5 Ways the Middle Class Is Getting Screwed

When Democrats talk about middle class Americans, they almost inevitably use them as a cudgel to attack the rich. On the other hand, bizarrely, Republicans seem to spend much more time defending the rich from attacks by the Left than talking about what they’re going to do to help the middle class.

That’s unfortunate because middle class Americans are the backbone of the country; yet their interests always seem to take a backseat to those of the wealthy, the poor and the naked self-interest of BOTH political parties. There’s nothing wrong with giving the poor a hand-up or making sure that the rich are treated fairly, but looking after the interests of America’s middle class should be priority #1 for both parties.

Instead of treating the interests of the middle class as a star for both parties to follow to take this country into the future, they’ve been getting screwed over.

1) Obamacare: The Affordable Care Act was portrayed as a panacea that benefits everyone, but what it actually does is punch middle class Americans in the teeth in order to help people with pre-existing conditions who didn’t already have insurance. At this point, everyone knows Barack Obama lied when he said you could keep your doctor. People also know he lied when he said you could keep your insurance. Millions of middle class small business owners have already lost their insurance and tens of millions of Americans will lose their insurance because of the employer mandate. However, the most devastating lie to the middle class was Obama’s false claim that the ACA would save the average family of four $2,500 a year in premiums. Instead, premiums skyrocketed by as much as 78% for some groups and “$643 billion in new taxes, penalties and fees” to cover the $50,000 a head it’s costing Americans to pay for each person who gets on Obamacare. If you are a middle class American whose salary stayed the same, chances are health care costs alone have made you feel as if you’re being dragged backward.

2) Soaring College Prices: Even though median household income has declined ACROSS THE BOARD for Americans in all income groups since 2000, the price of a college education rose at 7.45% per year from 1978 to 2011. Parents are digging into their savings and their kids are coming out of school deeply in debt. The average student loan debt in 2013 was $29,400. Where’s the push by either party for more rigorous work schedules for professors at public universities, reductions in their inflated salaries or a drawback on the administrative bloat? The middle class is drowning in debt to put their kids through school and nobody seems to care.

3) Trade policies: Trade is an extremely complex subject. For example, if you want to know the REAL reason we are developing more incredibly wealthy Americans like Bill Gates while more middle class Americans are falling behind, trade has a lot to do with it. On the one hand, because of the ease of foreign trade in the modern era, a product like Microsoft Windows is no longer just something for Americans. It can now be easily sold all over the world and that helps a few people at the top get extremely rich. On the other hand, because of the effective use of shipping containers (which only started happening about 50 years ago), the rise of computers and feasibility of instant communications, a lot of jobs that had to be done locally have moved overseas. You can now hire someone in India who’s educated, speaks English and will work for $4 an hour to do the same job you would need to pay an American $20 to do in many parts of the country. That’s the inevitable part of things that’s difficult to do anything about. The world has changed and we have to deal with it as it is.

However, as a nation that has embraced free trade policies, we’ve been far too reluctant to throw our weight around to ensure that markets are opened to American products. Free trade does benefit the middle class by ensuring they have cheap goods, but far too often Americans who make competitive products are being closed out of foreign markets by protectionists while our government merely shrugs its shoulders. Meanwhile, industry after industry has closed its doors in the United States. We don’t make radios and TVs here anymore. No cell phones are made here. Over 42,000 factories have closed since 2001. The villain isn’t free trade so much as politicians who aren’t willing to DEMAND that other countries give our businesses staffed by middle class workers the same opportunity to sell our products overseas as we give other nations.

4) Immigration And Illegal Immigration: Illegal immigration mainly hurts poor Americans who lose out on jobs to illegals who can undercut them on salary because they don’t have to pay healthcare and car insurance and can cheat on their taxes with impunity. However, there are also middle class Americans losing jobs and seeing their wages driven down because they have to compete with foreigners who don’t have the same expenses they do because they’re above the law.

However, legal immigration is also problematic as well. That doesn’t mean immigration is bad. To the contrary, immigration is good for the country and immigrants make a tremendous contribution. However, water is also good for you a glass at a time, but it can also wipe you out in a flood. We have a flood of immigration in this country and the middle class is suffering because of it. A report from the Center of Immigration Studies lays out how bad it has gotten.

