Watching the Daily Show last night I heard a staggering statistic.

In 2008 the richest 1% of the country owned 70% of our countries wealth.
In 1990 the richest 1% of the country owned 40% of our countries wealth.

What this means is that the other 99% of us are currently struggling and fighting for that last 30% while that 30% is slowly slipping away to the rich.

I understand it takes money to make money. I've got a few great project ideas I would love to tackle but need capitol. But its amazing that the gap is growing so rapidly. We look at the federal bailouts of the subprime collapse and realize the CEOs of these companies are getting massive salaries that most of us couldn't even fathom while the rest of the country gets screwed. This isn't a Democrat or a Republican issue because all of the politicians are sure to take care of themselves and I am sure most of them are on the side of the 1% than the 99%.

So what is gonna happen? If that top 1% gets closer to 80%, 85%, 90%? We're only a few years away ...

That's interesting numbers. I wonder what constitutes "wealth" there? But one could argue that as foreign investors leave more Americans in our top 1% are gaining what some Japanese buisnessman once had. Our dollar is dropping, our worth is dropping, investors are leaving.

I know all of that is a big reach but just saying.

Class warfare built on envy, lust, and a complete lack of hindsightedness.

So what is gonna happen? If that top 1% gets closer to 80%, 85%, 90%? We're only a few years away ...
Following the course we're on, probably widespread unrest.

It seems that most of us are complacent enough to zombie out to American Idol and not cause trouble, but when we can't afford food and cable anymore; things will change.

Don't you be fucking with my cable and internet!

What this means is that the other 99% of us are currently struggling and fighting for that last 30% while that 30% is slowly slipping away to the rich.
It's a lot worse than that too.

You and I don't even get to compete for the remaining 30%. The bottom 80% of our population is actually fighting for less than 10% of the wealth.

Wealth is cash, personal property (jewelry, electronics, antiques), and real estate.

Doing some research on this, its not like it started in the 90s. Actually that value in the 90s was the biggest at it time, too.

Think about the biggest change between the 50s and today. Instead of walking to the corner store to buy your groceries, you shop at Giant. Instead of shopping for clothes at a neighborhood boutique, you shop at Wal-Mart. Everything you buy is from a massive corporation owned by another massive corporation instead of someone in your community. And when they screw up, their CEO still gets a massive golden parachute. When the middle class and the lower class are the ones who pull the belts tighter, that 1% still makes a profit when your house gets foreclosed on, when you get laid off in corporate cutbacks, and so forth.

I haven't bought anything from Wal-Mart in over a year. I still shop at Target, but they tend to treat customers and their employees better than Wal-Mart.

You and I don't even get to compete for the remaining 30%. The bottom 80% of our population is actually fighting for less than 10% of the wealth. I don't know what these numbers mean, but in reality that "10%" we're supposedly "fighting for" is still orders of magnitude more posh and lavish than any other generation of Americans ... who are orders of magnitude wealthier in comparison than any other civilization in the history of the world.

But let's complain about $4 / gallon gas while driving around in our air conditioned cars listening to our XM radios.

That's incorrect. If you look at what we're really making, adjusted for inflation (AKA what the money can actually buy us), we've barely been breaking even for some time now. When you take into account how the CPI basket has been constantly tweaked, it's not even breaking even.

The fact is.

This Generation of Americans coming up are going to have, for the first time in American history, a lower standard of living than their parents.

But let's complain about $4 / gallon gas while driving around in our air conditioned cars listening to our XM radios.

Nice false generalizations here.

1) Driving with the air conditioning on at highway speeds uses no more gas than having the windows down, and in some cases uses less fuel.

2)I'm sure you are well aware, but using the radio has absolutely nothing to do with how much fuel someone consumes.



But hey, our economy is just fine despite what the Fed says, what most leading economists say, what our government reports say, etc., just ask Akipt.

The fact is, I think you all lack any sort of perspective.

But heh, you can't even tell the difference between prosperity and a discussion about a possible recession.

And for you daft ones, no, I haven't said our economy is doing well right now. But it's not doing that bad either at the moment. I'll even say there are some serious issues that need addressed (and I have already on this board recently), but I'm not going to start hoarding rice and flour right now either.

Perspective on what?

I think his point was people actually can afford a car with air conditioning and the luxuary of XM radio.

