Obama isn't helping the middle class he's destroying it (unemployment, Congress, minimum wage)
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This spells it out pretty clearly. The graph in the link should help the reading challenged swooners too.
"NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Sure, the economy is adding jobs these days...but most of those positions pay pretty poorly. Some 58% of the jobs created during the recovery have been low-wage positions, according to a new report by the National Employment Law Project. Only 22% have been mid-wage jobs and 20% higher-wage positions. These low-wage jobs pay $13.83 an hour or less.
"The recovery continues to be skewed toward low-wage jobs, reinforcing the rise in inequality and America's deficit of good jobs," said Annette Bernhardt, NELP's policy co-director. "While there's understandably a lot of focus on getting employment back to pre-recession levels, the quality of jobs is rapidly emerging as a second front in the struggling recovery."
The explosion in low-wage job growth comes after the Great Recession hammered the mid-wage job sector. Some 60% of the jobs lost during the downturn were mid-wage, as opposed to 21% of low-wage and 19% of higher-wage positions"
"...the decline of the middle cllass in America is going to get a lot worse."
A major shift in our economy is happening.
We are transitioning from an "employment economy" to an "ownership economy".
Most Americans that are currently working for others are not going to have a bright economic future.
That may sound harsh, but it is the truth
Add to that Obama's plan for redistribution of wealth, taxing the working class who live in the suburbs and trasnferring those taxes to the inner cities will cause the middle class to shink further.
Add to that Obama's plan for redistribution of wealth, taxing the working class who live in the suburbs and trasnferring those taxes to the inner cities will cause the middle class to shink further.
How do you tax geographically? I know Republicans at the state level can tax the working class in cities and redistribute those taxes to the middle class in suburbs, but how can Washington do that?
Well seeing how this has been going on since the 1980s, Obama is really not the cause of it. TEXAS, very out of line with Obama administration leads the nation in low wage jobs and ranks 9th in poverty. The real reason is more complex than simply blaming one man.
What specifically has Obama done to "destroy the middle-class?" He lowered taxes on the middle-class and favors raising taxes on upper incomes; he extended unemployment benefits; he has a jobs bill that the GOP won't pass.
The meme that Obama is responsible for declines in income of the middle-class, that has been going on for quite some time, is pathetic.
In the 60 years after World War II, the United States built the world's greatest middle class economy, then unbuilt it. And if you want a single snapshot that captures the broad sweep of that transformation, you could do much worse than this graph from a new Pew report, which tracks how average family incomes have changed at each rung of the economic ladder from 1950 through 2010.
Here's the arc it captures: In the immediate postwar period, America's rapid growth favored the middle and lower classes. The poorest fifth of all households, in fact, fared best. Then, in the 1970s, amid two oil crises and awful inflation, things ground to a halt. The country backed off the postwar, center-left consensus -- captured by Richard Nixon's comment that "we're all Keynesians now" -- and tried Reaganism instead. We cut taxes. Technology and competition from abroad started whittling away at blue collar jobs and pay. The stock market took off. And so when growth returned, it favored the investment class -- the top 20 percent, and especially the top 5 percent (and, though it's not on this chart, the top 1 percent more than anybody).
If one is complaining that the middle class's income isn't rising, then tell the GOP to raise the minimum wage; tell them to stop being hostile to unions; tell them to stop passing laws that make it easier to outsource jobs to slave labor countries. This is Labor Day.
Last edited by MTAtech; 09-03-2012 at 05:40 AM..
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"...the decline of the middle cllass in America is going to get a lot worse."
