38 percent of all American workers made less than $20,000 last year.
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/goodbye-middle-class-51-percent-of-all-american-workers-make-less-than-30000-dollars-a-year
Printable View
Whoa!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Quote:
Originally Posted by Packratona!
The United States government spends about 1/3 of all its tax revenues on the military budget. You can figure all the rest out from there.....with a little critical thinking. :D
People are clearly "making up" income deficits by spending on credit cards.
I have heard any number of culprits fingered for the “demise of the middle class”. The article puts the blame on foreigners and robots. The Sandernistas see it as a matter of “the rich” not contributing their “fair share”, although they aren’t terribly specific about who the rich are and what fair might be. Trumpkins incline to the sneaky Mexican theory. Some point to bankers or the wrong flavor of politician. One suggestion posted here is that our defense establishment is too robust. Some blame declining wages on a general dumbing down of the American population, variously attributed to teachers unions, parsimonious taxpayers, electronic entertainment or organized religion. Others see us in an overall cultural decline: we have become lazy and entitled, and are now paying the price. Others still see a surfeit of lawyers as the cause.
I agree that most American folks are lazy and almost all people in the US have a toxic sense of entitlement.Quote:
Originally Posted by LDAHL
My personal opinion is that a massive swath of people who think they have an "income problem" actually have a spending problem.
I'm always a little skeptical of statistics published by small groups with an agenda, but those numbers may be close as far as I could tell with a small amount of sleuthing. There seemed to be a little better picture if you excluded age groups under 25 years of age. In my mind the migration of manufacturing overseas and automation of jobs is a big factor. I worked for a manufacturing company for part of my career and in my later years of employment it was getting hard to find temporary workers to do relatively hard manual labor that paid fairly well, say $15 dollars an hour, and a chance of well paid permanent employment with health and retirement benefits. Rumor around was that people would rather work easier jobs in the service industry that paid minimum wage. So I think there is something to folks being lazy. I also think there is something to the overweighted wages of upper echelons and enormous wages of CEOs, where wage distribution is not fair to the lower incomes.
compared to what, they spend more hours at work than almost any other country on earth.Quote:
I agree that most American folks are lazy
I think that depends on the income. 20k is not much. 30k? I think it depends on the part of the country and whether it's household with kids or just some single person's income, in an expensive part of the country it's not much either and will be a struggle even for one person, but somewhere cheaper it might be less so.Quote:
My personal opinion is that a massive swath of people who think they have an "income problem" actually have a spending problem.
Both very good points. I stand corrected on the first issue for sure.Quote:
Originally Posted by ApatheticNoMore
When my parents were young and first married (1950's), my Dad, with only a GED, made enough money to own a house and allow my Mom to stay at home. He didn't have a fancy white collar job either. That scenario does not happen today. A high school graduate working full time at a minimum wage job (or even a couple of dollars above minimum) can barely afford to pay rent on a one bedroom apartment. I'd hardly say that's a spending problem. It's a everything-has-increased-in-price-except-wages problem. Minimum wage jobs are only meant to be for high school and college students (as most conservative politicians say)? Tell that to my husband (48) who has a masters degree and has to work two part time low wage jobs to equate one full time one because its impossible to find higher paying "career" jobs here. I've worked at my job (office job) for 13 years and only this year finally hit $15.00/hr. We're fortunate that we live in a state that has one of the lowest costs of living in the country, otherwise we'd be screwed financially. And to hint that we're lazy and it's our own fault for making so little really makes me see red.