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On The Progressing Extinction Of The US Middle Class
Beneath the positive headlines Bloomberg's Joe Brusuelas notes that there is evidence that a good portion of consumers continue to face a difficult adjustment to the $125 billion tax hike in January and the 15 percent increase in gasoline prices during the past four months. Spending among the upper quintile of income earners is masking weakness elsewhere but it is jobs headlines that are really hiding the dismal reality in America. As the following chart shows, confirming our earlier discussion, the middle-class income-earner is becoming an endangered species (with no 'conservation group' willing to stand up for them) as the government holds the lowest income earners' hand and Bernanke the highest.
Charts: Bloomberg
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FUCK Y.....oh hehe.
Banana republics have got nothing on Obozo's corrupt regime.
Expand that graph, say 40yrs? Could this be a long term trend??
They really need to be called the Productive Class, as opposed to the Skimming and Leaching Classes.
I love how every comments section starts here:
Comment 1: I have read the title and have a short response! First!
Comment 2: In response to Comment 1, I would like to talk about something unrelated!
Comment 3: In response to your two comments, I would like to veer slightly toward the topic at hand. I am more knowledgable because I have read the title and half of the article, and need to demonstrate that quickly to be near the top!
and so on...
There are ground rules for this kind of thing, after all.
hack is public, so why avoid its usage?
Wow! CNBC does a segment today regarding the GIGANTIC shadow inventory of foreclosed homes the banks are currently sitting on, and about to release. But, but, but....I thought we just experienced the bottom? "Not exactly" says some dickwad from Realtytrac. He continues: "Actually, this new release of homes should raise inventory levels up TWO YEARS!!!!"
WHAT?? Two years of housing inventory?? "That might actually affect the value of homes, builders are developing today....(SILENCE)..."Uh, yeah it probably will" says the Realtytrac exec. Fawkin Hilarious!!!!
Fraud Street is sitting on many. Throttling them to the sheeple at the right price and hedgies for a cheap price.
I know a lady who hasn't made a mortgage payment since 2009
4 FUCKING YEARS
Still living in the house, the "pass-through certificates" plaintiff that started (but never progressed) the foreclosure lawsuit has been making all the property tax payments since then and she is prepared to move IF/WHEN the house ever actually goes up for sale.
And this is in the 'burbs, not some redlined ghetto shit. When these properties hit the market, forgetaboutit.
About 14 months ago the NYT (or maybe the WSJ) reports there were over 109 months supply of houses. That sounds right from what I see "on the ground" and esp considering builders are still going crazy depsite the massive oversupply.
....but DingleBarry says he is fighting for the middleclass...
If we could just manage to somehow elect a republican president then everything will be all better! /sarcasm off.
Get rich. You'll be poor if you don't. There will be no in-between.
Just like Sweden, Mexico, Russia etc. 99% poor, 1% ultra wealthy with nothing in the middle.
Pawnman,
Why group in Sweden with Mexico and Russia? Sure, you can hate Sweden's policies (anti liberty and all that) but income distribution has been much less unequal than the USA for a long, long time.
"Why group in Sweden with Mexico and Russia?"
Would have a tough time finding 3 more disparate countries.
Just pick a bunch of countries which have had 'democracy' brought to them c/o the USA and you'll see this inequality best illustrated.
Sweden is an example of Sweden. It's like a sect. Self referent. Hermetic. Wrapped up in the faith. And above all life sucking. I'm referring of course to non Muslim parts of demographic deathbed Sweden.
What is Sweden doing in your list? There are so much better examples, Russia is good one.
But then again, there will be war, so list of poor countries will change after looting of neighbours.
The countries I mentioned all have the same problem of a prominent, entrenched upper class and a long drop off from there. Albeit they took different routes to get to the same destination. Sweden has a very low key, but powerful ruling class. They don't show up on TV like Warren Buffet does here. I purposely picked such diverse examples to prove the point that it's happening worldwide.
socialism is the best remedy against rising new money class.
take away the incentive.
why sweden?
how do i do that if I'm not Jewish?
The Yids can always use an ignorant Mick front man, like Joe Biden, or you could become a traitor like John Roberts.
Have you heard of shicksas?
I had a longer list, but I would need a barf bag.
kind of like the real mob in america has always been Jewish but the Jews really promoted the fact that the dagoes were the ones to go after
another holocaust film about how jews are the only victims in the history of human kind and masses won't think about them.
