22 Statistics That Prove The Middle Class Is Being Systematically Wiped Out Of Existence In America is an excellent if startling slide show. It shows the evidence of a middle class being wiped out but doesn’t delve into “How”.
The bottom line is that the “Middle Class” increasingly have no margin (and/or no will) to save. We truly have been reduced in many ways to wage slavery. Whether it’s corporate monopolists or state socialists, the net effect is the same – an oligarchy of wealth and power.
If you believe that any nation is best served when there is a strong Middle Class, the first step is to create your own business with its own income over and above your “wage slavery” and then encourage others to do the same through mentoring, voluntary associations of entrepreneurs, establishing credit unions, etc.
Here are the first 10 signs…
1. 83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.
2. 61 percent of Americans “always or usually” live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.
3. 66% of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.
4. 36 percent of Americans say that they don’t contribute anything to retirement savings.
5. A staggering 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.
6. 24% of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.
7. Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008.
8. Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.
9. For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.
10. In 1950, the ratio of the average executive’s paycheck to the average worker’s paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.
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