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 : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: greatplains_guy who wrote (57378)	10/19/2012 12:40:31 AM
From: greatplains_guy	Respond to of 71588

How Obama and Biden Buried the Middle Class By EDWARD MORRISSEY, The Fiscal Times October 3, 2012 Michael Kinsley once defined “gaffe” as the accidental telling of a political truth. That definition aptly describes the jaw-dropping admission from Joe Biden on the campaign trail this week. Thundering against Mitt Romney’s economic plan, which Biden erroneously claims will raise taxes on the middle class, the Vice President proclaimed his outrage. “How they can justify raising taxes on a middle class that has been buried the last four years?” Biden asked. Perhaps Biden missed a memo or two, but for most of the last four years, his running mate, Barack Obama, has been President. For two of the last four years, his party controlled Congress by large majorities, as well as the two years that preceded those, and Biden’s party has controlled the Senator for all six years. In fact, both Biden and Obama sat in the Senate previously, Obama for four and Biden for decades. If the middle class has been buried, it’s been on their watch. Is this a political inconvenient truth? Has the middle class been “buried” the last four years? By any measure, the middle class has certainly lost ground. Median household income has declined each of the last four years, a decline which has accelerated during the Obama “recovery” that started in June 2009. Median household income dropped 2.6 percent during the Great Recession, but has dropped 4.8 percent in the three years since. That is one reason why the Census Bureau reported three weeks ago that the middle class had declined to“an all-time low” in 2011, as the Washington Post headlined their article on the subject. By the third year of Barack Obama’s presidency, poverty had leveled off at a near all-time high as well, while the middle class continued to lose ground on income. But that wasn’t the only measure on which the middle class found itself moving backward; their average work hours also declined, as did the average pay rate, while home values continued to decline. The percentage of Americans with jobs fell to a 31-year low in August at 63.5 percent, another symptom of a decline in the middle class. All of this occurred during the Obama/Biden administration, a point that the Democrats had tried to avoid ... thefiscaltimes.com