By Charlie Lockett
10/30/10
When I write these blogs or comments I do not dependent on only one source for the opinion I make, and therefore providing a link is something that really irritates me because I read many articles and opinions before I come to my own opinion.
With this I will not provide a link but I will tell you that it is a paper published in the Daily Finance.com. As I say I do not depend on one commentator or one news article or one economist, I read a number of news papers everyday and listen to many opinions every day, and come to my own conclusions, and I would suggest that everyone do the same.
I also know that no one likes to be shown how they have been mislead and deceived over the years into believing something that is completely contrary to their own well being, and many times that is exactly what I am doing, and I will do it again in this posting.
My only hope is that at some point in time each and every one of you will investigate what I write and enlighten yourself as to what is happening in the United States, and how the middle class has all but disappeared and why that has happened.
Maybe if you do that you will become legitimately irate and demand we actually go down that road to prosperity once again.In 2005 Michael Norton of Duke University and Dan Ariely of Harvard University polled a cross section of 5522 people and just published the results under the heading of “Building a Better America-One Wealth Quintile at a Time”.
This study demonstrated that most Americans have a severely skewed view of America’s wealth distribution.Some of the things brought out in this study is that 40% of the population of the United States is either poor or lower middle class, which is one and the same.
To me that is shameful, that the richest country in the world has almost half of their population is living in poverty.They divided America into five groups the rich, the upper middle class, the middles class, the lower middle class and the poor. They defined wealth as total assets minus total liabilities. Currently, as of 2005, 85% of the wealth is held by the rich, 11% by the upper middle class, 4% by the middle class and a combined share of an anemic 0.3% by the lower middle class and the poor.
This is wealth as opposed to income which is a different situation altogether.When it comes to income these guys used the standard of median income which is deceptive because there is a great disparity between the top 5% and the rest of us, but for this blog I will go with the median standard that they used.
The median income for the rich is about $259,000 per year, the upper middle class is about $74,700, the middle class is about $46,700 and the lower middle class and the poor average about $20,200.This should bother each and every one of you regardless of where you stand on the political spectrum.
Since 1983 the rich have increase their share of the wealth by4% and the middle class has lost 23% of their share of the wealth, but the really startling fact is that the poorest 40% have had their share of the wealth slashed by a whopping 78%.
Their final conclusion was if the Bush tax cuts, the inheritance tax cuts and the super low capital gains tax continue these numbers will just get worse.
