the right keeps denying the middle class is getting screwed. THEN,
when they DO admit we have a problem, they blame the middle class.
now comes m ore proof the middle class is being raped by the wealthy:


http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/1a8a5cb2-9...44feab49a.html

The slow economic strangulation of the Freemans and millions of other
middle-class Americans started long before the Great Recession, which
merely exacerbated the “personal recession” that ordinary Americans
had been suffering for years. Dubbed “median wage stagnation” by
economists, the annual incomes of the bottom 90 per cent of US
families have been essentially flat since 1973 – having risen by only
10 per cent in real terms over the past 37 years. That means most
Americans have been treading water for more than a generation. Over
the same period the incomes of the top 1 per cent have tripled. In
1973, chief executives were on average paid 26 times the median
income. Now the *multiple is above 300.

The trend has only been getting stronger. Most economists see the
Great Stagnation as a structural problem – meaning it is immune to the
business cycle. In the last expansion, which started in January 2002
and ended in December 2007, the median US household income dropped by
$2,000 – the first ever instance where most Americans were worse off
at the end of a cycle than at the start. Worse is that the long era of
stagnating incomes has been accompanied by something profoundly
un-American: declining income mobility.

Then there are those, such as Paul Krugman, The New York Times
columnist and Nobel prize winner, who blame it on politics, notably
the conservative backlash which began when Ronald Reagan came to power
in 1980, and which sped up the decline of unions and reversed the most
progressive features of the US tax system.

Fewer than a tenth of American private sector workers now belong to a
union. People in Europe and Canada are subjected to the same forces of
globalisation and technology. But they belong to unions in larger
numbers and their healthcare is publicly funded. More than half of
household bankruptcies in the US are caused by a serious *illness or
accident
---------------

middle class DECLINING in income

FEWER UNIONS

notice a pattern here? aided and abetted by right wing mythology about
the 'american dream' and the infallibility of the rich...