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Is the “Middle Class” disappearing in America? (1 Viewer)

Eric_L

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Eric
You should be a bit more hinest, with us if not yourself. You critisize Heritage for leaving out important details then you drop that bomb.

RobertR,
I think you're on to something, but there are other ways competition gets stifled or inhibited. Look at the volumes of regulations regarding the auto industry, pharmacutical, insurance, toys, tools, etc.
 

mylan

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You know Eric, thats what I meant by "playing" the market, invest..period, not damn day trade. Most in the middle class are not going to INVEST period because there is always something else that takes the money. My dad, who is the world's most saving person, could have made a fortune investing but he grew up poor and his mentality was always "the stock market is a rich mans game".
 

Ken Chan

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No, the conclusion from those stats, culled from "various government reports", is still bogus. First, just because you might have some kind of air conditioning and a microwave oven, it doesn't mean you're comfortable. More to the point, those "material conditions" say nothing about the family's access to quality health care, the children's opportunities for a good education, or how much money they're investing each month in their retirement and the stock market, just to name a few things.
 

MarkHastings

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but there are middle class people who don't have that either.

I think I know what he was getting at with the microwave and A/C thing...it's so bizarre to think that poor people can own such items. Like cell phones; a poor person with a cell phone? It's possible, but just a bizarre concept. Like when I drove by the slums in Puerto Rico....they all had satellite dishes on their roofs. The dishes probably cost just as much as their entire homes. It's such a weird thing to imagine.

It's these "luxury" items that poor people have that would NEVER have been possible back in the 50's and 60's. I mean, what luxury item could a poor person own back then? Yet, today, you see it all the time.
 

Brian Perry

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But I would bet that in absolute terms, health care for even those considered poor is better now than 50 years ago. (One way to verify would be to look at life expectancy tables...I'm sure they're higher now for all socioeconomic levels.)

As for education, I am convinced that the most important factor is the family a student comes from, not money spent. When I look at the dollar amount spent per student in my district (a suburb of Chicago), it is actually less than the per capita amount spent in the notoriously poor Chicago Public Schools ($8,600 vs. $9,500). Yet the test scores in my area are miles ahead of CPS. I think the main reason is that the percentage of students in my area coming from 2-parent families is over 90%, whereas in the CPS I believe the number is less than 25%.

In today's "gotta have the latest toy" world, I can see how someone with little discretionary income spends it on a Sony Playstation instead of books. But even then, how many choose to use the free public library? You'd be surprised at how much simple choices like that affect people's futures.
 

Eric_L

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Eric

According to your dad then there is an epidemic of affluence in America.
Half of American Households Own Equities
http://www.ici.org/shareholders/dec/...quity_rpt.html
56.9% to be more specific. " Two-thirds of all equity investors in 2005 are between the ages of 35 and 64... Ninety percent of equity investors own stock mutual funds and nearly half own individual stocks... As in past years, nearly all equity owners in 2005 follow a buy-and-hold investment philosophy and view their equity holdings as long-term investments. However, equity investors today are somewhat more conservative financially than they were six years ago, likely in response to the 2000-2002 bear market. Although equity owners are more cautious about investment risk today, their equity holdings continue to account for more than half of their household financial assets."

Meanwhile - there is likely a reason why your father has that perception: Equities are a tool for creating wealth - if you purchase them then there’s a considerably higher likelihood that you will eventually be wealthy - and therefore - no longer middle class. To expect wealth creation tools to be spread evenly across social classes is pretty silly considering that these tools are designed to move people UP in social class. It would be like noticing that healthy people are much more likely to be eating healthy and exercising and then wondering why overweight people are under-represented among them...
 

Chu Gai

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Well sure Ken but this perception of comfortable, real or unreal as it may be, is always going to exist since it's relative. Maybe we've all read about the retired schoolteacher or librarian who upon their death bequeathed millions to some organization and we find out they'd been investing a little over great lengths of time. Even for people of modest means, if they're disciplined, there's certainly ways to substantially improve their net wealth.

On a side note, did anyone read how the borough of Queens is the only large county in the country where the incomes of blacks is greater than that of whites? Digging deeper into this very interesting statistic, they find it's not the native born blacks who've accomplished this but immigrants. Now, if anyone's got it tough, it's people who are just entering a new country and have to deal with a very different life. Maybe there are lessons to be learned from studying how they've become successful.
 

RobertR

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This essay from Thomas Sowell has much to say about the mistake of simplifying the causes of economic inequality to the politically convenient labels "racism" and "evil corporations". It's far more complex than that, and thinking only in such terms is not the way to address the problem. One of Sowell's most interesting examples is that of black immigrants from the West Indies, who on average do better economically than whites, despite having arrived in this country destitute and having all the disadvantages of American blacks (history of slavery, racism). On a more personal level, my wife tells me of the blatant discrimination against the Chinese minority in her native Indonesia (borne out by Sowell's research), yet they are far better off economically than the native Indonesians.
 

george kaplan

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Thomas Sowell?!?! God, I don't know how to say this with enough force without being political, but he is one of the biggest morons in the entire world. If he's saying something, I'm just going to assume that the opposite is true.