All I can say for the younger generation and even some of the younger ones on this board, you best be saving your pennys and not spending beyond your means. I know I have but then again when I was in my 20's I never really spent hours playing video games or surfing the net, I was out busting my ass to put in the spot I am today. Which I feel is damn good. What L2 said was very true.

OK perspective. The cell phone for example... Everyone has one now.

What would that have been worth to our parents in the '50s and '60s? That little device beyond doing the obvious instantaneous communication with anyone in the world connected to a phone network, but it can also give you your location to within 6 meters anywhere in the world, can play a huge selection of your favorite tunes, and can take digital pictures, play games, etc...

A lower standard of living my ass. None of you could handle living in their 'better standard of living' world now.

What would that have been worth to our parents in the '50s and '60s?
Probably a lot less, because both of our parents weren't apart, both working 50+ hours a week just to make ends meet!

However, having the "opportunity" to pay for cell phone service doesn't improve your financial well-being. Having devaluing junk that comes with a monthly service fee just puts you on a treadmill and never increases your net worth.

After decades of paying for cell phones and cell phone service, what will you have? Will you be any closer to a piece of that 90% of wealth? Will your cell phone company chip in for your kids to go to college or you to retire?

Well it's obvious there are some basic definitions we need to agree on for this dicussion (wealth, financial well-being, standard of living, etc.)

having the "opportunity" to pay for cell phone service doesn't improve your financial well-being. Having devaluing junk that comes with a monthly service fee just puts you on a treadmill and never increases your net worth.Yes, but it drastically improves your standard of living.

After decades of paying for cell phones and cell phone service, what will you have?After decades of spending $40 / month on broadband internet, what will you have? It depends on how you use it.

Will you be any closer to a piece of that 90% of wealth?No, the best way to get closer to that 90% is not by buying gadgets with monthly services fees, but to get a college degree and then a graduate degree if you want to take the path most traveled. The whole Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness thing...

If the monthly services fees are causing us to lose standard of living compared to our parents, how's that anyone's fault but our individual selves?

You're the one that brought up cell phones. I completely agree that if you're wasting every last dollar on trinkets, then you are a moron and deserve to end up broke.

However, I think something like that is irrelevant to our broader access to wealth. We aren't talking about how you spend it or what you spend it on, but how much is available to spend and what it's really worth.

Look at the 50's and 60's, like you mentioned. Sure, they didn't have cell phones, but they did still buy trinkets to keep up with the Joneses. Color televisions, for example.

The difference is that they were keeping up with the Joneses on a single income and managing to save significant amounts of money. In 2006, the national annual savings rate actually dropped to -1.6%. That's lower than it was during the Great Depression. Compare that to the high of +11.1% in 1985.

As a society, we've been using credit to maintain the illusion of a higher standard of living. That will only last so much longer. Then what?

Will a disconnected cell phone in someone's pocket make them feel better about being homeless?

Standard of living isnt another monthly bill.

Thats the problem though, we have so many things that we "need". Its not that a cell phone makes life easier, its that we have come to point where we cannot function without it as society has morphed around it and made it standard gear.

So we pay another monthly bill. And we save less money. And we take less vacations, and we own less land, and we pay off less debt.

And thats the real fucker here. Debt. When in American history have we ever run up such massive piles of debt?
During the last 30 years we were given an almost unlimited line of credit, and as a nation we abused the fuck out it. Dozens of credit cards, massive amounts of unpaid, decades old debt. The wealth of our country is being bled dry by cheap and easy credit, by trivial "needs" and piles of things we really don't need but somehow found ourselves unable to live without.

You ask what the people in the 1950s would have done with Cell Phones? Shit, if they had more sense that us, they would have thrown them in the fucking river.

Another topic on a differen't forum was:

Is $100K/per year the new $50K/per year?...100K a year doesn't even go far, living a very modest life (with regards to home and trips..ect.) with no kids feels like 50K not even 10-15 years ago.

Gramm was constantly tinkering with banking and financial institution laws; he was behind dropping the restrictions put in place following the "Great Depression" which allowed for more fast and loose playing with investments and mortgages and which led according to many directly to the Subprime fiasco; and, before even leaving politics he had a job with a Swiss financial institution which subsequently lost over $30 billion on mortgage trading.

