The truth is our standard of living will be on a slow decline the next several years

[TwixVoy]

Folks I have been one of the most pessimistic people on the economy. I don't feel we are looking at any dire situations like a complete economic collapse.

I think the reality we all are going to have to admit is that our standard of living is going to be on a gradual decline for many many years. I think Obama tried to warn us of that when he stated that many of the jobs we lost (for example, in the auto industry) were not going to come back ever.

The way I see it we have several key components that will continue to drag us down that have not been addressed, and that corporate America (and corporate owned congress) simply does not care to address. They are:

1. Credit credit credit. We have too many people in debt. Too many of our solutions involved the creation of more debt. Cash for clunkers was OK, but it resulted in giving several hundred thousand people who had no car payment a new debt they will have to service every month. We finance every part of our lives.

We finance our education. We have students walking out of school with massive debts and now can not find jobs sufficient to ever pay those debts off. (which can also never be discharged in bankruptcy)

We finance our homes and then found out we could not afford them. Has the market actually changed to make homes affordable? Not really. It changed when we had crazy lending standards and ultra low rate teasers. When we started having 50 and even 75 year mortgages. When we had interest only and negative amortization mortgages. This allowed more people to attempt to get a home, but it was simply more debt and financing tricks. People could not truly afford them. Has anything changed to allow people to truly afford them? Are people earning higher wages? Nope.

We finance our consumer purchases. The amount of outstanding credit card debt we have as a nation is insane.

2. Our economy is based on consumer spending. It seems to me too much of our lives have been dedicated to spending and getting more "things". Very little emphasis has been focused on personal savings and building true wealth. Many people don't earn enough to do that, and the ones that too are entirely focused on getting "things". Being in debt and spending every dime you have makes you weaker. Many people are in a situation where they can not rock the boat at work. If they lose their job they lose everything. They are debt slaves.

3. We are consumers and not producers. Actually making said "things" is what builds wealth as a nation. China and others now dwarf us on actual production. While they are producing goods, selling them, and building wealth we are consuming them ON CREDIT. China is running a massive surplus and is financially strong. We (as has recently been reported) are looking at a multi-trillion deficit that will continue to build for the next several years. This makes us incredibly weak over time. We have not done anything to increase our ability to manufacture. Hell, we bailed out the banks but let Michigan collapse. We gave the money to the banks no questions asked, yet we demanded Michigan give us a plan and prove they could fix things. It was decided they could not. No such requirement for the banks though. Funny how that works isn't it?

4. We outsourced our middle class jobs. Nuff' said. Pretty damn stupid move. The moment this started picking up steam in the 90's we as a population should have revolted and been marching in Washington. We as a nation can not survive on service jobs. Wal-mart is the largest employer in this country right now. That is a PROBLEM because the largest employer has the largest employee base classified as generally being in poverty. We got rid of manufacturing. We got rid of IT workers. We got rid of damn near anything we could that wasn't service sector.

5. We killed off our unions. This goes along with number 4. Employers tell us that "unions served their purpose and everything is law now". That is BS. If we had strong unions in this country they would have led the revolt on outsourcing. Pretty hard to do though when the vast majority of the country is not involved in the labor movement. There is always going to be a fight between employers and labor. Labor always will be exploited by employers if we don't organize against it. Unfortunately too many Americans have been convinced they don't need to and we can just trust our employers to do what is right for us.

6. Other nations such as China will over take us. Our dollar will eventually lose a ton of its value. Once the world figures out we are broke they will wash their hands of us. This little implosion of ours has alerted the Chinese to just what kind of condition we are in. They are not stupid and will begin to gradually decouple from us over time. Once we can no longer depend on foreign nations to finance our spending, and we can no longer count on cheap goods being imported from them.... where does that leave us? Hell even our medicine is produced abroad now. Our entire consumer economy depends on two things. One being foreign nations lending to us, and the other being said foreign nations willing to send us cheap goods to buy.

Notice how all of these things relate to each other? They all have a net impact of making us weaker over time. This is the root cause of our economic crisis. NONE of these points have been addressed by congress. Instead we have sent even more of our wealth to mega corporations. How have they rewarded us for our generous bail outs? Have they increased wages? Have they bettered working conditions? No. Instead they have rewarded us with more lay offs and outsourcing. They have rewarded us by spending billions to lobby against our ability to have health care.

