Middle class continues to disappear

America's middle class has nearly vanished. The U.S. and A. isn't just a nation of haves and have-nots. Now it's a land of have-mores and have-nothings.

According to new IRS data, the richest Americans' share of national income has just set a new modern record. In 2005, the most recent year for which data is available, the richest 1% of Americans Made 21.2% of all Money, up from 19% in 2004. This is the biggest gap between the rich and poor in the post-Great Depression era. The last time there was such a wide gap was in the 1920s - a fact that's even more chilling. Indeed, it was that era's hero worship of the unregulated market that caused the Depression.

What policies have caused most Americans to see their real incomes fall lately? Much of that can be blamed on the loss of manufacturing and other jobs, the stagnation of the minimum wage, suburban sprawl, shifting the tax burden to the poor, lack of government oversight of Big Business, the gutting of the safety net, and increased trade with countries with cheap labor. Just one of these policies would have been bad enough. That they've all happened in conjunction with each other is a deliberate effort to soak the poor and is nothing short of fascism.

America has in effect been in a chronic recession for over 25 years - the longest continuous span of bad economic fortune in the nation's history. This isn't just because I reached adulthood and had to stop relying on the oldsters (who weren't rich either). It's a fact that replacing factory jobs with the lowest-paying service jobs - while CEO's and wealthy investors get richer off everyone else's labor - isn't good for the economy. Throughout history, the unregulated marketplace has been shown to be bad for not only most people's economic level but also their social position.

What does Bush - the national village idiot - say about all this? He told the Wall Street Journal, "Skills gaps yield income gaps." So he thinks it's the people's fault they're not making enough to live on? Americans go to school more years and more days per year than they did 30 years ago, so the recession obviously isn't caused by people not going to school long enough. Even if people had less school now, they'd still be competing for the same jobs. The stock market has done quite well in recent years, but the market in the post-Depression era is almost perfectly antithetical to how well most people are doing.

The growing gap between the rich and poor is unsustainable. More and more of the poorest people can't pay their bills, and that's going to start depriving the rich of the money they've come to expect. Then the entire system will collapse. America could very well find living standards reduced to something as primitive as they were 100 years ago.

(Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119215822413557069.html)