Free Republic

America's middle class has fallen to mediocre levels — the U.S. median income only qualifies for 19th in the world now, below Japan, Australia and most of Western Europe. The bottom line is that the average Spaniard or Italian — not to mention the typical middle class denizen in 17 other countries — has more to his or her name than the average U.S. citizen does, according to CNNMoney. Using data culled from the latest Credit Suisse Global Wealth report, CNNMoney reported Americans' median wealth is only $44,900 per adult — meaning half have more than that, and half have...

Concerned that the City is an inhomogeneous hodgepodge with pockets of great wealth in some neighborhoods and squalor in others, newly appointed Housing Preservation and Development Commissar Vicki Been announced a plan to move 80,000 to 120,000 poorer families into middle class neighborhoods. “This way instead of having blight and filth in every direction they might look poorer families will be within easy walking distance of a better kept neighborhood,” Been boasted. “The crimes that plague poorer sections of our City would be more evenly dispersed throughout the whole City. Victims will come from a more broadly representative subset of...

Hoping to push their agenda ahead of the presidential election, a group of prominent conservatives has devised a 121-page policy manifesto aimed at giving the Republican Party a message that will attract some of the middle-class voters the party lost in recent White House races.The document, to be unveiled Thursday, features eight essays with proposals on issues including health care, taxes and education. The authors hope the book will help Republicans address the economic anxieties of Americans and nudge the party from its most polarizing positions and constant confrontations with President Obama.“We have to do more than ‘Stand athwart history,...

Who will prove the champion of the little guy and gal? Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) — on deck for her party’s presidential nomination should Hillary Rodham Clinton bow out — has become the political leader of choice for those who advocate Big Government as that champion. This columnist is skeptical about Big Government improving the lives of the citizens. Yet … there is a case to be made for Warren. She is, at very least, a magnificently worthy adversary for advocates of limited government and deserves to be taken seriously. America has had a decade of lousy job creation and...

There are four structural drivers behind the soaring costs of the middle class lifestyle. Why have the costs of a middle class lifestyle soared while income has stagnated?Though it is tempting to finger one ideologically convenient cause or another, there are four structural causes to this long-term trend: 1. Baumol's Cost Disease2. Systemic headwinds to the current version of capitalism3. Dominance of global corporate capital4. Financialization The key take-away here is that the first two causes are structural and cannot be changed by passing a law or funding another state bureaucracy. Though many believe they can tax global corporate capital to...

"............................Educated, articulate and well versed in the recitation of neo-Marxist agitprop, [Seattle Council Woman Kshama Sawant]clearly has read many books and been taught many things that aren’t so.Such is the case with Sawant’s core mission of raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour because she believes it helps poor people. She is convinced that she can, by decree, override the laws of economics from her perch on Seattle’s city council. “Victory in the fight for $15 an hour will mean a substantial improvement in the standards of living of working people in Seattle,” Sawant...in a recent interview[,]“A real class...

It’s an Obama world. Of 953,000 Jobs Created In 2013, 77%, Or 731,000 Were Part-Time. ... And it’s likely to get worse… Obamacare will kill off at least two percent of the US full-time workforce. ... Obamacare is accelerating the US towards a part-time nation. Even far left Think Progress reported today that most of the jobs added since the recession are low paying jobs.

About one-third of American households live "hand-to-mouth," meaning that they spend all their paychecks. But what surprised the study authors is that 66% of these families are middle class, with a median income of $41,000. While they don't have liquid assets, such as savings accounts or mutual fund holdings, they do have homes and retirement accounts, with a median net worth of $41,000. ... Poor hand-to-mouth households, by contrast, typically have incomes of $21,000 and no assets. Families that don't live paycheck to paycheck have incomes of $51,000 and assets of $116,000. Those living paycheck to paycheck have a tougher...

The American middle class, long the most affluent in the world, has lost that distinction. While the wealthiest Americans are outpacing many of their global peers, a New York Times analysis shows that across the lower- and middle-income tiers, citizens of other advanced countries have received considerably larger raises over the last three decades. After-tax middle-class incomes in Canada — substantially behind in 2000 — now appear to be higher than in the United States. The poor in much of Europe earn more than poor Americans.

The American middle class, long the most affluent in the world, has lost that distinction. While the wealthiest Americans are outpacing many of their global peers, a New York Times analysis shows that across the lower- and middle-income tiers, citizens of other advanced countries have received considerably larger raises over the last three decades. After-tax middle-class incomes in Canada—substantially behind in 2000—now appear to be higher than in the United States. The poor in much of Europe earn more than poor Americans. The numbers, based on surveys conducted over the past 35 years, offer some of the most detailed publicly...