This is why we will continue to have a slow decline over time. Make no mistake about it. Just because you see the DOW shooting up doesn't mean good things for you. Hell Wall Street has a rally when lay offs are announced. Less jobs = more profit for them short term. None of these core issues has truly been addressed, and our friendly corporations are fighting tooth and nail to make sure it stays that way. Look at what they are doing just on health care reform. They are not concerned with our interests. We will continue to become poorer and poorer over time. That is the sad truth about it, and it won't be until most Americans have trouble having a home and food before enough people are actually willing to turn off American Idol and do something.

[enid602]

1. accurate

A more accurate statement might be that all countries´standards of living will most likely decline over the next several years. Except for a few oil states, of course.

[LeftHander]

2. Our over extravagant lifestyle will back off.....nt

[Cant trust em]

3. Is that such a bad thing?

I think that we can taper off for a while and still live fruitful lives. We just won't be able to consume as much, which may be positive in the long-term.

[TwixVoy]

4. Yes it is

Because for many people it will be a struggle just to survive. Most people have no wealth as an individual. If you add up all of a persons debt and assets you come up with a negative number most of the time. That means they have a negative net worth financially. We can not truly be "free" as individuals when we are slaves to banks. When we are one pay check away from being on the street.

It is not a problem we can not buy "things" as much. It is a problem we don't have JOBS and financial security as a people.

[Cant trust em]

13. Well, your number 1 in this well-thought out post is credit and debt

Housing is a primary driver of this. I think that some people will have to get by on renting. While homeownership is the primary means of creating asset wealth, it's just not in the cards for everyone.

These are significant problems, but I'm not seeing it as a doomsday prophecy.

[TwixVoy]

21. Not doomsday

As I say in the start of my OP I don't see the dire end of the country kind of scenario some have been concerned about. I think 50 years from now history books will refer to this period as the time when the United States started a slow decline to becoming a poorer nation.

[Cant trust em]

24. Right. But I think a degree of that will not be so bad, and might be healthy

I think that we're in a position to lose a little bit and it won't be that bad. If we had income levels around those of European counties, that would certainly be a decline, but I wouldn't consider that to be too big of a loss.

You do make a lot of good points, particularly in ways that we can re-build the working class.

[TwixVoy]

25. Agreed

I just wonder how many individuals are going to have to suffer the worst of this - homelessness being something I see increasing. And I wish we had actually been working on fixing these issues a long time ago. Sadly we still aren't.

[Cant trust em]

28. I agree. Society as a whole is going to need a retooling.

I don't think we're ever going to be able to compete with China on manufacturing. T-shirts, and other tchotchke are never going to be produced here again. We're going to have to find something else to make and I think green technology is our best bet. We need to make education a top priority and produce more engineers and scientists. We need to stay on top of innovation because low-skilled labor as we know it is not going to be an option for too much longer.

[TwixVoy]

29. I think it is easier for our leaders

to go out of their way to try to maintain the status quo. Most Americans don't want to be told the ugly truth that we are going to be on a decline unless we drastically start to change things. For a politician telling people things they don't want to hear is bad for business. So now we are spinning our wheels trying to go back to the mass excess of before.

[Cant trust em]

30. That is a fact. People will never vote for someone who tells them the honest truth.

One problem with America is that we want everything without any sacrifice. The time is coming that if you want to have good income you're going to need to be educated. Not just in any subject matter, but something that actually has a future. English degrees aren't going to be worth the paper they're printed on anymore. I think there's a lot of dogma out there that kids need to reach for the stars and do what they love. So now we've got a bunch of kids with their masters degrees in whatever wondering why they don't have a job.

On edit - I'm pretty much a hypocrite here because I'm 29, I have a poli sci degree and I work for a non-profit. I happened to be able to do what I love, so it's really easy for me to talk about those who didn't suck it up and become software engineers.

[AndrewP]

5. very well written

[arcadian]

6. Trapped like a rat we will begin to lash out with the only thing we have left, our weapons.

Whan fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. -Sinclair Lewis

[grantcart]

7. it is possible that the overall AVERAGE of standard of living might decline

If it means that the tremendous concentration of wealth stops and that people in the bottom have greater access to health care and more disposable income then while the average asset base declines the actual material wealth significantly increases.

