Tag: Middle class

WHEN THE WALL STREET CABAL TOOK OVER AMERICA

The chart below reveals much about what has happened since Nixon closed the gold window in 1971, allowing politicians, controlled by the Wall Street banking cabal, to spend our country into $33 trillion of debt, while accumulating another $200 trillion of unfunded pension and welfare obligations. The age of the growing middle class ended in the early 1970’s after a couple decades of progress. Eisenhower and Kennedy were moderates, while the Fed was run by William McChesney Martin, who wasn’t afraid to pull away the punch bowl before the party got out of hand.

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What does it take to be middle class in America?

https://www.oftwominds.com/blogoct18/middle-class10-18.html

What does it take to be middle class nowadays? Defining the middle class is a parlor game, with most of the punditry referring to income brackets as the defining factor.

People tend to self-report that they belong to the middle class based on income, but income is not the key metric: 12 other factors are more telling measures of middle class membership than income.

In Why the Middle Class Is Doomed (April 17, 2012) I listed five minimum threshold characteristics of membership in the middle class:

1. Meaningful healthcare insurance (i.e. not phantom insurance with $5,000 deductibles, etc.) and life insurance.

2. Significant equity (25%-50%) in a home or equivalent real estate

3. Income/expenses that enable the household to save at least 6% of its income

4. Significant retirement funds: 401Ks, IRAs, etc.

5. The ability to service all debt and expenses over the medium-term if one of the primary household wage-earners lose their job

I then added a taken-for-granted sixth:

6. Reliable vehicles for each wage-earner

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Neoliberal Economics Destroyed the Economy and the Middle Class

Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts

According to official US government economic data, the US economy has been growing for 10.5 years since June of 2009. The reason that the US government can produce this false conclusion is that costs that are subtrahends from GDP are not included in the measure. Instead, many costs are counted not as subtractions from growth but as additions to growth. For example, the penalty interest on a person’s credit card balance that results when a person falls behind his payments is counted as an increase in “financial services” and as an increase in Gross Domestic Product. The economic world is stood on its head.

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How Middle America Is to Be Dispossessed

Guest Post by Pat Buchanan

How Middle America Is to Be Dispossessed

The Democratic Party does not want to close the door to voting on migrants who broke our laws to get here and do not belong here, as these illegals would likely vote for pro-amnesty Democrats.

In all but one of the last seven presidential elections, Republicans lost the popular vote. George W. Bush and Donald Trump won only by capturing narrow majorities in the Electoral College.

Hence the grand strategy of the left: to enlarge and alter the U.S. electorate so as to put victory as far out of reach for national Republicans as it is today for California Republicans, and to convert the GOP into America’s permanent minority party.

In the Golden State, Democrats control the governors’ chair, every elective state office, both U.S. Senate seats, 46 of 53 U.S. House seats and three-fourths of each house of the state legislature in Sacramento.

How does the left expect to permanently dispossess Middle America?

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Nearly 70 percent of Americans consider themselves middle class: Here’s how many actually are

Via MSN

The definition of “middle class” can vary wildly depending on who you ask. For some, it’s defined by certain attributes: If you’re hardworking, thrifty and humble, for example, you’re middle-class.For others, it means earning a substantial salary but not so much that you’d be considered rich.

That’s according to new data from Northwestern Mutual’s 2018 Planning & Progress Study, which found that 68 percent of Americans consider themselves middle-class, down 2 percent from last year. However, because of the fuzziness of the definition, far more Americans consider themselves middle-class than technically qualify based on income.

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America’s Long-term Challenge #4: Erosion of the Middle class

Guest Post by Simon Black

We’ve all seen the headlines: the Middle Class in the United States (and much of Europe for that matter) has been in decline for years.

CNN May 18, 2018: “Almost half of US families can’t afford basics like rent and food”
Marketwatch June 2, 2018: “50 million American households can’t even afford basic living expenses”
Wall Street Journal February 13, 2018 : “US households shoulder record $13.15 trillion debt”

This is the opposite of what we’ve witnessed here in Asia– an astonishing, almost unprecedented rise in the Middle Class.

In China, just 4% of the population was middle class in 2000 according to consulting firm McKinsey. By 2012, China’s middle class had exploded to 68% of the population.

Vietnam’s middle class has nearly doubled just since 2013. And there are similar trends across the region.

This is a pretty big deal, signaling not only a game-changing shift in global wealth and power, but also trouble ahead for millions of households on the edge.

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How the Deep State Robbed the Working Stiff

Guest Post by Bill Bonner

Nothing much to report from Wall Street, Washington, or the ranch…

So we continue our look back at what we have learned so far…

Most of what we know, of course, is what everyone else knows, too:

Stocks are near record highs… with the Dow still trading above 24,000… and the so-called FAANG stocks – Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google – still at levels not seen since the Nasdaq crash in 2000.

Include Microsoft and Nvidia, and you get a combined market cap of $3.8 trillion… up 7% this year and 37% over the last 12 months…

…debt is at a record high, too (and scheduled to go much higher). Not only are the feds borrowing at an unprecedented rate, The Wall Street Journal tells us that consumers are, too:

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How The Deep State Squeezed America’s Wealth

Authored by Bill Bonner via InternationalMan.com,

Salvator Mundi, said to be by Leonardo da Vinci, is the world’s most expensive painting.

Last Wednesday, at auction, each square inch was valued at nearly $1 million – including the bummed-up, restored, and damaged parts.

The painting may not be da Vinci’s work. Or perhaps, since it has been so heavily doctored up, little remains of his work. And whoever’s work it was must have been having a bad day.

And yet, it sold for over $450 million (including auction-house charges) – a lot of money for such a depressing work of art.


