Incidentally, I saw that on a bumper sticker in Elkhorn, WI yesterday.
The inflation-adjusted net worth for the typical household was $87,992 in 2003. Ten years later, it was only $56,335, or a 36 percent decline, according to a study financed by the Russell Sage Foundation.
The one beside it read “OBummer”. h/t
Nobody told me there would be math.
nice to see that the economic recovery is going so well.
While this will cue the usual handwringing about “income inequality”, it is actually proof that the “recovery” in the US is being done on the back of the consumer. As the saying goes, “from the books of the banks, to the backs of the taxpayer.”
Yeah – Obama isn’t the ONLY thing wrong with the US.
It all comes down to a basic misunderstanding of what wealth is. Most politicians – especially on the left, but some on the right as well – seem to believe that money is wealth. Confiscate and print money, then spread it around, and everything is fixed! The opportunity for graft when you have a trillion dollar slush fund for ‘fixing poverty’ is a side benefit.
But wealth is not money; it’s the goods and services produced by human labor. By disincentivizing work at virtually every stage of the government, then handing over a portion of working people’s wages to those who aren’t working, the government has directly created this problem. Less work means less wealth – giving those who aren’t working a portion of that wealth simply means there is less to go around.
To date, the government’s solution to ‘less wealth to go around’ has been to print more money, and offer more benefits to people who aren’t working. This, of course, exacerbates the problem, and they come up with a new solution – to print more money, and offer more benefits to people who aren’t working.
This is why socialism doesn’t work.
Meanwhile the rich get richer. I’m not a commie, but the middle class is slowly being gutted.
Meanwhile there are plenty of people who contribute very little to the economy yet earn huge salaries….just look at government. And government continues to grow in size and scope.
And there are plenty of people who get mega rich producing nothing of intrinsic value. Look at Facebook. Look at Twitter.
The system is broken and it is no longer rewarding the right people anymore. If you are a bum you can get handouts. If you are in the government your wages go up and up without limit.
In the end we’ll have burger flippers, the mega rich, and a massively bloated government. True for both USA and Canada. And then the system will collapse.
Smaller net worth = greater insecurity = more Votes for Democrats
It is all going, according to plan.
Why has everyone missed the obvious fact of my lifetime? Canadians, in terms of home ownership, vehicles, and general standard of living were better off in 1970. Our toys are maybe a bit different but all the technological advances since then has enriched much of the rest of the world but done nothing for us.
Yeah well gold no longer reflects the value of the dollar. It reflects inflation much like the price of gasoline and new cars….however the reality that the bulk of a family’s wealth is the home post bubble it’s a buyers market.
Here in Canada, real estate remained stable but the rural real estate market seems stuck on nuts….distorted by other factors such as dairy industry tax shelters. That bubble will burst once Wynne discovers it…..it will be bloody….
The system is broken and it is no longer rewarding the right people anymore. If you are a bum you can get handouts. If you are in the government your wages go up and up without limit. BC
It is called rewarding your friends, and punishing your enemies, and if the Republicans don’t start opposing Obama there will be no Republican base in 2016. People can not be permanently fooled.
If Obama had cut off illegal immigration, the lower US middle class would be doing much better, as the number of new illegals is greater than all the jobs created in the last 6 years. Without them, millions more Americans would have jobs.
The US has been on a fast track to Greece for the last 6 years. Prior to that they were more or less in economic stasis due to public debt crowding out the private sector (think Ontario), Green theocracy crowding out development, corporate tax rates guaranteed to off-shore industry, and the continual dilution of the low skill demographic through federally engineered and condoned invasion. Thrift has been replaced with the opium of dependency.
One of the first events will be the The Indentured Servants throwing off their shackles to move to;
1/. right to work areas;
2/. limited Social Justice bull roar in the work;
3/. employees recognize the person/family who owns a small business has normally taken a risk in their own financial wherewithal & spent much unpaid time to build and maintain a business;
Canadians as a group missed out on the 2000-2008 boom completely. Wages here have been essentially flat since Trudeau The Elder.
Because taxes, obviously. Less obviously but more insidiously, inflation.
These days you need $2 million minimum in savings/investments to retire and enjoy a reasonable middle class life. Nobody I know of has two megabucks in their piggy bank, an awful lot of people are retiring to lower class/poverty life. These are Boomers, at the moment.
By the time Gen X comes along to retirement, it will probably be $4-$5 million. Gen Y ten years later, probably double that again.
Or the wheels will have come off entirely, and Retirement will be something old people whinge about their parents having enjoyed.
So will single family dwellings and second cars. And first cars.
Or, wild outside chance, we could all pull together and FIX IT. That would look like a huge, massive, gigantic, 75%+++ tax cut.
Like I keep on saying, the only way to kill the plague rats in the wainscoting is starvation. You can’t beat Lefties at their own game of thrones bullsh1t, you have to remove all funding and let them fight each other to the death over the remaining pennies.
Tax Cut Now. CPC, pay attention you morons.
There is nothing wrong with America that a few hundred thousand more rules, regulations, and illegal immigrants can’t fix.
“Without them, millions more Americans would have jobs.”
Yeah, bussing tables, picking crops, and cleaning homes. These jobs aren’t exactly being stolen from under Americans by illegal immigrants. They’re jobs nobody else wants, because they’re menial and poorly paid, lack benefits of any kind, and offer zero job stability or opportunity for advancement,
“Canadians as a group missed out on the 2000-2008 boom completely. Wages here have been essentially flat since Trudeau The Elder. Because taxes, obviously. Less obviously but more insidiously, inflation.”
Yet oddly enough, middle- and working-class wages have grown steadily in places like Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, and other countries with higher taxation rates than Canada.
So maybe the problem in North America isn’t taxes per se.
I like how literally eight posts down, everyone here was insisting that unemployed people are the lazy authors of their own misfortunes, yet here, where the topic is the stagnated wages of the typical SDAer, it’s all Obama’s fault (but not Harper’s).
It feels like Trudeau all over again, watching this wasting disease pretending to be human wrecking America..