Government data show that since 2000 all of the net gain in the number of working-age (16 to 65) people holding a job has gone to immigrants (legal and illegal). This is remarkable given that native-born Americans accounted for two-thirds of the growth in the total working-age population. Though there has been some recovery from the Great Recession, there were still fewer working-age natives holding a job in the first quarter of 2014 than in 2000, while the number of immigrants with a job was 5.7 million above the 2000 level.

The results are easy to see, but the “why” is harder to fathom. Are immigrants displacing younger Americans from the work force? Is someone who’s newly arrived in the country willing to work cheaper than a native-born American in a high profile job? Are American minorities losing out?

We don’t know for sure, but what we do know is that the current level of immigration we have is hurting the middle class. Would there be anything wrong with slowing down the number of immigrants coming here for awhile to try to help the people who are already here? If either party put the middle class first, it would have already been done.

5) The Debt: The higher our debt goes, the more money the Federal Reserve is going to print in order to make it easier for us to pay off our debt. The more money the Fed prints, the more inflation we’re going to ultimately have. The more inflation we have, the less the money that middle class Americans have saved over a lifetime is going to be worth. That’s a big deal, because there is absolutely no chance – none, zero, nada – that Medicare and Social Security are going to continue to survive in their current form.

The total present value of payments expected under Social Security and Medicare beyond what is expected to be collected under current tax laws is about $100 trillion. One way to put that amount of money in context is to note that it is about twice the amount of all the net private assets that exist in America today….the best back-of-envelope estimate is that meeting this unfunded portion of our Social Security and Medicare commitments would require roughly an immediate 80 percent increase in federal income taxes, sustained forever.

Add to that the fact the Democrats are eyeing pension funds and Obama is already floating the idea of a wealth tax. So, what happens to middle class Americans when the value of money they’ve saved is dramatically eroded because of inflation, Social Security and Medicare go bust or at best, limp along, taxes go through the roof and the government is scooping money out of pensions and bank accounts to pay off our debt? The poor will still be poor. The richest Americans will move somewhere else. The middle class will be the ones crushed like a raccoon under the wheels of a semi-truck. That’s where we’re headed and by the time we’re done, there will be people hoping they die before we run out of money.

Obama declares war on the middle class

*approximately $320 billion in new taxes. He’s packaging this as a “Robin Hood*” effort:

Ostensibly, by ripping off some taxpayers he will be able to give more people free stuff.

This is simply cynical class warfare of several different levels.

First, and foremost, not a single penny of any tax increase on the wealthy will see its way into the pockets of the middle class simply because Obama is not advocating tax relief. Rather he’s proposing to use the increase to create a new barrage of increased in federal spending that ensures in a few years that the middle class will be called upon by a future Democrat administration to pay more for all the wonder spending the federal government is doing.

The administration is able to tout these tax increases as helping the middle class because they define as rich anyone who is not destitute. These are the taxes. The fact is that much of the tax increase on the wealthy comes from the middle class. From Americans for Tax Reform:

* Robin Hood was a tax protester. In folklore, he was responding to extortionate taxes imposed on the the “proletariat” during the reign of King John, a time when the nobility and clergy were exempted from taxation. Robin Hood was actually giving the poor a tax refund.

http://www.redstate.com/2015/01/19/obama-declares-war-middle-class/

27 Facts That Show How The Middle Class Has Fared Under 6 Years Of Barack Obama

By Michael Snyder, on January 18th, 2015

27 Facts That Show How The Middle Class Has Fared Under Barack Obama

During his State of the Union speech on Tuesday evening, Barack Obama is going to promise to make life better for middle class families. Of course he has also promised to do this during all of his other State of the Union addresses, but apparently he still believes that there are people out there that are buying what he is selling.

Each January, he gets up there and tells us how the economy is “turning around” and to believe that much brighter days are right around the corner. And yet things just continue to get even worse for the middle class.

The numbers that you are about to see will not be included in Obama’s State of the Union speech. They don’t fit the “narrative” that Obama is trying to sell to the American people. But all of these statistics are accurate. They paint a picture of a middle class that is dying.

Yes, the decline of the U.S. middle class is a phenomenon that has been playing out for decades. But without a doubt, our troubles have accelerated during the Obama years. When it comes to economics, he is completely and utterly clueless, and the policies that he has implemented are eating away at the foundations of our economy like a cancer.

