Well, this explains a whole lot: America's upper middle class is thriving.

[TalkingDog]

Grateful peonage makes for some good minions. Fuck the rest of you.

www.wlwt.com/money/americas-upper-middle-class-is-thriving/40151566

Still, the rich and upper middle class have gotten a disproportionate share of the income gains. While much of the growth comes from the increase in their ranks, proportionately that would only give them control over 57 percent of the nation's income in 2014. Instead, their share was 63 percent, up from 30 percent in 1979.

[leveymg]

1. Top 3 percent serving the top .01. Trickle-down.

Professionals, corporate managers, and apparatchiks being taken care of. The rest are fungible or human sacrifice.

[TalkingDog]

2. The wealthy don't wipe their own asses. So there's a naturally expanding job market right there.

A few years ago, Buckingham Palace was restructuring the budget. This was about the same time that Elizabeth wanted to raid the Heating Fund for the poor to pad the royal's budget out.

Charles did his part and let a few people off his staff. But he kept one butler who really only had one job, which was to put toothpaste on Charles' toothbrush. Charles said he couldn't let him go, because butler was the only one who could put the paste on the brush so that it formed that nice perfect bead. (True Story. Seriously)

All those lower middle class and poor folks need to start brushing up on their toilet paper folding skills.

[seabeckind]

3. So many little pieces of evidence saying something is wrong.

Looking thru the threads on this site there're situations which seem unrelated and are treated as if they are independent. Hel, there are probably 10 or 15 active right now, like the health insurance fiasco, the rental issue, etc.

And the source for all seem to have a starting point around the same time.

Labor laws, Voting rights, Oligopolies. M&A strategy, decline of innovations, stagnant wages, and the list goes on and on.

All starting around 1980.

It seems to me that the best possible course to start fixing all of these little things is to look at the changes that started then and if they are the first step in a downward direction,

change the direction. Work to reverse those bad moves. When you find yourself lost the first thing to do is review the turns you made and recognize which one is the culprit.

Quit the status quo. It is broken. What's that definition of insanity again?

[bvar22]

5. Step One:

Return to the pre-Reagan Tax Rates.
Before Reagan, the top rate was 70%.

When the USA had higher tax rates on the upper brackets, Corporate Owners preferred to pay themselves a smaller salary instead of give it to the government, and invest the money in the Company in the form of higher wages and benefits for the workers.

[Adrahil]

7. Absolutely. Step two: massive public works projects.

[Binkie The Clown]

4. There's one very obvious soultion to this problem...

Lie, cheat, and steal your way into the upper middle class. Problem solved.

[Adrahil]

6. Another symptom of....

the increasing decline of high-demand, high-wage working an middle class blue collar jobs. Those job will continue to leak out of our economy.

We are transitioning to a "knowledge economy." Make sure you know how to do something that, at least for time being, a computer or robot cannot do.

[Johnny2X2X]

8. different for us

My father was a union auto worker, he went to college for a year, but got married and had kids so he dropped out got his journeyman diemaker's card and went to work. He worked hard and long and eventually got to be a diemaker at GM, he never missed a day of work for 14 years until he hurt his eye at work. Worked all the overtime he could and had great benefits. He retired debt free about 10 years ago with a nice GM pension supplemented by he and my mom's SSI. He earned a comfortable retirement.

I feel I am pretty successful, I have a degree in Engineering from a Big Ten School, have my PMP, know some software,am working on my MBA, and manage major software projects for a Fortune 15 company. I have decent benefits, what I think is fair pay, and really generous time off. I feel pretty self satisfied and lucky. Until I think about this, I have a wall full of degrees and certifications, I manage $50 Million projects and am answerable to executives. But I'm still not doing as well as my dad was when he was my age working at the local GM plant. With OT he made 6 figures for most of the 80s and 90s, his pension pays him $3600 a month and my mother worked too so she has a small pension and they both get SSI. I might see 6 figures a year here pretty soon, but my 401K is nowhere near as safe of a bet as his pension was, and even at this huge company my benefits can't touch what my dad got for his family for decades from GM.

Even the highly skilled jobs aren't paying what they used to. And what's worse is that the ruling class has convinced a majority of workers and lower management that they don't deserve anymore than to be just getting by.

This is the richest country in the history of the world, it is a tragedy that the majority of people can work as hard as they want and still not earn a decent living. Those at the top have taken it all for themselves, they are living like Kings while the rest of us fight for the scraps.