Some may be,but one thing for sure here is why some are feling the way they do financially:

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The Middle Class in America Is Radically Shrinking.
Here Are the Stats to Prove it
Posted Jul 15, 2010 02:25pm EDT by Michael Snyder in Recession
Related:

From The Business Insider
Editor's note: Michael Snyder is editor of theeconomiccollapseblog.com

The 22 statistics detailed here prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence in America.

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer at a staggering rate. Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, but now that is changing at a blinding pace.

So why are we witnessing such fundamental changes? Well, the globalism and "free trade" that our politicians and business leaders insisted would be so good for us have had some rather nasty side effects. It turns out that they didn't tell us that the "global economy" would mean that middle class American workers would eventually have to directly compete for jobs with people on the other side of the world where there is no minimum wage and very few regulations. The big global corporations have greatly benefited by exploiting third world labor pools over the last several decades, but middle class American workers have increasingly found things to be very tough.

Here are the statistics to prove it:
• 83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.
• 61 percent of Americans "always or usually" live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.
• 66 percent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.
• 36 percent of Americans say that they don't contribute anything to retirement savings.
• A staggering 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.
• 24 percent of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.
• Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008.
• Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.
• For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.
• In 1950, the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average worker's paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.
• As of 2007, the bottom 80 percent of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.
• The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.
• Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17 percent when compared with 2008.
• In the United States, the average federal worker now earns 60% MORE than the average worker in the private sector.
• The top 1 percent of U.S. households own nearly twice as much of America's corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.
• In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.
• More than 40 percent of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying.
• or the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.
• This is what American workers now must compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.
• Approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 - the highest rate in 20 years.
• Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million in 2009.
• The top 10 percent of Americans now earn around 50 percent of our national income.

Giant Sucking Sound
The reality is that no matter how smart, how strong, how educated or how hard working American workers are, they just cannot compete with people who are desperate to put in 10 to 12 hour days at less than a dollar an hour on the other side of the world. After all, what corporation in their right mind is going to pay an American worker 10 times more (plus benefits) to do the same job? The world is fundamentally changing. Wealth and power are rapidly becoming concentrated at the top and the big global corporations are making massive amounts of money. Meanwhile, the American middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence as U.S. workers are slowly being merged into the new "global" labor pool.
What do most Americans have to offer in the marketplace other than their labor? Not much. The truth is that most Americans are absolutely dependent on someone else giving them a job. But today, U.S. workers are "less attractive" than ever. Compared to the rest of the world, American workers are extremely expensive, and the government keeps passing more rules and regulations seemingly on a monthly basis that makes it even more difficult to conduct business in the United States.
So corporations are moving operations out of the U.S. at breathtaking speed. Since the U.S. government does not penalize them for doing so, there really is no incentive for them to stay.
What has developed is a situation where the people at the top are doing quite well, while most Americans are finding it increasingly difficult to make it. There are now about six unemployed Americans for every new job opening in the United States, and the number of "chronically unemployed" is absolutely soaring. There simply are not nearly enough jobs for everyone.
Many of those who are able to get jobs are finding that they are making less money than they used to. In fact, an increasingly large percentage of Americans are working at low wage retail and service jobs.
But you can't raise a family on what you make flipping burgers at McDonald's or on what you bring in from greeting customers down at the local Wal-Mart.
The truth is that the middle class in America is dying -- and once it is gone it will be incredibly difficult to rebuild.

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2011400,00.html

“And nine years after 9/11, the fight over the mosque near Ground Zero shows how obsessed we remain with an enemy that may no longer exist.”

The RNN article links to the above article. Regardless how you feel about the Mosque, it is these types of articles that are fueling the controversy. The writer believes the threat is receding on it’s own, primarily due to Muslims revulsion over Jihadists killing fellow Muslims. He suggests that this nation should “move on”. Outrageous!

So put down your guard America, you have nothing to fear. The threat by Islamic extremists is virtually over. I suspect this writer felt the same way after the first WTC bombing. When is mainstream media or RNN going to show a revulsion for these type of asinine articles, instead of their concern about Islamophobia?

Is the left "Christaphobic"? Maybe the left is Theophobic in general, except for Islam of course. For some reason the most intolerant of all - the muslims get a free pass in this ginned up question. The left is always bashing Christianity, but inexplicably they're very supporting of Islam. You remember the religion that in the 21 st. century is still stoning women to death, and homosexuals too!! Maybe the latter will get your attention.

Even the phrasing is biased. That old tactic of labeling one who disagrees as having a "phobia", thus implying that the opposition has an irrational fear or mental disease.

I find it funny that only consrvatives have the "phobias", and never are the progressive liberal types so afflicted. The progressives pulled the same gag with "homophobia", you see if we do not accept and embrace homosexuality entirely,..we now have a disease called homophobia. A cute trick indeed. Prior to 1970 the psychiatric community classified homosexuality as a mental disease,..until they buckled under to the liberals and their 'newspeak' nonsense.

I say the left and it's lemmings are stricken with "Eleutherophobia". Go look it up.

robert
I wholly agree with the rest of the post but, 83% of stocks are in the hands of institutional investors, like 401k, union and state retirement plans ect.

What really bothers me is that our govt has bent over backwards to help companies leave the united states, or export jobs and entire factories.

What really bothers me is that our govt has bent over backwards to help companies leave the united states, or export jobs and entire factories.

-------------------
Fred

The reason is the companies contribute to the prostitutes in Congress.

Cas:
To your point,and the "supremes'really gave the Corporations the "green light"to really have our representatives do things that are really anatomically impossibe to us.

To your point,and the "supremes'really gave the Corporations the "green light"to really have our representatives do things that are really anatomically impossibe to us.

----------

My apologies robert.

I did not see your response until now.

The Democratic Supremes are not that much better.

----------------

Justices Affirm Property Seizures
5-4 Ruling Backs Forced Sales for Private Development

Cas:Scarey.

"Justices Affirm Property Seizures
5-4 Ruling Backs Forced Sales for Private Development"

Very Scary which proves the Supreme Court are the protectors of the wealthiest.

"Very Scary which proves the Supreme Court are the protectors of the wealthiest."


Which only proves through repeated idiotic statements that you don't believe in America nor its proud heritage. A man without a country - very very sad indeed.

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