Full article at HuffPost:
New Figures Detail Depth of Unemployment Misery. Lower Earnings for All But Super Wealthy:
One out of every 34 Americans who earned wages in 2008 earned absolutely nothing -- not one cent -- in 2009.
The stunning figure was released earlier this month by the Social Security Administration, but apparently went unreported until it appeared today on Tax.com in a column by Pulitzer Prize-winning tax reporter David Cay Johnston.
It's not just every 34th earner whose financial situation has been upended by the financial crisis. Average wages, median wages, and total wages have all declined -- except at the very top, where they leaped dramatically, increasing five-fold.
Johnston writes that while the number of Americans earning more than $50 million fell from 131 in 2008 to 74 in 2009, those that remained at the top increased their income from an average of $91.2 million in 2008 to almost $519 million.
Read that last paragraph again; it supports the premise that we're living in a
plutonomy, with a shrinking middle and more and more income going to the upper .1%, especially the upper .01%.
The HuffPost article disputes
the official 9.6% unemployment figure with a link to a New York Post article from earlier in the year which estimates
the true jobless rate at closer to 22%. The author, John Crudele, lists the various 'adjustment factors', used to arrive at the official U3 figure: the 'Birth/Death Model,' a 'benchmark revision' that subtracts jobs that really didn't exist. Add in the U6 figure - people working part-time who would like to work full time - and the 'discouraged workers' - those who've stopped looking - and the 22% figure looks more credible.
The HuffPost piece also includes a CBS News video with interviews with some Americans impacted by unemployment and under-employment.
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