AS seen in the New Yorker -a typical American male who works full time and still has a job is earning almost exactly the same now as his counterpart was back in 1972, when Richard Nixon was in the White House, O. J. Simpson rushed a thousand yards for the Buffalo Bills, and Don McLean topped the charts with American Pie.
The figures, which appear in Table A-5 at the back of the Census Bureaus ...report (pdf), are these. Median earnings for full-time, year-round male workers: 2010$47,715; 1972$47,550. Thats not a typo. In thirty-eight years, the annual earnings of the typical male worker, adjusted to 2010 dollars, have risen by $165, or $3.17 a week.
If you do the comparison with 1973 it is even worse. The figure for median earnings of full-time male workers in that year (when O. J. rushed two thousand yards and Tony Orlando had a chart-topper with Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree) was $49,065. Between now and then, Archie Bunker and Willie Loman have suffered a pay cut of more than twenty-five dollars a week.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2011/09/poverty-figures.html#ixzz1h4gp9w6K
Now unless any of you are willing to make the case that the average American male worker in the USA has become a lazy bastard?
The argument (often made here by some of the morons on this board) that what is happening to the middle class is entirely resulting from Americans spending too much money is a rather assinine POV.