by Michael
What in the world is happening to the middle class? Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most vibrant middle class in the history of the world. When I was growing up, a single income was all that was needed to support a middle class lifestyle for an entire family. My mother didn’t work outside of the home, and that was the case with many other mothers that lived in our middle class neighborhood. None of the kids that I played with or went to school with were “wealthy”, but everyone lived comfortably. But now everything has changed. The middle class in America is working harder than ever, but it has been steadily shrinking. With each passing day, more Americans are falling out of the middle class and into poverty, and this is a trend that should deeply alarm all of us.
In most families, both parents have to work extremely hard just so that the bills can be paid each month.
In fact, in many cases both parents are either working multiple jobs or putting in insane amounts of overtime. At this point, squeezing endless hours out of workers has become a permanent state of affairs in many industries. The following comes from an NBC News article entitled “36-hour shifts, 80-hour weeks: Workers are being burned out by overtime”…
From firehouses and police stations to hospitals and manufacturing plants, workers say they are being required to work increasing overtime hours to make up for post-pandemic worker shortages — leaving them sleep-deprived, scrambling to cover child care duties, and missing birthdays, holidays and vacations. While the extra hours can provide a financial boost, some workers say the trade-off is no longer worth it as they see no end in sight to a problem that has now lasted for several years.
“It’s getting to that fever pitch moment,” said Gonano, who is president of the Virginia Beach Professional Fire and EMS union. “It’s just rampant. People are tired of working all the overtime. It’s definitely causing morale issues.”
Many years ago when I worked in Washington D.C., I remember putting in 80 hour weeks.
Working such long hours can really affect your health after a while.
Unfortunately, these days many Americans have no other choice. The only way that the bills are going to get paid is by working countless hours.
But even though Americans are working so hard, they aren’t doing so well. According to a brand new survey, only 14 percent of U.S. voters say that Joe Biden’s economic policies have made them better off…
A new poll spells out the steep economic cliff that President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign is facing.
Just 14 percent of voters think his policies have made them better off, according to the survey published Monday.
And overall almost 70 per cent said Biden’s economic policies had either hurt the US economy or had no impact, including 33 per cent who said they believed the president’s policies had ‘hurt the economy a lot.’
This is one of the primary reasons why so many voters have soured on Biden.
And when that same survey asked about the sources of financial stress, the number one response was inflation…
When asked what was causing them most financial stress, some 82 percent of those surveyed said price increases.
‘Every group — Democrats, Republicans and independents — list rising prices as by far the biggest economic threat . . . and the biggest source of financial stress,’ said Erik Gordon, a professor at Michigan’s Ross School.
‘That is bad news for Biden, and the more so considering how little he can do to reverse the perception of prices before election day.’
Over the past several years, the cost of living has gone up much faster than paychecks have.
Just look at the cost of housing. Home prices have gone into the stratosphere, and as a result housing is now more unaffordable than it has ever been before…
The income of a typical homebuyer in the United States surged to $107,000 from $88,000 last year, as home affordability precipitously worsened, according to an annual report from the National Association of Realtors.
The 22% jump was the highest annual increase on record, and puts homeownership out of reach for many families in the United States, where the median income is about $75,000, according to the Census Bureau.
Buying a home has become much harder for people as mortgage rates surged over the past two years and home prices continue to rise due to very low inventory.
And don’t even get me started on food prices.
When I get to the checkout counter at my local supermarket, I feel like asking the cashier what organ I should donate in order to pay for my cart of groceries.
In order to get inflation under control, the Federal Reserve has been aggressively hiking interest rates, and an economist that worked at the Fed for six years is warning that interest rates are going to go even higher…
“I worked at the Fed for six years and if inflation expectations are drifting higher and they’re not under control, the Fed absolutely will act,” Luke Tilley, chief economist at Wilmington Trust Investment Advisors, told CNN.
“That is the one thing that gives them trouble sleeping at night. They don’t lose sleep over recessions because they come and go, but they do lose sleep over long-term inflation expectations drifting higher,” he said.
Of course high interest rates are already absolutely devastating many sectors of the economy.
For example, the trucking industry is in the midst of “the great trucking recession” right now…
“Everybody’s calling this the great trucking recession, and it’s true because all the trucking companies right now are in dark times,” he said. “This is not a good time to be in the trucking industry. Just to paint a picture, the trucking industry is the engine that drives the American economy forward. We’re fueling growth [and] prosperity by transporting goods to where they need to be and when the engine breaks down or stops, it works like a heart. When that ceases to be, it brings the entire economic system to a halt.”
Yellow Corporation, for example, which is one of the nation’s oldest and largest trucking companies, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in August, laying off 30,000 employees. Convoy Inc., a Seattle-based trucking startup that was valued by investors at $3.8 billion just last year, shut down last month.
Our politicians in Washington have been borrowing and spending trillions upon trillions of dollars in a desperate attempt to prop up the economy, but it isn’t working.
But all of that borrowing and spending is making our long-term financial outlook a lot worse. In fact, Moody’s just reduced the rating outlook for the U.S. government from “stable” to “negative”…
Moody’s Investors Service on Friday lowered its ratings outlook on the United States’ government to negative from stable, pointing to rising risks to the nation’s fiscal strength.
The ratings agency has affirmed the long-term issuer and senior unsecured ratings of the U.S. at Aaa.
“In the context of higher interest rates, without effective fiscal policy measures to reduce government spending or increase revenues,” the agency said. “Moody’s expects that the US’ fiscal deficits will remain very large, significantly weakening debt affordability.”
We really are in the endgame.
Our leaders were able to keep the party going for a long time, but now the jig is up.
Inflation is out of control, the value of our currency is being destroyed, and debt levels have reached cataclysmic proportions.
The era of seemingly endless prosperity is over, and an extraordinary amount of pain is ahead of us.
A full-blown economic meltdown has now begun, and there is nothing that Joe Biden can do to reverse this process.
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