Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Impeach George W. Bush -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (81292)	6/2/2007 7:20:09 PM
From: JBTFD	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93284

""taken many high paying jobs overseas" implies that their are now less high paying jobs in the US. But that isn't in fact what is occurring." Maybe you could substantiate that. And I'm not talking about CEO jobs, just good paying middle and upper middle class jobs. Or lower middle class jobs for that matter. "Being able to afford a house is not the only measure of wealth. But even by that measure people have gotten wealthier. Home ownership is up, and the average house is larger." Apples and oranges. Housing affordability and home ownership rate are two different things. There is no question that housing affordability is down over a generation ago. It now takes 2 good incomes to afford a home in most major cities. A generation ago one good income was enough to afford a home and a good lifestyle. So maybe home ownership is up, but at what cost? Lower affordability means that both parents need to work and children are left at daycare. Do you see this as a step forward in the quality of life? Maybe you do, because of your value system. I don't. Lower taxes, and a slowdown in regulatory expansion helps far more than the very rich. Substantiation? One could argue that tax cuts have coincided with a propensity to deficit spend and that it was the flood of new money hitting the economy that spurred on economic gains not the new tax cuts. This is the case with both Reagan and Bush. They both spent like drunken sailors , put it on their card, so to speak. I argue that that spending is what spurred the economy, not the tax cuts. And the long term cost of that type of policy is that the national debt is balooned. So now more and more of our taxes goes to pay interest on all the debt that Reagan and Bush have racked up. This is the underside of republican fiscal policy that no republican seems to want to be honest about. "Also to the extent the rich are getting richer they are not getting richer at the expense of everyone else, but more often to the benefit of everyone else." This is also article of faith righty claptrap. But if is not an honest assessment. The bottom 60% of income earners in our country are falling more and more behind and their standard of living is getting lower and lower. Benefit of everyone else my ass.

To: TimF who wrote (81292)	6/2/2007 9:15:19 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 93284

Good News on Income Mobility Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post takes a beating around here sometimes, so I want to draw attention to his dynamite column this week on the non-disappearance of the middle class. Drawing on a new book, Social Stratification in the United States by Stephen Rose, Pearlstein demonstrates that rumors of the demise of the American middle class are greatly exaggerated. In fact, living standards for most Americans are improving. Not everyone is flipping hamburgers or working at Wal-Mart. To the degree that the middle class is shrinking, it is because more people are rising out of it than falling from it. Pearlstein takes pains to note that Rose “is not your standard-issue conservative market apologist — far from it. He left medical school to get his PhD in economics, then alternated between teaching and community organizing. He served on the Democratic staff of the Joint Economic Committee and in the economics shop of the Clinton Labor Department.” So you can trust him — he worked for Clinton! And Rose finds, as Pearlstein lays it out, that there’s a lot more good news than the “sky-is-falling rhetoric of the Democratic left” would lead you to believe. Pearlstein notes: [I]t is often reported that the median household income in the United States is $44,500. Of course, that takes in households of varying size, from singles to the Brady Bunch. It also includes households headed by workers in the prime of their working years (29 to 59), as well as those just beginning or ending their careers, when earnings tend to be lower. So, to get a truer picture of economic well-being, Rose adjusts the data for household size and excludes those headed by people younger than 29 or older than 59. And when he does, it turns out that the median income for the “typical American family” jumps to $63,000, which in most parts of the country buys a pretty comfortable middle-class lifestyle. This doesn’t mean the middle class isn’t shrinking. In fact, from 1979 to 2004, Rose calculates, the percentage of households in the “middle class” category — those with incomes of $30,000 to $90,000 — fell to 39 from 47 percent. But it would be hard to describe that as bad news when the proportion of well-off households — those with incomes of more than $90,000 — rose by nearly nine percentage points. During the same time frame, the percentage of households that were poor or near-poor remained about the same. One of the favorite liberal story lines is that the only way middle class families have been able to maintain their standard of living is by forcing mom to work more hours. But that, too, turns out to be an exaggeration. By looking just at married couples at various points in the income ladder, Rose found that for all but the poorest households, inflation-adjusted income was higher in 2004 than in 1979 even after factoring out any increase in spousal work hours. It is also a myth that the Great American Jobs Machine is producing mostly lousy, low-paying service jobs. Rose simplifies the government data by putting all jobs in three categories: “elite” jobs, encompassing managers and professionals; “good jobs,” such as those held by supervisors, skilled blue-collar workers, craft workers, police, firefighters and clerical workers; and “less skilled” jobs, such as those held by unskilled machine operators, laborers, sales clerks and waiters. Looking at it that way, it turns out that the number of lousy, low-skilled jobs has been on a long, steady decline since 1979, while the number of “elite” jobs has been growing steadily. The number of “good” jobs has declined marginally as skilled office work has replaced skilled factory work. Rose is concerned, quite properly, about the condition of the poorest people in the American economy, though he and I would probably disagree on the best way to help them enter the economic mainstream. But he’s also brought a healthy dose of reality to the debate over “the declining middle class.” cato-at-liberty.org -- washingtonpost.com