This is the Democratic Party’s new top-bottom coalition, one in which the traditional middle class—white ethnics, blue-collar manufacturing and trade workers, small business owners, and others—has no part. These “left-outs” are the urban equivalents of Reagan Democrats. Their instinct to vote Democratic may remain, but the economic interests that once bound them to the party have largely disappeared, leaving them politically unaffiliated. They are open to voting for a compelling Republican, such as Rudolph Giuliani—particularly if the city in which they live appears to be spiraling downward. In other words, these independent-minded, urban middle classes are quintessential swing voters. They...

One phenomenon of the modern economy is affluence that doesn’t feel like it. You work, earn and spend quite a lot, yet it seems you’re getting nowhere. Some new economic analysis helps quantify just how many people might be characterized as the “wealthy poor”— and it’s a surprisingly large chunk of the overall population. A new paper by economists Greg Kaplan and Justin Weidner of Princeton University, and Giovanni Violante of New York University, finds that about 70 million Americans may live in families they describe as “wealthy hand-to-mouth” households. These are families that own assets such as homes, cars,...

A bunch of labor unions’ massive retrenchment from directly supporting the passage of ObamaCare to publicly taking the legislation to the woodshed is well documented by now, but yet another big union just came out swinging against the law by levying one of President Obama’s favorite intellectually bankrupt themes against him: Income inequality, of course. Via the Washington Examiner: A national union that represents 300,000 low-wage hospitality workers charges in a new report that Obamacare will slam wages, cut hours, limit access to health insurance and worsen the very “income equality” President Obama says he is campaigning to fix.“Only in...

...Over the past 50 years or so, these post-Protestants have gradually formed the core of a new and fascinating social class in America....And we can recognize their origins in mainline Protestantism when we discern some of the ways in which they see the world and themselves. They are, for the most part, politically liberal, preferring that government rather than private associations address social concerns. They remained puritanical and highly judgmental, at least about health. And like all puritans, they are willing to use law to compel behavior they think right. Nonetheless, they do not think of themselves as akin to...

MINGO JUNCTION, Ohio The roar is gone. Five years after Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel's once-thunderous mill went idle, the only sound here is that of the oldest parts of the plant being dismantled. The demolition began about a day or so before a red carpet rolled out at the White House for a state dinner featuring a dress worn by the first lady that cost more than the salary of a police officer in this town. The demolition still was going on last Wednesday, at the same time that Vice President Joe Biden boasted about the positive impact that the American Recovery...

From the end of World War II until the 1990s, California possessed a magnetism unique among the 50 states. It was — according to a mythology that was probably overwrought even in those halcyon days — an American Eden, a place where ambition and unfettered imagination combined to make even the most exotic dreams seem feasible. One of the reasons that image was so enduring was that the state consistently delivered on the outsized expectations. It came to be the center of American entertainment, with “Hollywood” becoming a metonym for the entire industry. It fostered the digital revolution that would...

The biggest issue facing the American economy, and our political system, is the gradual descent of the middle class into proletarian status. This process, which has been going on intermittently since the 1970s, has worsened considerably over the past five years, and threatens to turn this century into one marked by downward mobility. The decline has less to do with the power of the “one percent” per se than with the drying up of opportunity amid what is seen on Wall Street and in the White House as a sustained recovery. Despite President Obama’s rhetorical devotion to reducing inequality, it...

CBS News reports that the combination of food prices being inflated and the stagnation of wages is threatening the middle class. The report noted that staples such as chicken, ground beef, and bacon have skyrocketed in price since 2011: the price of chicken is 18.4% more than it was; ground beef is up 16.8%; and bacon saw a huge increase of 22.8% in price. These price hikes came despite the federal government’s sunny assertion that prices in general have only increased 6.4% in that period. Meanwhile, median income has only risen 1% each year, while the cost of college tuition...

The roots of American liberalism are not compassion, but snobbery. That’s the thesis of Fred Siegel’s revealing new book, The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class.

Submitted by Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse blog, The death of the middle class in America has become so painfully obvious that now even the New York Times is doing stories about it. Millions of middle class jobs have disappeared, incomes are steadily decreasing, the rate of homeownership has declined for eight years in a row and U.S. consumers have accumulated record-setting levels of debt. Being independent is at the heart of what it means to be "middle class", and unfortunately the percentage of Americans that are able to take care of themselves without government assistance continues to decline....