You chould have written this OP in 1992 as well. Then the internet came along and a tremendous wealth explosion.


Interestingly a lot of deregulation was authored by Senator Kennedy. Airlines for example - that led to a huge explosion in the industry and the regular guy being able to fly.


In time President Obama will take his knife to the oligarchy of energy production in the US. If it can be deregulated so that alternative producers of green energy can start businesses in their garages and plug into the grid then you will see another huge explosion in the wealth of the country - bigger than the internet bubble of the 1990s.


To give you one example - currently in California if your solar panels produce excess production you have to eat it you cannot sell it back to the energy company.

And on cue this thread announces that solar production costs have dropped dramatically:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x6404074

[TwixVoy]

8. I can not believe you refer to the "internet" as a wealth explosion

many people refer to that as the ".Com Bubble".... and all that wealth turned out to be the same kind of "wealth" we got from the mortgage bubble.

[grantcart]

31. Are you kidding -- simply because their is a bubble doesn't mean that

real wealth was not created. In fact bubbles only happen when real wealth creation becomes overly exaggerated. After the bubble bursts the exaggeration is taken away but the real increase remains.

In 1991 the Dow Jones was at 3000 at 2000 it was 11,000. After the bubble burst it settled over 8,000.

The attached chart clearly shows that even taking out the bubble effect that the 1990s clearly had the largest increase of wealth in the history of the stock market.

http://www.nyse.tv/djia-chart-history.htm
Entire new industries, google et al, were created and the retail industry has been completely rewried.


After the Wright brothers and others started to fly a similar wealth explosion occurred and eventually an investment bubble exaggerated the potential and burst but, like the internet innovations, a new industry was created. Some of the remnants of the 'bubble' found themselves undercapitalized and joined together and United Airlines was born.

The wealth created from the internet is, again like aviation, just begining.

In the not so near future a significant part of our health care will be done on the internet. You have a question about a minor ailment you will contact your doctor and might even be able to submit the results of a couple of home tests.


You are clearly not well versed in economic history.


But there is a greater problem with your overall economic analysis and that is you equate average GDP or GNP with quality of life.

Taking away your misunderstanding of the "net increase of wealth" of the 90's there is a more fundamental error.

Simply because the average GDP or GNP goes up doesn't mean that the average quality of life goes up. If the wealth is concentrated so that the rich become richer and everyone else suffers then the quality of life has not improved.

Conversely even though the GDP stagnates but their is less wealth polarization it could well mean that the average quality of life improved significantly.

But we can have both. We can reduce oligarchy - especially in energy production - and reduce polarization of wealth and substantially increase both the GNP but the quality of life for normal Americans.

[vinylsolution]

9. Don't forget the oil crunch....

.... which is a lot closer than most people know.

As supplies diminish even more sharply, prices will go through the roof.

How are we going to feed 300 million Americans without fossil fuel powered agriculture?

Suddenly, that lil' homestead in rural Kansas seems like a good idea.

[onenote]

10. how do you measure "Standard of living"

Standard of living can be measured in a lot of ways and means different things to differnt people. It can be based on income levels, life expectancy, availability, type, and size of housing; distribution of certain goods and products.

Based on some of these measures, the SOL may decline; based on others, it may increase. I think overall the safest bet is that it will continue to increase, but a a declining rate.

[TwixVoy]

14. It will be a universal decline

ALL people in this country will feel it regardless of what you currently consider to be a good standard of living. Everyone will experience at least some decline in standard of living.

Hell even the ultra rich (the top 5%) - for the first time in decades - are experiencing a trend of earning less.

The fact is this will lead to everyone suffering to some extent, because all of this (as I noted in my OP) is intertwined.

[omega minimo]

11. People learning to be less wasteful, healthier and less addicted to conspicuous consumption are good

things :thumbsup:

[TwixVoy]

16. Exactly

That is a good side effect of this - but you fail to note the other problems such as loss of middle class jobs. Is it a "good thing" when the majority of the country is forced in to service sector work at $8/hour? There is a difference between cutting back and living in poverty one pay check away from the street.

[omega minimo]

20. I didn't "fail" anything, I simply pointed out one aspect.

[TwixVoy]

22. You attempted to make it seem like all of this was a good thing

and over simplified it to "people buy less junk yay!" when it is far from that simple.