Donald Trump as da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi

The question on the table: Why?

But since we don’t know the answer to that question, we’ll answer another one: How come so many people have so much money?

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The Average American Had A Bigger Savings Account… In 1997

Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

Quite literally as a I write these words to you, the heads of the world’s largest central banks are packing their bags and heading home after a three-day symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

Central bankers aren’t exactly mega-celebrities, so their conferences don’t make international news outside of financial circles.

But if people understood what was at stake, they’d probably pay more attention.

Central bankers wield totalitarian authority over their nations’ interest rates.

America’s once-thriving middle class is slowly fading away

Guest Post by Quetin Fottrell


The U.S. is the only country in which fewer than 60% of adults were in the middle class. The U.S. has the largest percentage of those who were lower income (26%) compared to 11 European countries.

What’s going on with America’s middle class?

Some members of America’s middle class are getting richer and moving up in the world. But millions of lower income people are also getting left behind. The share of people in the middle class in the U.S. is less than in any of 11 countries from Western Europe, according to a new report by the Pew Research Center, a nonprofit think tank in Washington, D.C., and has fallen to 59% in 2010 from 62% in 1991. “The American experience reflects a marked difference in how income is distributed in the U.S. compared with many countries in Western Europe,” the report said. “The U.S. has a relatively large upper income tier.”

‘Income inequality, or the hallowing out of the middle class, has been seen in both the short-term and in the years going back before the financial crisis and the Great Recession.’

Mark Hamrick, Washington, D.C. bureau chief for Bankrate.com

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The Collapse of the Middle Class in 20 Major U.S. Cities

Via Visual Capitalist

When future historians look back at the beginning of the 21st century, they’ll note that we grappled with many big issues.

They’ll write about the battle between nationalism and globalism, soaring global debt, a dysfunctional healthcare system, societal concerns around automation and AI, and pushback on immigration. They will also note the growing number of populist leaders in Western democracies, ranging from Marine Le Pen to Donald Trump.

However, these historians will not view these ideas and events in isolation. Instead, they will link them all, at least partially, to an overarching trend that is intimately connected to today’s biggest problems: the “hollowing out” of the middle class.

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Why the white middle class is dying faster, explained in 6 charts

Via Vox
The mortality rate has been rising for middle-age white Americans.
Felicity McCabe/Getty

 

In 2015, a blockbuster study came to a surprising conclusion: Middle-aged white Americans are dying younger for the first time in decades, despite positive life expectancy trends in other wealthy countries and other segments of the US population.

The research, by Princeton University’s Anne Case and Angus Deaton, highlighted the links between economic struggles, suicides, and alcohol and drug overdoses.

Since then, Case and Deaton have been working to more fully explain their findings.

They’ve now come to a compelling conclusion: It’s complicated. There’s no single reason for this disturbing increase in the mortality rate, but a toxic cocktail of factors.

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Is Retirement for the Middle Class about to Go Up in Smoke?

From Birch Gold Group

The retirement landscape is changing, and fast. Just a few decades ago, Americans took the idea of an easy retirement as a sure thing. But with pensions crumbling, markets swooning, and increasing political uncertainty, it’s becoming harder and harder to find a retirement strategy you can really count on.

Unfortunately, it’s not just union workers and pension holders who have great reason to worry… it’s anybody who is relying on a 401(k) or traditional IRA to retire. Here’s why…

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A Very Concise Explanation of Why The Democrats Lost, And Will Keep Losing

Guest Post by Jesse

“This whole ‘red scare’ thing has become so thoroughly ridiculous, so blatantly propagandist and overblown, so pervasively passed around by mainstream media outlets without serious investigation, so obviously picked up off a shelf in ad hoc convenience, and so completely hypocritical by the professional elite, that I am tempted to write it off and forget about it. But I should probably be deeply troubled for other reasons.

It is a sign of the establishment going further off the deep end, and further dropping its pretenses. It is a sign of a desperate elite that will say anything, do anything, and risk everything to control the narrative and protect itself.

We are descending into farce. Deeply dangerous farce.”

Reader M. M.

This is a short video from Thomas Frank below.  I have included two more short videos that are optional.

Every pundit who is grinding their axes about the various forces that unjustly took the election from Hillary needs to listen to this.

Thomas Frank is absolutely right. Everyone who had their eyes open could see this loss by the Democrats coming, or at the least a much closer race than expected.   Donald Trump certainly saw it, and used it for his advantage.

And even now, the core political and entertainment establishment clearly is not accepting this, does not care in their cozy complacency.

A good part of this is because of the credibility trap, and their sense of entitled superiority.

If you don’t believe this, watch the Democratic establishment mouthpiece channels like MSNBC almost any evening.

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CIVIL WAR II – FOURTH TURNING INTENSIFYING (PART 2)

In Part One of this article I laid out the case against the criminal establishment and how the regeneracy is being driven by the anti-establishment sentiment sweeping across the land. This atonement Fourth Turning will de-establish decade’s worth of delusional decisions. This election has destroyed the last vestiges of trust in this fraudulent system.

This dysfunctional rigged presidential election reflects the tearing of the civic fabric at points of maximum susceptibility. As a country we have neglected, denied, or delayed necessary action on a plethora of vital issues threatening our long term viability as a nation. The deferral of difficult painful decisions has been a ploy of the ruling class, allowing them to further siphon the wealth of a dying empire, while maintaining control over the masses through laws, regulations, taxes, surveillance, intimidation, technology bread and circuses, and mainstream media propaganda.

This is a country truly divided, much along the lines of the first Civil War. The divisions aren’t just along political party lines, but race, education, geography, gender, age, class, religion and ability to think critically. The presidential polls (IBD) reveal many of these divisions clearly:

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