Talk about an oxymoron. He has a belief. He finds data that supports his belief, and ignores all data (usually great quantities of such) that don't support his a priori beliefs.

I bite my tongue in the hopes that this thread doesn't get shut down, but man it's hard not to expand on why this man is a complete idiot.
 

RobertR

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So you're claiming, for example, that West Indies black immigrants do not have a higher average income than whites, or that Chinese Indonesians do not experience discrimination in that country, yet are better off economically than native Indonesians (a fact personally attested to by my wife)? What is your source for disputing such facts (and many others) cited by him?
 

Chu Gai

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george, I can appreciate an alternate point of view and if perhaps you can take a couple of Sowell's points in the link that Robert provided and illustrate matters that you felt were overlooked or overemphasized, I'd appreciate reading it.
 

george kaplan

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All I'm saying is that Sowell comes from a purely political spin angle. I'll try to illustrate, though this is delicate.

With the recent spate of 'scandals' going on, which hit at a group Sowell likes, he has been claiming that these are trivial, and that it's just a frivilous and biased media playing things up. He has written many columns lately that there are more important and serious issues to talk about.

Yet, not too many years ago, when similar scandals hit an administration he didn't like, watch out, that's all he wrote about. This is hypocrisy at it's worst.

I'm not saying that he never uses facts that are true. What I'm saying is, he selectively uses facts that are true only when they say what he wants them to, and when they don't, he'll flat out lie. Are some of the things he says in that link above true? Probably. Are some of the things he says in that link above false? I'd bet my house on it. Are the conclusions he draws from the mix of truth and lies he presents valid? Hell no, if he drew a scientifically and logically valid conclusion, it would be a pure accident.

He is a political ideologue, and if he's an example of where you get 'facts' and analysis to make your case, then I'm only all the more certain that your position is probably wrong. Show me facts from well-respected peer reviewed journals, and not a ideological columnist, and then we can debate.

I certainly can't go into more detail here, but if an admin OK'd it, I could certainly provide links to sites that show clearly, in his own words, the hypocrisy and total lack of scientific rigor in his writings.
 

RobertR

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George,

I see a lack of response on your part about exactly what it is that’s supposed to be factually incorrect in Sowell’s essay. Which exactly of the historical/geographical/cultural facts (the sources for which he cites in the footnotes) he cites in the essay do you claim to be “outright lies”? And how do you know they’re lies? Saying “Sowell has an opinion on the relative importance of other political matters” is NOT a basis for proving he made up facts in this particular essay, or a basis for discrediting ANY factual claims made by ANYONE with a political point of view. Labels do not make arguments. I would hardly call someone given a National Humanities Medal for his prolific scholarship by the National Endowment for the Humanities a "complete idiot". By the way, perhaps you don't know that Sowell IS published in scholarly journals. Here's a list:

ARTICLES IN SCHOLARLY PUBLICATIONS:
"A Student's Eye View of George Stigler," Journal of Political Economy,
October 1993, pp. 784-792.
"Jean-Baptiste Say," The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, Vol. 4, p. 249;
"Say's Law," Ibid., pp. 249-251; "Jean Charles Leonard Simonde de Sismondi,"
Ibid., pp. 348-350; "Stigler as a Historian of Economic Thought,"
Ibid., pp. 498-499; "Thorstein Veblen," Ibid., pp. 799-800.
"Assumptions versus History in Ethnic Education," Teachers College Record,
Fall 1981, pp. 37-71.
"Weber and Bakke, and the Presuppositions of 'Affirmative Action',"
Wayne Law Review, July 1980, pp. 1309-1336.
"Adam Smith in Theory and Practice" Adam Smith and Modern Political Economy,
edited by G. P. O'Driscoll, pp. 3-18. (1979)
"Sismondi: A Neglected Pioneer," History of Political Economy,
Spring 1972, pp. 62-88.
"Samuel Bailey Revisited," Economica, November 1970, pp. 402-408.
"The 'Evolutionary' Economics of Thorstein Veblen,"
Oxford Economic Papers, July 1967, pp. 177-198.
"Marx's Capital After One Hundred Years," Canadian Journal of Economics
and Political Science, February 1967, pp. 50-74.
"The Shorter Work Week Controversy," Industrial and Labor Relations
Review, January 1965, pp. 238-246.
"The General Glut Controversy Reconsidered," Oxford Economic
Papers, November 1963, pp. 193-203.
"Marxian Value Reconsidered," Economica, August 1963, pp. 297-308.
"Karl Marx and the Freedom of the Individual," Ethics, January 1963, pp. 119-126.
"Malthus and the Utilitarians," Canadian Journal of Economics
and Political Science, May 1962, pp. 268-274.
"Marx's 'Increasing Misery' Doctrine," American Economic Review,
March 1960, pp. 111-120.
 

