American Middle Class No Longer #1: The Slide Begins

[Indy]

[Philly]

What should we do about this?

[Indy]

I would start by casting out and excommunicating the frauds and liars who have spent years telling us that what's holding us back from economic progress is poor people and minorities.

Also, the people who support policies that benefit only those 10% and insist the rest of us go on "austerity."

Once their fraud and deceit has been exposed, people will shun them, right?

Or will the Henrietta Effect continue to take hold?

[John Galt]

as noted in another thread discussing basically the same thing, household economic growth being so divergent is because of women getting high paying jobs and assortative mating. you just want to focus on how the gap is so large, but the gap isn't much larger than it was 50 years ago if you were to randomly mate everyone with everybody else. instead the rich marry the rich and the poor marry the poor

now the difference with between canada and the us isn't explained in this fashion. as the graphs on your link show, the canadaian american gap wasn't that much before, and it seems BIG OIL has given them that burst to get them to the top

to which the only appropriate response is, frak baby frak

[Indy]

[fstarcstar]

[fstarcstar]

[John Galt]

minimum wage would be less of an issue if we didn't allow hordes of latinos in that want to work for next to nothing. i am totally for unrestricted immigration btw, but i am also against the existence of minimum wages. i also am not stupid and know what is driving down wages (which is part of why i am totally for it, by the way, because that translates to cheaper things for me)

the whole study on the other hand talks about mean equivalized disposable household income. it's the only way to get canada that high. i am ranked in at least the 90th if not the 95th percentile according to their data (after tax), but i am not in the 95th percentile in income, im not even close

[exploited]

Measuring relative to other countries is silly, considering all of those countries are also declining. I agree that the problem is class warfare waged by the uber-rich, but there really isn't anything to be gained by comparing yourself to Canada or Europe or wherever.

[Winchester]