This is the REAL "Great Rotation" going on right now. Back to the way things have been in most societies for most of history: Small number of rich, large number of poor and just enough middle class to service the rich.
Yes, this is actually happening. You are not having a nightmare or drug-induced hallucination (well, maybe you are but it's still really happening).
Questions?
Yes I have a question: When is Honey Boo Boo coming back on TV?
Well we are a little warped here in the USA by the post wwII experience and the whole westering thing followed by a series of technological transformations. To paraphrase a starship captain from Iowa, we don't believe in the zero sum game. Republican voters don't in any case. The 47% situation going forward hands the big chair on the bridge over to the zero sum crowd.
I believe he actually said that he didn't believe in a no-win situation. Obviously, he was not alive in 2013, having not been born yet, or he'd believe in it.
Most of recorded history, yes. Most of human history, no, no, no.
Not that I disagree, but how would you know what it was like before recorded history? Just curious.
in prehistoric times there were two main classes: dumb and dumber
jobs headlines that are really hiding the dismal reality in America.
This is standard policy with fascist governments. You are surprised?
Being middle class is so overrated.
/sarc
I thought for a second that I was middle class, but then I learned that a single mom on welfare with a minimum wage job and 2 kids makes as much as I do. In other words, I'm as poor as a welfare mom. #Losing
Between the refundable child tax credits and the refundable earned income tax credit that single mom with a minimum wage job and 2 kids can not only pay no taxes, but reap a tax "refund" over well over $8,000 if she hits the 'sweet' spot and easily $5,000 if she doesn't.
Almost half of her total "earned" income for the year can come from her tax "refund".
Preferably a "flexible" reporting job, like waitress, barmaid, or maybe she could service the crack-head/bath salts American community. That has some actual growth.
Being middle class is so over-rated especially when the middle class are just wage/tax/debt slaves.
even millionare CEOs are just wage slaves who wasted majority of their waking lives to climbing the corporate ladder.
the real ruling class are born capitalists.
middle class = working class
low class = can't even get a job to work class
Jeremiah wright preached the evils of middleclassness to the Obamas for twenty years of Sundays, then the democrats hearded theses affirmative action anti American fucks onstage and Into to the white house. Because they sound so reasonable when explaining the dismantlement of the Republic and rule of law.
"Jeremiah wright preached the evils of middleclassness to the Obamas for twenty years of Sundays"
So that works out to about 5 times, for the Obamas.
Interesting chart. The other interesting thing is wage suppression of menial jobs. Plumbing is one notable exception, but most trades have been decimated by the pincer forces of helicopter parents who buy into the every-child-a-college-diploma bullshit and unrestrained immigration.
Don't forget to jump on the Gerber Life College Plan bandwagon.
Don't wait until your brat is 20 years old to save for college.
plumbers are holding up well also eclectricans mechanics etc. but mostly because for every 3 retiring, only one new guy is showing up. gas is killing our bottom line
The poor don't have shit. The rich run the show. Compression in the middle is all that remains as the system cannabalizes itself.
The Great Depression was the greatest transfer of wealth from the middle class to the financial elite.
What's going on today (The Greatest Depression) makes what went on then look like child's play.
+1
The Wall St Banksters are the biggest crooks to ever walk the Earth.
To be fair the swelling of the US middle class after WW2 was the wonder of the world - never have so many become so rich, and so fast
And they're wealthier now than then by a long shot. Better stuff, more stuff, and experiences unknown to e kings of old, but also to the wealthy of a mere 100 years ago. Our poor are rich.
HISTORY...
UK was top military power with her dominant royal navy taxing global trade between her colonies
1870 US surpasses GDP of UK
WWI ...US sat out of war
1917 US surpasses as world's largest economy over UK
WWII ....US sat out of war until the last minute
1945 US becomes top creditor nation, while UK in debt from wars...USD = reserve currency
1970 USD becomes fiat (aka. we rule so you take this paper and give us real goods system)
NOW
US was top military power with her dominant airforce taxing global trade between her colonies in the dollar-zone
China sat out of wars in middle east
2012 China surpasses as world's largest economy over USA
2020 China surpasses GDP of USA
China to become top creditor nation
Chinese Yuan becomes reserve currency
Time for Americans to get off of their high horse and learn to worship Chinese owners.
