I grew up in a family that I considered middle.  They were able to easily pay for a 30k house being built, a 3 or 4k car, buy groceries, gas and necessities.  We always took a week vacation every summer.  And Christmas, there would be packages everywhere.  They were middle class, worked hard, but did not struggle for needs or desires.  

What happened to cause everything to be so expensive?  How did they figure out that we would keep paying almost 4 dollars a gallon for gas?  A couple hundred dollars at the grocery store for a few bags?  

I think our dollar has been devalued, and things aren't really going up.  Our purchasing power of our dollar has been lowered coupled with our salaries not going up.

What are your thoughts?  What is middle class anymore?  I think we should be re-named upper poverty, working poor.  Do you believe our dollar is being devalued?

Thank You,
Madison

Even though I would call that the working poor. The bottom rung of the middle class, the majority of Americans.

The middle class is any one who is income dependent.

The middle class is people who make the median income of 44k to about 6 figures. This varies depending on where you live. There's probably places in NYC where 6 figures makes you the working poor, lol.

Consider the following: historically, productivity and wages have always keep up with each other, at least until 1970. Since then productivity has skyrocketed beyond what workers recieve in wages. This is the reason why we've had one economic bubble after another.

What this means is that wages have been effectively suppressed. The median household income is 44k. If wages had kept up with productivity, then the median household income would be closer to 92k.

If you want to know why everyone's broke and up to their necks in debt, there's your reason.

So where did all that extra money go? It went to the top 1%. They stole your money.

-- Modified on 10/22/2012 2:41:21 PM

(having the Federal Reserve print money out of nothing)  and the dollar will come back.  Harry Dent Jr has a great book out on "The Great Crash Ahead".  Looking forward to my all day travels tomorrow,  so I finish it.  It has a lot to offer all of us for our future.  He is a great monetary futurist.

BINGO,  you hit the nail on the head BV

We know two things: 1) the official policy of the Federal Reserve is to engineer and maintain inflation and 2) inflation is theft.

Average wages(earned income) measured in purchasing power, i.e. adjusted for inflation, has declined for most workers, especially in the past several years. Measured in purchasing power, i.e. the number of gallons of gasoline or loaves of bread an average worker can buy with one hour of labor, American workers have experienced a steady decline in the value of their labor for the past 40 years.

The Dollar has lost most of its value just in the past 45 years; according to the BLS inflation calculator (which very likely understates real inflation), it takes $7 2011 dollars to buy what $1 bought in 1966, at the top of the post-war Bull market.

Can we buy 7 times more goods and services now? Or can we actually only buy 6 times more goods? If so, then our earnings have actually declined by 15%. Put another way: 15% of our earnings have been effectively stolen via inflation.

The Federal Reserve robs savers every day of millions of dollars, which it then transfers to the "too big to fail" banks by paying interest on those banks' reserves. Savers earn .01% on their cash while banks are paid 2% interest. The difference is, what is stolen from savers and funneled to the banks.

So why do we allow POTUS to keep borrowing from the Federal Reserve.  Most people don't have the inclination the time or both to educate themselves they would rather puppet what their friends say,  consequently we are being indoctrinated by our government.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/who-owns-the-federal-reserve/10489

The Banks have all the money so the Politicians are bought and paid off. There really is no difference between the two political parties, both are hypocrites and sucking the dicks of the crooks on Wall St. When interest rates start to rise, and they will at some point, this whole charade is going to blow up in the Federal Reserves face.

No better words spoken,  except it will be our/citizens faces that everything blows up in not theirs,  hell they got all "our money.   Madison put up a post with Jack Nicholson the other night,  it was perfecto.  No time to look for it right now.

-- Modified on 10/22/2012 11:20:07 AM

unemployment outrageous.
food stamps increase outrageous.
female unemployment outrageous.
black unemployment outrageous.
college loan progam unaceptable.
gas proces 3 + times higher than when he took office.
Arab spring eating our lunch.
debt rising at astronomical rate....killing USA future.
...more???

USA can't afford 4 more years of the O-man.

Not when the country is 16 trillion dollars in depth.

It's certainly ain't Congress who's fixing this shit.

QEIII has already been a great success. Unemployment is below 8%. It's also improving our trade situation. We need more QE, not less.

If Japan's economy has stagnated during a global boom, what will it do during another global bust? If you want a look at the fiscal future of the U.S., look west to Japan, a nation that sits precariously on a fiscal cliff a thousand miles high.

I work in a soup kitchen once a week and  what might you do to give back sir???

-- Modified on 10/22/2012 1:29:29 PM

1) Labor Union jobs have greatly declined in this country

2) We are printing so much money we are devaluing the dollar.

Our massive debt is starting to make other companies question the stability of our currency and our addiction to government spending requiring the printing of large amounts of currency is a death spiral if we do not break out of it soon.