If you have a good paying job, you should probably try to hold on to it as hard as you can, because those types of jobs are steadily becoming rarer. Since 1990, the U.S. economy has produced millions of jobs, but as you will see below nearly two-thirds of them have been low wage jobs. Of course this is one of the biggest factors causing the systematic erosion of the American middle class. Today, half of all U.S. workers make less than $33,000 a year, but meanwhile the cost of living has been steadily increasing. Housing costs, health insurance and other basic necessities have been rising much faster than our paychecks have, and this has put an enormous amount of financial stress on hard working American families. (Read More...)
Good Paying Jobs
For Countless Americans, Living In Their Vehicles Has Become “The New Normal”
Once again tonight, countless numbers of Americans will sleep in their vehicles, and this is a problem that is getting worse with each passing year. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the homeless population in the United States hit 552,830 in 2018, but many believe that the true number is actually a lot higher. Because in order to accurately count the homeless you have got to find them first, and many homeless do not want to be found. But even if the HUD figure is accurate, it is still a great national tragedy to have such a high number of homeless, and a large percentage of those homeless Americans are living in their vehicles. (Read More...)
Hordes Of Anti-Trump Democrats Are Lining Up To Run For Congress In 2018
If Republicans don’t wake up, there is a very real possibility that we could lose control of the House of Representatives in 2018. And if that happens, Donald Trump’s agenda will be dead in the water because the Democrats will use their majority to block everything. Trump’s surprise election victory last November was perhaps the single most galvanizing moment for grassroots Democrats in this generation. Just as the election of Barack Obama gave rise to the Tea Party movement, we are now seeing a tremendous amount of energy among liberals all over the nation. If Republicans cannot match this energy, we are going to be in for quite a shock in November 2018. (Read More...)
The Republicans In Congress Have Betrayed Us Again
I guess by now we should be accustomed to politicians lying to us. For years, Republicans have been promising to repeal Obamacare if we would just give them control of the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives. We did that, and now they are breaking that promise. Because even if “Obamacare 2.0” miraculously gets through the Senate, most of the essential elements of Obamacare will survive. If you look at the latest Senate bill, most of the Obamacare subsidies are still in there, many of the Obamacare taxes are still in there, and most of the Obamacare regulations are still in there. On top of everything else, the bill would create an absolutely massive health insurance company bailout superfund, and that is something that the Democrats never even dared to do. The bill being pushed by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wouldn’t actually fix much of anything, and it certainly cannot be called a “repeal” of Obamacare. (Read More...)
5 Trends That Are Destroying The Middle Class In America
The middle class in America has been shrinking for decades, and our leaders seem powerless to do anything about it. Two years ago, the middle class became a minority in this country for the first time ever. In other words, the middle class now accounts for less than 50 percent of the population. But back in the early 1970s, the middle class made up more than 60 percent of the population. I have often compared being in the middle class to playing a really bizarre game of musical chairs. When the music stops playing each month, more chairs are being pulled out of the middle class, and most of us are just hoping that we will still have a chair for the next go around. (Read More...)
The Startling Truth About How Working Families Are Truly Faring In This Economy
It is hard to live the American Dream when the deck is stacked against you. Our politicians stood idly by as millions of good paying jobs were shipped overseas, our economic infrastructure was absolutely gutted and multitudes of small businesses were choked to death by miles of red tape. Now, we are reaping the consequences. In America today, nobody has a job in one out of every five families, and there are more than 100 million working age Americans that are currency not working. And thanks to our transition to a “service economy”, many of those that are actually working are deeply struggling too. According to the Social Security Administration, 51 percent of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year. And the Federal Reserve says that 47 percent of all Americans could not pay an unexpected $400 emergency room bill without borrowing the money from somewhere or selling something. That means that about half the country is flat broke, and things get even more precarious for working families with each passing day. (Read More...)
Suicide, Crime, Unemployment And Poverty All Soar As The Economic Crisis In Alberta Accelerates
The nightmare that is currently unfolding up in Canada will soon be coming to the United States. When the price of oil first started crashing, most Americans and most Canadians applauded. Most people thought that lower gas prices would be really good for the economy. Well, it turns out that the exact opposite is true. Just like in the United States, the energy industry has been the primary engine for the growth of good paying jobs in Canada since the last recession. Up in Alberta, there was such a need for oil patch workers that even someone that had just recently graduated from high school could find an oil patch job that paid six figures during the boom times. Now the “boom” is turning into a “bust”, and huge numbers of those good paying jobs are being lost. As a result, suicide, crime, unemployment and poverty are all skyrocketing, and the mainstream media is telling us that “the worst is yet to come“. (Read More...)
We Are Witnessing The Slow, Tortuous Death Of The American Worker
Once upon a time, the U.S. economy produced a seemingly unending supply of good paying jobs that enabled American workers to buy homes, raise families and live the American Dream. But now all of that has changed. Over the past several decades, there have been some fundamental shifts in our economy that have steadily eroded the value of the American worker. Thanks to incredible advances in robotics, computers and other fields of technology, many economic activities that once required a tremendous amount of manpower now require very little. Nothing is going to reverse those technological advances, so the jobs that have been lost as a result are now gone forever. But there are millions of other good jobs that we have lost that we could have done something about. Over the past couple of decades, millions upon millions of American jobs have been shipped overseas. Thanks to a whole host of “free trade” agreements that our politicians promised would be very good for our economy, U.S. workers have now been merged into a global labor pool with hundreds of millions of workers on the other side of the globe that live in countries where it is legal to pay slave labor wages. In such a situation, it is only natural for big corporations to shift production from high wage areas to low wage areas. Unemployment in America has skyrocketed and so have corporate profits. Today, corporate profits as a percentage of U.S. GDP are at an all-time high, but wages as a percentage of U.S. GDP are near an all-time low. The lack of decent jobs in the United States is one of the primary reasons why we are in an economic crisis that never seems to end, and things are not going to turn around any time soon. We truly are witnessing the slow, tortuous death of the American worker, and politicians from both political parties are just standing aside and letting it happen. (Read More...)