Not going to happen - you're more likely to see more "Vincent Chin" incidents.
detailed in 6 minutes
Wealth Inequality in Americahttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM
They used to be able to save to get out of the middle class...now they can´t....all their excess if any now...gets paid into new fees, taxes, regulations...and even if they did save..they lose money on their savings...lack of interest...and inflation eats up the rest..
Hmm...that chart looks similar to the results of Karl Marx' economic theories.... two types of groups and no in-between
marx seemed to direct alot of his vitrol at the middle class-never mentioning the small upper class but fixating instead on a poor/middle class confrontation
Never mentioning the upper class? Who do you think he meant by "capitalists"?
"poor/middle class confrontation"
The class-war. And the poor are not synonymous with the working classes. Marx did not include peasants in the working class, the working class was strictly urban, cf. the Russian revolution and Maoism, with their focus on rural peasantry (whom Marx had referred to as, more or less, irrelevant and useless to the socialist cause), which simply reflected the reality of the place and time in Russia and Asia. Class war is believed by Marxist-Leninists to be the key to socialist revolution. Marx understood very well that the middle class was really the "lackeys of the rich" class and knew the vast majority of the middle classes were reactionary and would never support a revolution in which they stood to lose a great deal (until true communism was realized, at least). Marx believed, rightly in my opinion, that the middle class was what stood between the working classes and socialism. They had too much invested in the status quo of the capitalists to support a socialist revolution, in other words, and aspired to become capitalists ("the rich") themselves, rather than attempt to build solidarity with the working classes. They had to be destroyed. Look what happened to the Kulaks. The rich could be swept away with ease once the revolution was underway. Again, look what happened to the gentry and nobility in the Russian Revolution.
The middle class is the substance of the status quo, keeping the capitalists and their system in place in exchange for their position above the workers and peasants. That is why Marxists believe it must be destroyed.
LOL, Marx had a theory of exploitation, not an economic theory. Every time he tried he had to quit as he couldn't even manage to maintain coherent definitions, instead promising to do it later. Luckily for him, he died first.
Unluckily for the rest of us, students of Hegel twisted it all into the social disease known as Progressivism, where they set up the machinery of exploitation in order to combat it, all while letting it win.
Which was ALL made possible by the creation of the not-Federal, not-Reserve system which gave the global evildoers nearly unlimited purchasing power.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugen_B%C3%B6hm_von_Bawerk#Published_work
Unbelievable! Only Wall Street Wins in Detroit Crisis Reaping $474 Million Fee
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-14/only-wall-street-wins-in-detroi...
I never imagined the downward spiral to serfdom would be this boring.
Don't worry, the war and death camp excitement means the show always goes out with a bang!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7N70rDR9K1A
Fast forward 2 minutes to get to the jest of the video which has an important message lost in the introduction and name of the video. This will give you something to look forward to.
Serfdom would be better than peasantry. At least in true serfdom, the lord is local, acknowledges and fulfills obligations to the serfs, and lacks the power to become a true tyrant in the style of, say the French monarchs.
If you're a fascist, and you believe the society is on the down side of an economic cycle, then that is an instruction to loot loot loot. LOOK at all the money middle class clowns have stashed away in their housing, their 401Ks etc.
Is there any doubt that we are now living in a vultureculture? You go where you can steal the money. That's American homeowners. So it shouldn't be any surprise that we're stuffing the underclass with cheap food to shut them up, and salaaming to the oligarchs, while slowly boiling the middle class frog.
The corporatist/fascist playbook. Any surprises here?
post of the day
Is there any doubt that we are now living in a vultureculture? You go where you can steal the money. That's American homeowners. So it shouldn't be any surprise that we're stuffing the underclass with cheap food to shut them up, and salaaming to the oligarchs, while slowly boiling the middle class frog.
Definitely right on, the only thing I'd add is that the SNAP program is also conveniently a giant indirect stimulus to corporate interests.
Translation: Low paying jobs up sharply. High paying jobs up slightly. Mid level jobs took a big nosedive starting on '08 and are nowhere near back to baseline.
actually the mid class dive started in the 80s-only consecutive bubbles have kept people in the middle class
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/03/14/senate-committee-ready-to-ok-assault-weapons-ban/
OT but here we go with the attack on our Second Amendment rights...
That passes and the Repugs will own both houses come 2014.
Maybe you were not paying attention but Obama, ACORN/unions/Soros stole and rigged the 2012 elections in all the swing states and blue states. They can rig the elections and will and the GOP was totally silent.
