Tag: more poor people

The Great Economic Divide

Let’s not beat around. Barack Obama was wrong. There are two Americas. Not red states and blue states or racial divides of Black and White. The two Americas are 1) the rich and 2) everyone else.

This is the subject that should be discussed and debated in the next presidential election. Even before that date the subject of the declining size of the middle class and the growing numbers of poor should be discussed by every candidate in both political parties.

Mario Cuomo, the just deceased former governor of New York State, speaking at the 1984 Democratic convention in San Francisco told us the truth about America. Unfortunately the things he said are even truer today.


“While the press and politicos would thrill to the speech’s metaphors about the ‘Tale of Two Cities’ and wagon trains heading west, Cuomo himself would note years later that the part of the speech that ordinary people mentioned to him more than any other by far was the moving description of his family’s immigrant experience” 1 which matches a story that many immigrants to America can tell.

So here we sit at the beginning of 2015 with 30% of the unemployed still looking for work for more than half a year. Many people have been unemployed for years rather than months. Considering those that are “marginally attached to the work force” the unemployment rate is over 11%. These are numbers from the last (November 2014) Labor Department report.

Some are whining that half of the population pay no income taxes.   Are they upset that their pay is so low or that the burden is too high for the nation’s wealthy population? That there is a population that receives special treatment for their dividend and interest earnings? The wealthy are taxed at a lower rate than the family that works for their income.  There are wealthy that pay no income tax because they own nothing but municipal bonds.

Will Jeb Bush, Hillary Clinton, or any of the other candidates discuss the great economic divide that haunts this nation? My guess is that this is a subject that won’t be discussed. The reason is quite simple. No one wants to alienate their backers who are mostly the very rich.

So what will they discuss and debate? Iran, Iraq, ISIS, Cuba, immigration, taxes, education and everything else you can imagine. There won’t be one word spoken about America’s economic divide.

1 Andrei Cherny, “The legacy of Mario Cuomo’s 1984 ‘Tale of Two Cities’ speech”, Yahoo News

There will be No Middle Class

In September, the number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more)was little changed at 4.1 million. These individuals accounted for 36.9 percent of the unemployed. The number of long-term unemployed has declined by 725,000 over the past year.

Both the civilian labor force participation rate, at 63.2 percent, and the employment-population ratio at 58.6 percent, were unchanged in September. Over the year, the labor force participation rate has declined by 0.4 percentage point, while the employment-population ratio has changed little.

These are not my words. They are copied from yesterday’s BLS report for the month of September.

Sadly today’s Los Angeles Times commentator, Doyle McManus wrote the following article that points out the real wealth trend in America.  The future looks even bleaker, according to libertarian economist Tyler Cowen.

Cowen is quoted as writing, “Our future will bring more wealthy people than ever before, but also more poor people. Rather than balancing our budget with higher taxes or lower benefits, we will allow the real wages of many workers to fall — and thus we will allow the creation of a new underclass.”


Poof goes the middle class

Imagine a future in which real wages for most workers decline year after year; a future in which middle-class jobs that disappeared in the Great…  The rest of this Los Angeles Times opinion here

McManus ends his column with the question, New ideas, anyone?  Even if someone has any new ideas how can they be implemented when our political system is broken?