[omega minimo]

33. No I didn't. And don't be a

---

You will find many here who know what you are articulating, who know "it is far from that simple," have been active on this for a long time, in our own lives and sphere of influence.

You want a pat on the back and to challenge and insult others who drop in with a simple comment, to which you attach false assumptions and petty accusations.

Those who have been aware and active on this have made different choices and are not lumped in with all the "we" behavior your OP assumes.

One aspect of the picture you are painting is what I said -- and that is that simple.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

12. The American standard of living was never sustainable in the first place.

A tiny fraction of the world's population cannot consume 25% of the world's total resources without reprecussions.

[TwixVoy]

17. Exactly

And this is hit on in my point about consuming on credit while producing nothing... and depending on borrowing and imported goods from foreign nations. We are like Rome before it's fall. We have ships coming in full of goods, but they leave empty.... just like Rome.

[PVnRT]

15. If a good economy is based on making things, and buying too many things is bad,

it would seem there is a problem in what you wrote, unless we are going to rely on exports.

A lot of what you said makes sense, but that seems to me to be a paradox. I guess you could argue that more money means you can buy more things without so much debt, but it's still an economy based on consumer spending, which I would argue all economies are based on. If consumers don't spend, how are companies generating income?

And if the goal should be saving for the later years to build "true wealth" instead of buying things, what is the point of that wealth? You can't take it with you. You can donate some, sure, but part of building "true wealth" for many of us is the opportunity to buy things and travel and spend that money as we see fit in our later years.

[TwixVoy]

19. I think you are not understanding the actual relationships

between "service" and "goods".

"it would seem there is a problem in what you wrote, unless we are going to rely on exports."

Here is the difference. You actually CAN rely on exports. Exports are possible when you have an economy that produces GOODS. (i.e. manufactures) For example, let's say you produce computer keyboards as one good. China has tons of cash and wants keyboards. You can box up those keyboards and send them to China. In return China gives you some of that cash (wealth). This helps us BUILD WEALTH.

See what happened in this situation? It is the exact opposite reaction of us buying. When we BUY we SPEND. We are at the point we are doing that on CREDIT. In other words - we have run out of WEALTH and are borrowing WEALTH from other nations who have it. What we need to do is BUILD wealth - and we do that by doing what we did in the example above.

The people HERE who make those keyboards have PRODUCTION jobs and get paid well because they are actually producing something. (keyboards in this example) They have jobs producing. That allows them to take the MONEY from those JOBS and BUY. But they made that money by PRODUCING. You don't make money by CONSUMING.

As it stands now we are very one sided. We are BUYING - but not PRODUCING.

We got rid of PRODUCTION jobs and replaced them with SERVICE jobs - which serve the BUYING side.

We can SELL keyboards to China. What does a Wal-mart worker do that we can SELL to China to BUILD WEALTH? Nothing. We can not box up the "service" of the wal-mart worker and sell it to China.

It is not a paradox. It is simple relationships between being a PRODUCER and a CONSUMER.

Does this make more sense?

[JDPriestly]

18. Free trade has not worked for the U.S.

That is because the dollar is the international currency, and it is way, way overvalued. That works in our favor in the sense that we can buy things from other people for less than it costs them to make them (in terms of their time, effort and raw materials). But it works against us in the sense that our goods are too expensive for others to buy.

People in other countries work for less than we do. In some cases, the differential is really due to our higher expectations and "standard of living." But in other instances, it is really due to the dollar differential.

Further, our economy and government are not organized so as to permit us to work together in times of crisis. The Europeans are handling their economies more wisely than we are. For example, in this recession, their governments have the power to intervene in the relationships between employers and employees to help stabilize the job market and keep companies in business. Our government does not have that authority. Further, their governments have the authority to intervene with regard to disparities in wages between management and labor. For example, the French government, which is, by the way, conservative by French standards, has set guidelines for the payment of bonuses by investment companies.

I do not expect the U.S. to reform our economic system to permit us to respond to crises more effectively in the foreseeable future.

When the Volkswagen was first imported to the U.S., the car owners bragged that they could just about fix anything in their cars with a hairpin. (Remember those things?) That was a bit of an exaggeration, but those cars sure were a lot simpler to repair than the complicated, computers on wheels we call cars today.