In that sense, I say the problem with our economy can be laid in some respects at the feet of the Republicans, who seem to always favor those with wealth.

Rumor has it McCain wants Gramm for his Treasury Secretary. Better start keeping stuff under the mattress again, if McCain wins.

Welcome to the final realization of the Monroe Doctrine: where we become a Latin American country just like the rest of the western hemisphere (save Canada), with an irredeemably corrupt government, a tiny population of haves behind their walls and razor wire, and the impoverished masses demonstrating over the price of tortillas and being pushed off of their homelands so that they can be turned into Chinese soybean plantations.

Real wages have stagnated, and would have fallen were it not for the increasing entry of women into the work force, in the US since 1973; in the 35 years since then we have kept afloat by means of households bringing in a second income, reducing our costs via buying cheaper imported goods (but killing living-wage jobs in the process), increased debt financing, and the increasing equity in our homes (those of us who own). The wave of deregulation and flattening of the tax scale started by Reagan in the 1980s set the stage for the snowballing movement of real assets in this country from the working and middle classes to the wealthy, such that the gulf is more or less unbridgeable now - the average working class citizen in Germany or France has a greater chance of upward mobility than the average American now, and that's been the case for some years, despite our liking to see ourselves as a 'classless' society.

This severe stratification is bad for democracy (although I'd submit that some of that 1% isn't so keen on democracy in any case and has more or less actively worked to undermine its pillars, such as public education), bad for national security and internal stability, and otherwise doesn't benefit anyone in the long term other than the robber barons themselves. I hate to sound so negative but I think we're in deep doo-doo, and have my doubts as to whether even 'Saint Change' Obama is willing, or capable, of taking on, not other members of our government, but those that hold their pocketbook-strings, and proposing and pushing through the sorts of changes we would need to the tax code, government infrastructure, trade policy, and all the rest, before we are bought out completely.

Regards,
Nydia

Another topic on a differen't forum was:

Is $100K/per year the new $50K/per year?...100K a year doesn't even go far, living a very modest life (with regards to home and trips..ect.) with no kids feels like 50K not even 10-15 years ago.Holy hell, do you realize how many people don't even break 50k? We've been living off one income of around 30k while my wife finished school. I don't think we were living in poverty by any means, but we don't have the latest and greatest, and we never will. Now that my wife is working and almost matching my salary, we might think about some trips, or finally replacing our old TV, or maybe just buying furniture that didn't come from a bargain store.

There's a perspective problem here. A good friend of mine makes over 120K a year, plus his wife's salary of around 40K. They bitch endlessly about how tight money is for them, while driving in a brand new car and showing up with new big screens. The last time they visited us they chose to stay in a very expensive hotel, rather than crash at our house like they would have in college. It's all a matter of how we look at the world.

Do we even need to outline what happens when you live below the poverty line, or compare 3rd world countries?


An interesting examination would be to look at that top 1% and see how much of their wealth they need, or even use. We just keep buying crap, and being told we need to buy more crap. I don't see the situation resolving ever. The other issue is that most of our leaders come from that top percentage - they don't even live in the same world as the people they represent.

Holy hell, do you realize how many people don't even break 50k?

Indeed, it's very instructive to look at the difference between the *mean* household income (the average), and the *median* household income - the amount which 50% make above, and 50% make below. (Economists, by the way, like to use mean household income when they want to argue that our standard of living *isn't* dropping :) ). Twenty-five years ago, these two numbers were very close. Now, the mean income is nearly *twice* what the median income is (Overall, the mean household income in the United States, according to the US Census Bureau 2004 Economic Survey, was $60,528, or $17,210 (39.73%) higher than the median household income, and the gap is widening). What does this, erm, mean? Simply put, it means that far fewer people are actually making that 'average' income than they were 25 years ago, and that income is getting more and more skewed towards the high and low ends.

By the way, as a college instructor with a Masters' Degree and 30 hours in my field, with full credit for both that extra education and all my years of teaching in school and out, in both a state and district that 'pays well', I make well under 50k/year and support a disabled soon-to-be graduate student on that. I've precariously gotten us from pillar to post via more debt than I care to think about and very judicious planning on how I would get us through my (paid at adjunct rate even if I work, which I do) summers. I can't imagine how people with children get by on half of that or less, which many people who work at, or go to, my school do, although 'needing' less certainly helps, when I look at where my own income has gone - being a bit of a space cadet I've been slow to make my own reality check and assess how I was going to manage my own assets longterm.