But Sen. Cruz did make Feinswine look to be the mental midget she truly is: http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/explosive-exchange-gun-hearing-between-ted-cruz-and-dianne-feinstein_707602.html
(with no 'conservation group' willing to stand up for them)
Wait a minute! Aren't these college-educated clowns supposed to be able to stand up for THEMSELVES? That's always the surprise about middle class people: they are politically ignorant. They don't know HOW to stand up for themselves. They don't know the difference between theft and income. They don't know right from wrong. Surprise!! They're zombies, cogs in a machine. They don't have any better idea of how to combat their slow decline, than the sophomoric commentators who get their articles posted on ZH.
That's why you can always boil middle class people slowly and they'll go willingly into poverty and starvation. Watch. It will happen with what was once called the American booboisie. And that's exactly what they are.
passive resistance is the key for the MClass
Just keep accumulating the standard ZH list of portable non perishable tangible items.
Yes I know some things are selling out regularly but just keep an order in the system anyhow...
Nuk nuk
A middle class is a temporary phenomenon that happens for a brief period of time to relatively new countries like ours. There is no middle class in nature or developed countries, just predator and prey.
I'd love to see a graph of this chart correlated with household, corporate, and goverment debt levels.
don't worry, debt is not 100% of gdp, it is only 77.2%...the republicans said so and that is the starting point for their negotaitions about saving 4 trillion dollars from the current budget of 36 trillion dollars over the next ten years.
under the republicans plan, the deficit comes down to just a few tens of billions in a few short years....easy peasy lemon squeezy!
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/12/us-usa-fiscal-ryan-idUSBRE92B0...
Anybody want a house? I can't sell the fucking thing so I figure I may as well give the fucker away.....3 bedroom 2 bath, priced under purchase four years ago. FUCK YEAH.
If you can find the book - The Future of Capitalism" by Lester Thurow - he clearly states in 1996 that the end game for capitalism is that it eats itself until fascism appears....are we on the path???
yes, we are. it's always the kings and the dictators that have the last say, not the usurers.
By "Capitalism" do you mean a system that includes free enterprise and free markets? Have not seen those for awhile.
We are clearly on the path to something very unsavory.
Crony-Socio-Facist-Capitalism is one possible description of the system at this point.
It will become whatever the Central Planners want.
Well the good news is fewer American (slaves) will be able to afford the shitty Carnival torture cruise vacations. Waterboarding in their backyard of their foreclosed home would be more pleasurable. At least they do not have to shit in plastic bags like a Carnival cruise.
So the parasite is killing the dog..,,makes you wonder what sort of clueless idiots the parasites must be to think this will end well for them.
Extinction of Dinosaur class progressing on schedule. Transfer of wealth to one percent is also progressing nicely and quietly. Sheep for most part, still asleep. There are a few concientious objectors, but they will be dealt with by drones and/or FEMA camps. Now, if we just can resolve this pesky issue of disarming the dinosaurs....
The extinction of the population through the damaging effects of radioactive DNA mutations has already begun.
There will be no great-great-grandchildren in the US capable of reproducing.
Thank you GE and Japan.
The Supreme Court is now chiming in on The Sequester. We have gone full-retard.
More eating of crow for the muppets.
It worse, from their website
"Specifically, we examine employment trends in 366 detailed occupations. We formed three equal groups, each representing a third of U.S. employment in 2008: lower-wage occupations with median hourly wages from $7.69 to $13.83; mid-wage occupations with median hourly wages from $13.84 to $21.13; and higher-wage occupations with median hourly wages from $21.14 to $54.55 (all in 2012 dollars)"
So now middle class is topping out at $21.13 an hour...that really isn't all that much if there is more than a single person involved, hell it's below the per cap income of the US.
They have convinced the lower/welfare class that making 200K a year is "rich". That way, it's a target rich environment.
Easier to hide when the perception of rich is actually middle/upper middle class.
Yeah! Who wants to be a temporary millionaire, ....again?
Booming Market Adds 300,000 New US Millionaires
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/booming-market-adds-300-000-150608288.html
headline should read the PROGRESSIVE exctinction of the middle class.
"The dismal reality in America" appears to be even more paradoxically dismal in Canada. The Canadian middle class are behind the those in the USA. The Canadian middle class are still in their bubble.