Our economy used to be a lot simpler too. It's grown much more complex, but we are still trying to fix it with hairpins. It's not really working. Sure, we can still prevent our banks from shutting their doors precipitously. But we cannot intervene in much of any other meaningful way. We can't do it. Our government can't do it.

And the private industry that Americans used to control is now actually owned and controlled by international syndicates and investors who could care less about national interests of any particular country. For them it is just about profits.

Our taxes are much lower than those in most other industrialized nations, but our industry has been allowed, even encouraged to export our jobs to countries that pay subsistent wages. In return, we get a lot of trashy imports. Free trade is not doing us any good. It is a bad deal. We should renegotiate our trade agreements, stop importing so much oil and regain our national economic independence.

The first step in reforming our economy is alternative energy.

[inna]

23. please see this thread as well:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=6404564&mesg_id=6404564

pretty brutal "prognosis" by Ian Welsh there.

[Arugula Latte]

26. It's happened to us. My family got by much more easily when I was a kid.

Four-bedroom suburban house for a family of four in an East Bay suburb of San Francisco, two cars (which were replaced with new cars every five or seven years), nice vacations (including Hawaii and Europe), skiing, horse-ownership, plentiful savings, no debt except mortgage -- all on one income (my dad's).

My husband and I and our two kids are not nearly in that position now.

[TwixVoy]

27. One thing I have observed

While you have noticed this I think maybe people in your same position have not yet come to realize it.

[theophilus]

32. You are partly right and partly wrong. Situations will arise that will

cause standard of living to rise for some and fall for others. We will, hopefully, meet in the middle. We will choose very different ways of life and to lessen our numbers.....or...we will lessen our numbers through catastrophe. The rubber is meeting the road. Not all that "slow" really. Obama has pointed out that "things have changed" and the "ground has shifted". My opinion.

[dysfunctional press]

34. for most people, it's already been on a slow decline for quite awhile...

but the pace is going to pick up.

our society has become too economically polarized- the gap between the haves and the have-nots is growing, and the middle-class that bridged that gap is vanishing.

a 'rising tide' may 'lift all boats', but a sinking ship can take everyone down with it.

[Octafish]

35. One family names fronts for a lot of those problems.

It rhymes with "Whoosh," the sound of all those good-paying manufacturing jobs leaving...

Know your BFEE: The China-Bush Axis

Judging from the help Obama's gotten from the DEMs in Congress, it may be GENERATIONS before the standard of living starts to climb.

Thank you for an excellent essay, TwixVoy. Spot-on, in every way. We are well on our way to a new feudalism, where those to the manor born have a hobnailed boot on the necks of the rest of us.

[HughBeaumont]

36. We can blame our great right-wing-run Corporations and the Repub leaders that enabled them for this.

1. This comes down to, over and over again as do a lot of these problems, wages not keeping up with the cost of living. Plain and simple. As Elizabeth Warren pointed out in a lecture series, we're actually spending LESS on "stuff" than we did 35 years ago, but we're getting absolutely killed on necessities (food, clothing, housing, transportation, education, health care, etc). The average yearly income in this country should be 58-60 thousand a year. Instead, it's hovering around 36-40k, which is woefully inadequate if you're single in most parts of this country and just adequate if there are two of you.

Education, like health care, should be subsidized, END OF SENTENCE. It's absolutely insane that America still believes only the really well-to-do should be able to get higher education, all because everything HAS to be about making a buck. Insane bullshit upon bullshit. Then again, a dumber population is easier to manipulate and control. This is why very little in the way of progressive action has happened in this country for 30 years (or 400, depending on which historian you ask).

I wrote a thread a while back asking why homes have to be so BIG. I got answers ranging from "no one wants to live in a cramped dump" (uh, tough shit. You ain't a CEO that has 7 kids, last I checked. What's the need for an acre mansion?) to "home builders simply make more profit off of larger homes than economically, reasonably built homes". I think it's not so much financing homes, as people have always done this. It's financing too much house that's the problem.

2. Again. Wages not keeping up with the cost of living. Hoarding every dollar in a bare hovel while eating crumbs for future security hardly makes for a good life. However, something's gotta give in the wage department. The average American simply cannot afford modern life anymore. Corporations are going to need to bite some bitter pills and fast.

