22 Statistics That Prove The Middle Class Is Being Systematically Wiped Out Of Existence In America

[Donnachaidh]

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.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/22-statistics-that-prove-the-middle-class-is-being-systematically-wiped-out-of-existence-in-america-2010-7##ixzz1Iwy86HZG

[villager]

1. which is why the only effective solution will be to withhold your labor

n/t

[jwirr]

2. For the first time my family is feeling the impact. Son in law was laid

off this week. They are the ones in the middle class in our family. If he cannot find another job their house (holding two families already) could face foreclosure. Here's hoping things work out before that happens.

[Pryderi]

3. "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half." - Jay Gould financier & railroad

[Jmaxfie1]

4. Great quote! n/t

[Pryderi]

7. Thanks! It's exactly what the Kochs and Dick Armey are doing with teabaggers.

[JDPriestly]

5. So true.

I was thinking today that Americans are systematically inculcated to believe that they are not as smart as people in other countries, not as hard working. Our products and industry, we are told, is not "competitive."

Our children don't learn as well as children in other countries, we are told.

And why don't our children learn as well as children in other countries? Well, we are told that it is because our teachers are no good.

But, never mind, we are the richest nation in the world. Much richer than we deserve, we are told.

[Hannah Bell]

6. +100.

[xchrom]

9. +200

[Nevernose]

10. It's the lies about the kids that eat at me

The lies about our schools. The American education system is one of the few things that we're still very, very good at. Besides the Talibaptists who try and infect our curriculum, despite the fact that teachers haven't seen their wages go up in 40 years, despite that even newer, better off districts have schools that are crowded and crumbling, despite the Michelle Rhees across the nation and the Bill Gates/Arne Duncan crowd spouting nonsense all the time -- despite all of this, the top 50% of our students lead the world in measures of reading, math, and science. Per capita, we produce twice as many scientists and engineers as China or India. Our schools' hallways have (or will have on Monday :) ) observers from all over Europe and Asia, educational experts who come here in order to improve their own educational systems.

[lonestarnot]

8. It will continue down the slide because Americans expect everyone else to act for them.

Very few willing to stand up to corporate theft.

[fascisthunter]

11. the sleeping giant is waking, and there is nothing they can do about it

those of us who follow politics have known for a long time what the right wing, conservative republicans were up to along with their wealthy constituency. We warned folks, but the media was to large.... well now, they are setting things into motion and I think they over-played their hand.

[JHB]

12. I have a name for this "Bait & Swich Economics"

Reagan pushed his tax cuts on the grounds that with more investment money available, manufacturing companies would modernize their outdated industrial plant so that we could compete better, and thus there'd be more and better jobs. (Conventiuonal wisdom of the time held that part of why Germany and Japan were doing well was because their industry had to be almost completely rebuilt after WW2, whereas many industries here were still using facilities designed for prewar technologies.)

But what did we get? Mergermania! Most of the money didn't go into new facilities, it went into Wall Street games. And why not? With the lower tax rates, you could get a better return on your money for buying and liquidating companies than for running them.

There was some building of new, more modern facilities, but more often than not they were in another country with cheap labor and little or no effective environmental or safety regulation.


Then there was the "New Economy", where apparently we were all going to be web designers and such. Higher education was the key, but surprise, surprise, the cost of higher education shot up far beyond the rate of inflation. And even if you get that, surprise again! those jobs start getting offshored.

Time and again, over the last 30 years all the "serious" prescriptions for "fixing the economy" by freeing the top to do as they please never produces the bounty at the level of mere mortals that was used to justify them in the first place.

[socialist_n_TN]

13. Which is why I call it class massacre...........

instead of class war. At least until we fight back.