JimBowie1958
Old Fogey
- Sep 25, 2011
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The Professional Political Class with all its politicians, writers, journalists, lobbyists, and donors who have controlled American politics since FDR won in 1932 have collectively betrayed the American Middle Class.
It is time to end Edward Bernays little system of control of the American public and put the political system back to work for OUR BENEFIT and not a bunch of elitist Oligarchs.
Donald Trump is rising because the US middle class has crashed
There’s no secret behind America’s groundswell of support for Donald Trump, the political outsider whose bid for the Republican presidential nomination threatens rip the party of Lincoln asunder. Trump supporters—who pushed him to victory in key Republican nominating contests in Mississippi and Michigan on Tuesday—are disproportionately older whites without college diplomas.
Today, these folks are usually referred to as “working-class.” But at the heart of Trump’s appeal is the uncomfortable fact that they used to be something else. These people used to be America’s middle class.
Last year, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis published an interesting bit of research. The paper showed that “middle class” living standards have declined much more drastically than other metrics—such as median household income—would suggest.
Analysts at the bank took survey data and sorted respondents by demographic criteria such as race, age, and education level, rather than income. They defined “middle class” families as those families “headed by someone at least 40 years old who is white or Asian with exactly a high school diploma, or black or Hispanic with a two- or four-year college degree.” These were the demographic profiles typical of people at the center of the US income distribution—the middle class—back when the same survey was first taken in the late 1980s.
Then they looked at how the income and wealth of families that met those criteria developed over time in the Fed’s Survey of Consumer Finances, which is conducted every three years and offers detailed data on the financial health of Americans.
The upshot: Real median income of these “demographically defined middle-class” households fell roughly 16% to $45,248 in 2013, from nearly $54,000 in 1989. (A separate study found that earnings of men in the US with a high school diploma, but no college degree, fell 13% between between 1990 and 2013.)
It is time to end Edward Bernays little system of control of the American public and put the political system back to work for OUR BENEFIT and not a bunch of elitist Oligarchs.
Donald Trump is rising because the US middle class has crashed
There’s no secret behind America’s groundswell of support for Donald Trump, the political outsider whose bid for the Republican presidential nomination threatens rip the party of Lincoln asunder. Trump supporters—who pushed him to victory in key Republican nominating contests in Mississippi and Michigan on Tuesday—are disproportionately older whites without college diplomas.
Today, these folks are usually referred to as “working-class.” But at the heart of Trump’s appeal is the uncomfortable fact that they used to be something else. These people used to be America’s middle class.
Last year, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis published an interesting bit of research. The paper showed that “middle class” living standards have declined much more drastically than other metrics—such as median household income—would suggest.
Analysts at the bank took survey data and sorted respondents by demographic criteria such as race, age, and education level, rather than income. They defined “middle class” families as those families “headed by someone at least 40 years old who is white or Asian with exactly a high school diploma, or black or Hispanic with a two- or four-year college degree.” These were the demographic profiles typical of people at the center of the US income distribution—the middle class—back when the same survey was first taken in the late 1980s.
Then they looked at how the income and wealth of families that met those criteria developed over time in the Fed’s Survey of Consumer Finances, which is conducted every three years and offers detailed data on the financial health of Americans.
The upshot: Real median income of these “demographically defined middle-class” households fell roughly 16% to $45,248 in 2013, from nearly $54,000 in 1989. (A separate study found that earnings of men in the US with a high school diploma, but no college degree, fell 13% between between 1990 and 2013.)