3 & 4. Putrid fruit of Laissez-fail Friedman-Reaganomics right there. Getting rid of manufacturing and industry was possibly the absolute DUMBEST thing we've ever done as a nation. Several dozen of my journal entries touch upon this. They walked all over us and we did nothing. I know humans cannot keep up with the speed of business, but COME on; you cannot kill off or diminish the value of entire career fields before new ones are created. That's just straight stupidity.

Corporations are realizing that the tide is turning. They cannot stomp on us any longer in the name of mega profits, and they're a bunch of dumbasses if they assert that they never saw this coming. Let's face it: these guys don't have a whole hell of a lot of options from where I'm sitting. Their discounts/offers/programs aren't working, their mass firings are only temporarily saving their precious bottom lines and leading to more layoffs in other areas of the economy, and they're sitting on the government dole (or using it to build plants overseas, giving bonuses to their upper echelon or remodel their offices) rather than freeing up capital, lending like it was supposed to be used for, or hiring.

Nothing is built from the top down. NOTHING. The foundation is in serious need of repair, and FAST. We need better social safety nets and an immediate HALT to Bewsh's wasteful occupations.

[bain_sidhe]

37. Readers of Kevin Phillips have been expecting this for years

I, like Mr. Phillips, believe that the U.S. is a "superpower in decline." It won't happen over night, but yes, we will lose our perch on the top of the heap. This need not be a catastrophe - The Dutch (the superpower of the 1700s) have a pretty good life, the British (the superpower of the 1800s) have a pretty good life, and on average, we can too.

But it CAN be a catastrophe - what matters, imho, is how we respond to the erosion of our position. Rome tried to maintain their position on the top, and ushered in the dark ages. Both Holland and Britain adjusted as the power slipped away, and maintained at least some influence on world events, if not absolute power over those events - and they had a much better outcome, both for themselves and for the world as a whole.

This isn't to deny or make light of your point that a lot of people will suffer, regardless of whether we go down gracefully or stumble about like a punch-drunk boxer refusing to admit it's time to get out of the game. But, for me, at least, it does help to know that we at least have a choice about how we go down. We can go down easy, or we can go down hard (and take a big chunk of the world with us). But we will go down, at least in terms of our world power and influence. It won't be the end of the world. But it will require adjustment, and some of those adjustments will be hard.

[omega minimo]

38. We also have the potential to become what we have pretended to be

a force for good in the world. Our personal and national priorities will inevitably have to shift, we will not have the globe to use as our plantation.... the corporatists will and we will be their serfs -- or not.

The good news for us while our economy is being propped up by foreign powers, is that the global economy is interconnected and for whatever reasons, the United States economy can't be allowed to completely tank.... for now.

:hi:

[applegrove]

39. You forgot the baby boomers will all be retireing in the next few years. At least they

will start to. Jobs will be more plentiful for it. In fact it may even become an employees market.

[Juche]

40. In some ways yes and no

There will be other reasons, namely health care and natural resources.

Health care costs will continue to grow at 2-3x the rate of inflation, taking up more and more money from consumers. Much of the spending will be because health care is better (better treatments, more treatments, etc) but it is still going to cost more.

Plus the world is running out of natural resources. Cost for virtually everything (oil, metal, agricultural products, coal, concrete, etc) are growing dramatically and will continue to do so as demand outstrips supply. So that is going to start catching up with us.

On the other hand, due to human innovation other products will go down in price. Electronics, clothing, automobiles, home furnishings, etc. will likely go down in price as their quality and reliability goes up and their cost goes down. Energy costs (aside from oil) may start going down as alternative energies are now cheaper than coal and becoming cheaper.

So in some ways yes, and some ways no. In the future health care will take up far more money, but that will be in part because it is higher quality. And things like autos will be cheaper. You will be able to buy a used auto for a few thousand dollars and drive it for 15 years before it breaks down because quality will be higher. Credit, healthcare and a natural resource crunch will screw us.

On another note, we have tons of wealth in this country we have just sent it all to the top. The per capita income in the US is 50,000, so if you split the GDP among everyone that is an income of 50k per person. However real per capita income is closer to 15-20k since the wealthiest 10% take about 2/3 of the wages.

So we have the wealth to ride this storm out, we have just congregated it too heavily at the top.

[troubledamerican]

41. Buy extra shoes NOW as an investment. In years ahead, they'll be unaffordable.