Time to raise taxes on Obama beneficiaries?
Welcome to Hubpages, retief. I’m looking forward to reading your first Hub.
If you examine the data, the top 1% have indeed prospered at the expense of the rest of Americans and it all has very little to do with the policies of the Obama administration. If you are trying to lay responsibility for the decline of the middle class on President Obama, you are seriously out of touch with reality. Over the last 50 years, the American economy has been restructured so that all wealth that circulates in society now gravitates upward into the pockets of those who need it the least.
Perhaps you missed the statement in your linked article, “The sharp fall in wealth for middle class, young, black and Hispanic households during the 'Great Recession' is readily explicable: such households tended to have higher debts and greater percentages of their wealth invested into their homes.” In addition, you apparently did not read in your linked article that studies “found income inequality has risen in almost every state over the last 30 years and that the middle class has just suffered its ‘worst decade in modern history.’” {1} Would you like to blame the President’s policies for an economic trend that began 30 years ago?
The Drudge report also identifies the collapse of the housing bubble that began in 2007 as the major cause of middle class decline. “But those gains were almost entirely erased as the Great Recession began in 2008, with black homeownership rates dipping to 45 percent last year and continuing to fall.” {2} It should also be noted that both home values and ownership fell for poor and middleclass whites as well.
Your Salon.com article makes the economic picture in American crystal clear: “New research found that while median wealth plummeted, the top 1 percent increased wealth by 71 percent.”
Edward Wolff, professor of economics at New York University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, analyzed the total net worth of Americans in 2007. He discovered that more than 1/3 of all privately held wealth in this country belonged to the top 1% of households. The next 19% of Americans held about half of all wealth, leaving a measly 15% for the 80% of struggling wage earners and the poverty-stricken at the bottom end. However, the importance of home ownership became significantly more obvious when he examined the total net worth of Americans minus the value of their homes. When he removed home ownership from his calculations, the top 1% of households accounted for 42.7% of the wealth, the next 19% for 50.3%, leaving a paltry 7.0% of all marketable financial wealth in the names of the least fortunate 80%. {3}
Imagine what will happen to this country if this trend continues. You once said, “it must be obvious that the culture is lost and work no longer has a real value.” How true! Many people at the bottom of the ladder are coming to realize that hard work and perseverance was once enough to live the American Dream but no longer.
Thanks for this thread, retief. I am looking forward to reading your first hub.
{1} http://www.salon.com/2012/11/27/median_ … ince_1969/
{2} http://www.drudge.com/news/163325/colla … obamaville
{3} Edward N. Wolff, "Recent Trends in Household Wealth in the United States: Rising Debt and the Middle-Class Squeeze-an Update to 2007" http://www.levyinstitute.org/publications/?docid=1235
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