Why is the US Middle Class Collapsing?

Poor Man Survival

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“A smaller government reflecting the needs of the middle class and poor is superior to a big government reflecting the needs of the privileged and powerful.”
― Robert Reich

 

Why is the Middle Class in the US Collapsing?

 

The U.S. dollar is progressively buying less and less. The middle class and savers are impoverished…

 

When I was growing up, my father was able to support his family of five on a single income. And when he was growing up, his father could do the same.

This sort of security simply doesn’t exist anymore.

These days, it typically takes two working parents just to be able to afford a comfortable standard of living. And even then, just barely.

Today people have to borrow on their credit cards just to get by. And young people are forced to indebt themselves decades into the future simply to pay for an increasingly worthless university degree.

 

A  typical family suffers from inflation—retail price inflation.

This is when the cost of goods and services outpaces their wages year after year.

People easily lose track of this. But enough time passes and they find that now two parents have to work just to afford a basic lifestyle, quality food, medical care, and education that one parent used to provide.
 

Just since 2005 we’ve lost 40% of our purchasing power because our monetary system has been put into overdrive printing more and more fiat currency [in reality, digits on a computer].  Since our own government has given up control over our currency, we’ve lost 95% of the value of our dollar since the Federal Reserve was created!

 

A new report just released by two academics at the London School of Economics and UC Berkeley shows just how rapidly the middle class is collapsing in the Land of the Free.

The top 0.1% (160,00 families with total net assets of more than $20 million in 2012) owned 7% of all wealth in late 1970s. That jumped to 22% in 2012.

The bottom 90%, on the other hand, went from a 36% share to a 23% share in the same period.

 

Thanks to the Federal Reserve, the middle class is slowly being suffocated by rising food prices.  Every single dollar in your wallet is constantly becoming less valuable because of the inflation the Fed systematically creates.  And if you try to build wealth by saving money and earning interest on it, you still lose because thanks to the Federal Reserve's near zero interest rate policies banks pay next to nothing on savings accounts.

 

  The Federal Reserve wants you to either spend your money or to put it in the giant casino that we call the stock market.  But when Americans spend their paychecks they are finding that they don't stretch as far as they once did.  The cost of living continues to rise at a much faster pace than wages are rising, and this is especially true when it comes to the price of food.

 

The Land of the Free used to be a place where you could work hard and build wealth for yourself, either by starting a business, taking some investment risk, or working your way up the chain.

Yet today, authorities chase away children who have the audacity to operate a lemonade stand without a permit.

The nanny state legally bars most grown adults from investing their own savings in lucrative private enterprises, forcing the masses into overheated, central bank- manipulated stocks and bonds.

And today you’re lucky to work for the same company for more than a few years. As a colleague told me a few months ago, few people have careers anymore.

Instead, human beings are ‘rented’ by companies to perform tasks. There’s no longer a career track, growth, or significant advancement.

 

This is dreadfully, terribly wrong.

The people in charge of this system have completely broken what capitalism is supposed to be. And they’ve replaced it with a new form of feudalism.

This is something that can’t possibly last.

All the technology and tools already exist for individuals to take the power back and divorce themselves from this reality.

You no longer have to live, work, and play in the same country where you were born.

You no longer have to hold the heavily manipulated, degraded currency that they destroy, or use the banking system that they control.

You no longer have to educate your children in the state-controlled school system, or feed your family the genetically-modified crap that the corn lobby bribes onto the store shelves.

You can break free. It’s a matter of choice.

 

Condensed from a post by Simon Black

SovereignMan.com

 

 

When the autopsy is written on the death of the middle class where will you be?

 

The Social Security Administration has just released wage statistics for 2013, and the numbers are startling.  Last year, 50 percent of all American workers made less than $28,031, and 39 percent of all American workers made less than $20,000.  If you worked a full-time job at $10 an hour all year long with two weeks off, you would make $20,000.  So the fact that 39 percent of all workers made less than that amount is rather telling.  This is more evidence of the declining quality of the jobs in this country.  In many homes in America today, both parents are working multiple jobs in a desperate attempt to make ends meet. Our paychecks are stagnant while the cost of living just continues to soar.  And the jobs that are being added to the economy pay a lot less than the jobs lost in the last recession.  In fact, it has been estimated that the jobs that have been created since the last recession pay an average of 23 percent less than the jobs that were lost.  We are witnessing the slow-motion destruction of the middle class, and very few of our leaders seem to care.

The "average" yearly wage in America last year was just $43,041.  But after accounting for inflation, that was actually worse than the year before...

American paychecks shrank last year, just-released data show, further eroding the public’s purchasing power, which is so vital to economic growth.

Average pay for 2013 was $43,041 — down $79 from the previous year when measured in 2013 dollars. Worse, average pay fell $508 below the 2007 level, my analysis of the new Social Security Administration data shows.

In recent years, the number of men that are struggling to find work has reached new heights.  In fact, the inactivity rate for men in their prime working years (25 to 54) is now at the highest level that has ever been recorded.

It has been estimated that it takes approximately $50,000 a year to support a middle class lifestyle for a family of four, and so the fact that 72 percent of all workers make less than that amount shows how difficult it is for families that try to get by with just a single breadwinner.

The way that our economy is structured now, both parents usually have to work as hard as they can just to pay the bills.

American people don’t believe that we can have economic collapse followed by economic and social chaos. They suffer from normalcy bias.

 

 

Yours in freedom,

Bruce ‘the Poor Man’

 

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