How Are American Families Doing? A Guided Tour of Our Financial Well-Being - NYTimes.com:
- Incomes Fell From 2010 to 2013 for Most
- Many groups, including both the youngest and oldest families and those without a college education, saw steep income declines even after an economic recovery had begun.
- Both young adult households (those headed by someone under 35) and those households headed by someone over 75 have seen steep income declines in that same period.
- This is the simplest yet most important fact to understand about the current economic recovery: It has not resulted in higher incomes for anyone other than those who were already doing well. And very large groups of Americans have experienced falling incomes.
- Wages have fallen as a proportion of income
- The gains in the stock market did not translate into greater wealth for most American families. The median American household was worth $81,200 in 2013, down from $82,800 in 2010 and way down from the $135,400 of 2007. (Those numbers are all inflation-adjusted, using 2013 dollars). While the wealthiest 25 percent receive a meaningful chunk of their income from capital gains, the bottom 75 percent receive a trivial amount.
- The survey’s breakdown of where household income is coming from helps explain why this is happening. Most Americans, particularly those in the middle- and lower-income brackets, derive most of their income from wages and salaries, not from investment income. In the wealthiest 25 percent of households, only 47 percent of their income comes from wages, compared with 70 to 80 percent for the lower three brackets.
America: Poorer, Less Affluent, In Decline.
What Happened?
Washington Sold Out America for Wall Street. Just look at Hillary Clinton and Eric Cantor (and they are just 2 of many, many examples). The pathology is systemic in both parties: Democrat and Republican.
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