The following are 27 facts that show how the middle class has fared under 6 years of Barack Obama…

#1 American families in the middle 20 percent of the income scale now earn less money than they did on the day when Barack Obama first entered the White House.

#2 American families in the middle 20 percent of the income scale have a lower net worth than they did on the day when Barack Obama first entered the White House.

#3 According to a Washington Post article published just a few days ago, more than 50 percent of the children in U.S. public schools now come from low income homes. This is the first time that this has happened in at least 50 years.

#4 According to a Census Bureau report that was recently released, 65 percent of all children in the United States are living in a home that receives some form of aid from the federal government.

#5 In 2008, the total number of business closures exceeded the total number of businesses being created for the first time ever, and that has continued to happen every single year since then.

#6 In 2008, 53 percent of all Americans considered themselves to be “middle class”. But by 2014, only 44 percent of all Americans still considered themselves to be “middle class”.

#7 In 2008, 25 percent of all Americans in the 18 to 29-year-old age bracket considered themselves to be “lower class”. But in 2014, an astounding 49 percent of all Americans in that age range considered themselves to be “lower class”.

#8 Traditionally, owning a home has been one of the key indicators that you belong to the middle class. So what does the fact that the rate of homeownership in America has been falling for seven years in a row say about the Obama years?

#9 According to a survey that was conducted last year, 52 percent of all Americans cannot even afford the house that they are living in right now.

#10 After accounting for inflation, median household income in the United States is 8 percent lower than it was when the last recession started in 2007.

#11 According to one recent survey, 62 percent of all Americans are currently living paycheck to paycheck.

#12 At this point, one out of every three adults in the United States has an unpaid debt that is “in collections“.

#13 When Barack Obama first set foot in the Oval Office, 60.6 percent of all working age Americans had a job. Today, that number is sitting at only 59.2 percent…

Employment Population Ratio 2015

#14 While Barack Obama has been in the White House, the average duration of unemployment in the United States has risen from 19.8 weeks to 32.8 weeks.

#15 It is hard to believe, but an astounding 53 percent of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year.

#16 At the end of Barack Obama’s first year in office, our yearly trade deficit with China was 226 billion dollars. Last year, it was more than 314 billion dollars.

#17 When Barack Obama was first elected, the U.S. debt to GDP ratio was under 70 percent. Today, it is over 101 percent.

#18 The U.S. national debt is on pace to approximately double during the eight years of the Obama administration. In other words, under Barack Obama the U.S. government will accumulate about as much debt as it did under all of the other presidents in U.S. history combined.

#19 According to the New York Times, the “typical American household” is now worth 36 percent less than it was worth a decade ago.

#20 The poverty rate in the United States has been at 15 percent or above for 3 consecutive years. This is the first time that has happened since 1965.

#21 From 2009 through 2013, the U.S. government spent a whopping 3.7 trillion dollars on welfare programs.

#22 While Barack Obama has been in the White House, the number of Americans on food stamps has gone from 32 million to 46 million.

#23 Ten years ago, the number of women in the U.S. that had full-time jobs outnumbered the number of women in the U.S. on food stamps by more than a 2 to 1 margin. But now the number of women in the U.S. on food stamps actually exceeds the number of women that have full-time jobs.

#24 One recent survey discovered that about 22 percent of all Americans have had to turn to a church food panty for assistance.

#25 An astounding 45 percent of all African-American children in the United States live in areas of “concentrated poverty”.

#26 40.9 percent of all children in the United States that are living with only one parent are living in poverty.

#27 According to a report that was released late last year by the National Center on Family Homelessness, the number of homeless children in the United States has reached a new all-time record high of 2.5 million.

Unfortunately, this is just the beginning.

The incredibly foolish decisions that have been made by Obama, Congress and the Federal Reserve have brought us right to the precipice of another major financial crisis and another crippling economic downturn.

So as bad as the numbers that I just shared with you above are, the truth is that they are nothing compared to what is coming.

We are heading into the greatest economic crisis that any of us have ever seen, and it is going to shock the world.

I hope that you are getting ready.

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/27-facts-show-middle-class-fared-6-years-barack-obama

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