Quote:
Originally Posted by joshgirls
I hope your right & im wrong. what i see different today is that the middle class is getting killed. all my 30 something friends, either husband & wife are both working, or one or both got laid off. The rich will always do well. thats true going back to the romans. But if there is no consumer to make the boom happen, there will be no boom. & the middle class is taking it in the ass from both high taxes & corporations that are gouging them & offshoring their jobs. Banks, insurance companies, oil companies, hospitals, they are charging absurd rates for their services. all these industries are oligopolies. there was a time when banks paid 4-5% interest on savings, 12-16% on the credit card, but those days are gone. a boom cannot happen when the worker pays 40% in taxes, 30% on the credit card, & lost their job to a foreign worker. The status quo cannot last.
|
Something that has happened over the last 20 years is that real wages for the middle class have not gone up much, but the prices of many things have. Right now the average wage in the US is about $16 per hour while the average home costs around 170K. That means the average person can no longer afford the average home unless they want to charge everything else in their lives and pay small monthly payments. Of course that ends up with people drowning in debt and if something happens like a layoff or illness they often end in bankruptcy.
So like you say the status quo has to change before there can be any real long term growth. The problem is that any major change is going to mean people will have to sacrifice things in their lives and many Americans don't like being told that they have to give anything up so change doesn't come easy