Eric_L

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Eric
I suspect you both are guilty of making the error of confusing opinion with research. (There is similar confusion between opinion and news.) Opinion is not scientific nor is it intended to be. It is more similar to analysis. You consider the facts available and create a hypothesis. You then test the hypothesis or research measurable gaps in the data. Then you analyze again and set or adjust your opinion.

The myth is that an analyst does not have a bias. This is a silly expectation. I would not trust someone who claims not to have an opinion. Opinions are like bellybuttons - everyone has one (and yes, I know, the real saying uses another body part, sue me.)

The beauty of opinions is that the creative and open minded use of them spawns new hypothesis to measure and then analyze. The ugliness of opinion is that there is no requirement for them to be based in any fact whatsoever.

Any opinion which is grounded in a fact deserves consideration. If contrary facts or inconsistencies can be found then the opinion should be modified. If contrary facts or inconsistencies cannot be found then the opinion should at least be respected even if doubted. It is the cornerstone of civilized debate. As soon as someone starts discounting facts simply because they do not like them, the source, or the timing it is safe to say the discussion has degraded from a debate to a futile argument.
 

Ken Chan

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If over half of households own equities, but most of them are not wealthy, even eventually, does that mean that your "considerably higher likelihood" is like the ten-fold increase from 0.3% to 3%? "One thousand percent" sure does sound high without any context.
 

george kaplan

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That's true. Cause I have no intention of wasting my time looking at it. I've read enough of Sowell's crap to realize that I place no value (at least none that isn't negative) on what he has to write. I don't waste my time with Holocaust deniers, and I'm not going to waste it on the bullshit spewed forth by Sowell.
 

Eric_L

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Eric
First you have to define wealthy. Is it $1 million dollars? Then I regret to inform you that if you are under age 40 if you do not retire with at least $1 million dollars you will probably not be able to stay retired. Is wealthy being in the top 10% of household assets? That is very likely for the 50% of people who own and accumulate equities.
"How is that possible for 50% of people to be in the top 10%?" you ask? Ah - it is very simple - they are not all the same age. Of the 50% who own equities, only 10% or so of them are retirement age. The other 40% are still accumulating. In 10, 20 , 30 or so years each of them will have their retirement event. Some will have stopped accumulating. Some will have died, some will have squandered. Some will have cashed in. Those who continued accumulating are considerably more likely to find themselves in the top 10% of household net worth. Certaily more likely than those who squandered their potential on household goods, savings accounts or consumer debt.
 

Edwin-S

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After reading this, all I can say is WOW!!. If I posted what I really think of this argument I would probably get booted off this board permanently.

I think you shouldn't be making blanket generalizations regarding the work ethics of the working poor and/or poor people in general. Plenty of people in those circumstances are working like dogs and still cannot get ahead.

Also, I recently read an article that stated that Americans are now working longer hours than workers in any other major industrialized nation, including the Japanese (who, in the past, have been noted as being virtual workaholics). Americans working such long hours directly contradicts your statements about lazy American workers.

The statement regarding "sweatshops" and poor American people not wanting to work in those kinds of environments leaves me almost speechless......but not quite. :)

Edited: Took out the part about the Beemer as I am not aware of what financial sacrifices you have made in order to afford an upmarket car like that.
 

Sami Kallio

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Working hard and working long can be two different things. I have seen people who work short days but don't bullshit around like some of those who work longer hours but all they do is gossip all day.
 

Edwin-S

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I guess you can look at it that way, but longer work hours equates to an increase in productivity as a whole. Some workers may work longer hours and get away with doing less, but the vast majority are expected to produce more for the hours worked. The statistic shows that American workers are spending more of their lives enriching their corporate masters than any other worker in the major industrialized nations. The statistic, to me, also deflates any argument that American workers, poor or otherwise, are lazy.

Many of those workers are also working longer hours just to stay afloat, which indicates to me that more and more ordinary working people are sliding out of the "middle class" strata and into the "working poor" class.

As an example, I do not consider myself "working poor" but I also no longer consider myself to be "middle class". I consider myself to be sliding, from the standpoint of income, closer to the bottom rung of what is considered "middle class". I had to look for a new occupation after the job I held for twenty years was "rationalized" out of existence by a beneficent CEO. I returned to college and gained a two year diploma in industrial automation. After completion, I regained employment; however, the hilarious thing is that I now earn no more (mostly far less) than an uneducated labourer in a manufacturing plant. In fact, ten years ago, a janitor in a sawmill earned what I earn now. Now, don't get me wrong there are other aspects of my new job that are better than my old one but financial remuneration isn't one of them. From a purely economic standpoint my new occupation is a joke compared to the occupation that I formerly worked at. Yet, the new occupation has far more knowledge requirements than my old one did.

I really bought into the fiction that going back for an education is supposed to be beneficial from an economic standpoint, but from my experience I now know what a load of bullshit that is. In the corporatocracies in which we live having an education means you too can now earn as much as a janitor did ten years ago. If that doesn't tell me something about the direction the "middle class" is going then nothing will.
 

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