Regards,
Nydia

Holy hell, do you realize how many people don't even break 50k?

I certainly do, I have many brothers and sister who raised 3+ children on single person income with less than half that. The question was just thrown out there for examination. I have the same question as Nydia does and how do people make it with a house full of kids. I hired a guy a couple months ago for $14.00 and he has 5 children. Its what the position pays, and he works his butt off. How does he support that family with that kind of money? I don't ask..he must have outside money because he has one kid going to college, owns his own house, ect..

I certainly do, I have many brothers and sister who raised 3+ children on single person income with less than half that. The question was just thrown out there for examination. I have the same question as Nydia does and how do people make it with a house full of kids. I hired a guy a couple months ago for $14.00 and he has 5 children. Its what the position pays, and he works his butt off. How does he support that family with that kind of money? I don't ask..he must have outside money because he has one kid going to college, owns his own house, ect..
Like so many home owners over the past several years, he's probably been cashing equity out of his house to make ends meet.

An interesting examination would be to look at that top 1% and see how much of their wealth they need, or even use.

The top 1% are getting you to finance their lifestyle, because they've rigged the game in their favor and take first class flights and hotels on their stockholder's dimes. Pretty slick. Beyond real property many of them don't have to use much of their wealth at all.

The top 1% are getting you to finance their lifestyle, because they've rigged the game in their favor and take first class flights and hotels on their stockholder's dimes. Pretty slick. Beyond real property many of them don't have to use much of their wealth at all.Which is what makes the consumer-driven world so ludicrous. Heck, I've got a closet and several boxes of 'stuff' I haven't touched in years. I'm tempted to up grade my PC this year just because I can, not because I need the power. And I'd really like a shiny iPhone. And and and.

By the way, Ibuden, that "Holy hell" was not aimed at you, it sounded different in my head. It looks a lot more aggressive in retrospect.

Nydia mentioned Canada, and I don't think its a US only problem. Internationally I bet the top 1% hold even more than 70% of the world's wealth.

Yeah, but we should aspire to be a little more egalitarian than Zimbabwe and Afghanistan. The US, in it's glory days between the Civil War and the 1970s, had a much flatter wealth distribution curve. This was not coincidental. The top 1% have and likely will always control a disproportionate amount of wealth, but when average citizens have no effective way to buy into the economy and instead simply feed it has been the economic situation we're trying to move away from, not towards.

This isn't even a merit versus welfare thing, if Joe Working Citizen has no chance of realistically ever getting ahead, you have a recipe for social strife and a move away from education, civility, and democratic processes. Every economist from the most fascistic big business proponent to Marx arrived at that one.

Nydia mentioned Canada, and I don't think its a US only problem. Internationally I bet the top 1% hold even more than 70% of the world's wealth.

well...heres an interesting link.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality

From the BBC today: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7420744.stm

Nice to see that a medical charity that was originally founded to serve isolated tribes in Guyana is now spending most of its time serving the working poor in the US. In particular, take a look at the picture at the length of the line of people (in Tennessee) queued up to receive free dental and health care from a British ex-pat's charity organization. I don't know how we can claim to be a great or even civilized country in the face of such a failure to serve even the basic health care needs of our citizenry.

From the BBC today: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7420744.stm

Nice to see that a medical charity that was originally founded to serve isolated tribes in Guyana is now spending most of its time serving the working poor in the US. In particular, take a look at the picture at the length of the line of people (in Tennessee) queued up to receive free dental and health care from a British ex-pat's charity organization. I don't know how we can claim to be a great or even civilized country in the face of such a failure to serve even the basic health care needs of our citizenry.

omgz, commie sighted!

From the BBC today: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7420744.stm

Nice to see that a medical charity that was originally founded to serve isolated tribes in Guyana is now spending most of its time serving the working poor in the US. In particular, take a look at the picture at the length of the line of people (in Tennessee) queued up to receive free dental and health care from a British ex-pat's charity organization. I don't know how we can claim to be a great or even civilized country in the face of such a failure to serve even the basic health care needs of our citizenry.

To me, this and our current education system are our two biggest failures as a 'world leader.'