1% and .1% came after 8 years of republican regressive taxes, deregulation, weak unions, high tariffs and limited immigration.

Now we have similarly skewed incomes with regressive taxes, deregulation, weak unions, low tariffs and higher immigration. I see which policies are common to both eras of income skewed towards the super-rich.

[TBF]

10. Check the Pentagon -

it's there or Cheney's basement. One or the other.

[Larry Ogg]

11. It's a good thing we elect corporately owned democrats to counter the corporately owned republicans.

It's a good thing because rich people might end up with more money than God, and We The Sheepeople might end up with no pot to piss in, and a morally and financially bankrupted joke of a government.

[Jesus Malverde]

12. bump for the numbers..nt

[MisterP]

13. "the middle class are commie!" soon we'll be seeing Latin American rhetoric slithering north

of the border--and, heck, by 1987 Heritage was calling *St Reagan* a useful idiot (hey, his best friend was the Sekretary General of the Kommunist Party of the Union of Soviet Sokialist Republiks)

[hfojvt]

14. nice article

too bad about the absurd insinuation that everybody who is NOT in the top 1% is part of the "middle" class.

Like the top 9% is part of the "middle"

The difference between their share of income in 1975 and 2010 is $426 billion.

So, really now that is $2 trillion EVERY year, taken from the bottom 90% and given to the top 10%.

Although I should not really say "given". After all they work very hard.

Stealing is not as easy as people think.

[WorseBeforeBetter]

15. A semi-retired friend has a PT job at Macy's.

She's seeing customers who don't bat an eye at plunking down a thousand-plus for vacation property linens, versus those counting change to buy a $3.98 onesie. There doesn't seem to be much in between. And the never-ending "arguments" over coupons are enough to wear anyone down.