Almost the entire North American civilization is a sophisticated slave society. Slaves are gradually forced to accept the frauds that dominate their lives, because those frauds were backed up with force, generation after generation, until that was long enough to result in the North American middle class manifesting all the typical attributes of slaves, such as taking pride in the stupid things that they were forced to do, in order to survive, and become "successful" as slaves.
Talking with most people in the middle class in North America is like talking to Uncle Toms, who identify with their masters, as their psychological defence mechanisms. Attempting to tell those people anything tends to become a frustrating waste of time, since their insanity is what they believe is sanity, and vice versa.
We can expect more and more bogus psychiatry to come around in the foreseeable future, which will assert that slaves who wake up to their slavery are insane. After all, a slave that resists their slavery is then called a criminal, and there are plenty of historical examples of the ways that dissent is described as demented, as well as criminalized, after a civilization becomes sufficiently corrupted and crazy that it is almost totally dominated by huge lies. All of the Orwellian tricks are now found deeply embedded in the minds of the North American middle class. Therefore, I expect to see modernized articles being published in the mass media that basically assert what was once called "draptomania."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drapetomania
Unfortunately, since the banksters triumphant frauds have been globalized, there is almost nowhere left to run away to ...
Extend your diagnosis back 5,000 years and include all state societies. It is what they are, what they do, how they work, how they are. All of them, all the time, everywhere. Normative psychology largely serves to legitimate and apologize for happens to be the environment the psychologists and their theories grow up in.
See Fromm's "The Sane Society" and his concept of humanist psychology. He understood that normative psychology is bullshit, mere apologia for the status quo (unfortunately, his solution involves universal communitarian socialism), which really only serves to keep people in a state of compatibility with their environment, and never judges that environment itself, in the same way that animal breeders seek to enhance certain traits and eliminate others, based on some arbitrary ideal.
You have to attack their premises. If you try to play their game you will lose.
1. What people in post-WWII America keep calling "middle class" was actually never anything more than a working class enjoying a period of unusually high wages. During those nice years, working class people in America could kid themselves that they were "middle class," merely because they were consuming some of the things that were traditionally consumed by a middle class, e.g. home ownership, college education, foreign travel for pleasure etc.
But those high-earning American proletarians were not really middle class. Few of them had any control over their own means of production. They were just wage and salary earning workers enjoying a period of high wages. They were only middle class in terms of their personal consumption--they were never middle class in terms of their social function. Now that the secular trend has reverted to the capitalist norm, American workers are being taught they are, indeed, mere proletarians who must always sell their labour to live.
The blue collars were the first to get schooled, starting back in the 1980's. At that time, the white collar proles laughed at the suffering blue collars. But in the 2000's, the white collars got it in the neck.
Now they're all just proles, although until the generation that remembers the happier times has died off, they will not have absorbed the cultural lesson. It will therefore take at least another 30-40 years to develop an American working class that is politically self-aware.
2. Over the long run the big capitalists eat up the substance of most of the little capitalists. In each period of volatilty, the big capitalists gain some more advantage, while more and more of the little capitalists get their faces pushed down into the proletariat. A few of the little capitalists do manage to join the bigs, but on the whole, over the course of many capitalist cycles, the petty bourgeois get progressively liquidated as a class. In a theory, a fully mature liberal capitalist society would only have two significant classes: a bourgeosie, and a proletariat.
3. Marx did not hate the petty bourgeois--he just thought that they're doomed as a class (not necessarily as individuals, because some individuals do beat the odds), so he had little patience with their class mobility pretensions. BTW there are leftists whose theories extolled the virtues of the petty bourgeoisie, e.g. Proudhon.
4. Global capitalism as a whole is still quite immature. Think of all the political barriers which still constrain the full and glorious expression of global capital! Think of all the things which cannot yet treated as alienable and divisible property! Think of all the natural commons not yet fully exploited! Therefore, even if it takes the American proletariat 30-40 years to acquire political self-awareness as a class, it will nevertheless take much longer for such articulated class consciousness to develop in much of the world, which has not even become properly integrated into a global capitalist system.
5. One more thing: the petty bourgeois elements who are getting pushed down into the proletariat seldom turn to the political left. Instead, the disclassed petty bourgeois tend to become reactionary, wanting to "set things back the way they should be." Besides, one gambit for the ruling class is to externalize the costs of class strife is to promise an empire for the masses: "Yes, here you're just proles, but since our nation is so mighty and glorious, we are the elite of the world!"
So don't worry about America going Communist. You guys will go F ascist first.