Shrinking Middle Class?

[Magnulus]

Originally Posted by evilnewbie

Your bolded statement is false. Environmentalist have long been proposing ethanol based fuels for a LONG LONG time. To say that none of them supported it is completely erroneous and many still do support it.

I'll revise my statement... environmentalists with scientific backgrounds have long warned about biofuels, particularly corn ethanol. Almost all environmentalists favor conservation, which means using less resources. Ethanol doesn't necessarily involve using less resources and in the most extreme case is nothing but a shell game where you swap joules of petroleum and coal for equal joules of ethanol- there is not much, if any, net gain in energy. On the contrary, many environmentalsts, if they favored ethanol production, favored using sugar cane and sugar beets as a feedstock, since the efficiencies are greater.

Now, maybe all some moron pundits in the media took away from that was "Environmentalists favor ethanol", but that is a vast simplification of the stance of environmentalists. In reality environmentalists would prefer to see the US move in a direction that is less dependent on fossil fuels, achieved by conserving energy. Trading in a car for mass transit, bicycles, walking, etc. (many environmentalists, on the contrary, are sceptical of hybrids and fuel cell vehicles). Living in well insulated, energy efficient homes that are not excesively large. All those things would be much more fruitful than hoping that ethanol takes off and suddenly has a positive energy-returned-on-energy-invested.

[Frenchman]

Germans and Austrians are working on low energy eco-houses, self-sufficient homes, to solve power & gas supply issues.

Passive house - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Autonomous building - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Would be nice to live in a self-sustainable region with clean homes, clean transportation and clean agriculture.

Digg - The First Ever Solar Hydrogen House (http://digg.com/environment/The_First_Ever_Solar_Hydrogen_House - broken link)

[clb10]

Originally Posted by jrod2828

You can't take your individual situation and make a point. I'm talking aggregate here. Every nation has poor people and rich people. The fact is that incomes are rising and less people make $35k or under since 1996 and more people (a lot more people) make more than $75k from 1996. And all those people who are making more than $75k came from the middle class. Fact is people aren't poor. People have food. People have clothing. People own tvs and vcrs and drink alcohol and buy cigarettes. Yet, they whine and cry about poverty. It's just not true on a large scale but the dems and the media sure wish it was.

You also have to consider that 27 in 30 Americans are government/ public workers, on Medicaid, on Social Security, on WIC, on EBT, on Disability, on a public employee pension or on public/ government assistance.

That would certainly skew the numbers a lot.