President Obama made helping the 'middle class' his highest priority in the SOTU speech last week even after the economy has by all accounts rebounded. Unfortunately, our new economy has been a boon to the 1%ers and nobody else, and as Atrios nicely sums it up, people don't have money. When the middle class thrives, the entire country thrives, but since this big shift in our economy, the rich are making more money than ever and are shunning the working class at the same time.
The middle class that President Obama identified in his State of the Union speech last week as the foundation of the American economy has been shrinking for almost half a century.
In the late 1960s, more than half of the households in the United States were squarely in the middle, earning, in today’s dollars, $35,000 to $100,000 a year. Few people noticed or cared as the size of that group began to fall, because the shift was primarily caused by more Americans climbing the economic ladder into upper-income brackets.
But since 2000, the middle-class share of households has continued to narrow, the main reason being that more people have fallen to the bottom. At the same time, fewer of those in this group fit the traditional image of a married couple with children at home, a gap increasingly filled by the elderly...read on
I wonder what filthy Democrat was in office in 2000 that started our economic plunge. Oh, sorry, it was a Republican named George Bush.
