Ted Nugent constantly sells the idea that Barack Obama is unfriendly to business. And one wonders if he will use his place at the WaTimes to lobby for the US Chamber of Commerce now being properly framed as an enemy of the middle class.
True to form, the Obama administration’s response has been to oppose any action that might upset the banks, like a temporary moratorium on foreclosures while some of the issues are resolved. Instead, it is asking the banks, very nicely, to behave better and clean up their act. I mean, that’s worked so well in the past, right?
The response from the right is, however, even worse. Republicans in Congress are lying low, but conservative commentators like those at The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page have come out dismissing the lack of proper documents as a triviality. In effect, they’re saying that if a bank says it owns your house, we should just take its word. To me, this evokes the days when noblemen felt free to take whatever they wanted, knowing that peasants had no standing in the courts. But then, I suspect that some people regard those as the good old days.
However, in shared mythology sometimes the peasants rioted, burned stuff and went after their tormentors with pitchforks.
Hasn’t happened here yet and, perhaps, is not likely to as explained here last week:
That luck never seems to come [the Pennsylvania voters’] way, or any semblance of economic fairness at all, doesn’t seem to matter.
While they may rail against the bailout and the wealthy people in Washington, when it comes down to it they still harbor the hard kernel belief that they might be part of a class-less society, or at least one in which they share something with the old customary rulers — their whiteness. Its irreconcilable — but the human brain can carry such collisions around for a lifetime.
=======
[In the end], they have always voted for the worst patrons of the ‘business people’, anyway. And they will again.
The Democratic Party always runs afoul of it, Too much Max Baucus, Bart Stupak, Ben Nelson — pick your favorite among the feckless. Not enough Alan Grayson.
They can be presented with irrefutable news of manipulation by those they claim to despise. But they will vote for the wealthy to put fingers on the scales against them. It’s proof of the brain’s limitless capacity to encapsulate notions which should, from a logical standpoint, not be able to exist together.
However, theoretically, there remains the possibility of pitchforks, riots and sackings.
Virgin Galactic’s space tourism rocket SpaceShipTwo achieved its first solo glide flight Sunday, marking another step in the company’s eventual plans to fly paying passengers.
“Tickets to ride aboard [Virgin Galactic’s] SpaceShipTwo cost $200,000,” the news report continued. “Some 370 customers have plunked down deposits …. ”
“[A spaceport] is under construction” in New Mexico, it is said.
Burt Rutan, making world-changing stuff near space skimmers-as-Bentleys for the only people capable of paying in cash.
Listening, as all good swells do, to National Public Radio, the air freshener for the mind, the Times sent its Pennsylvania boy — Michael Sokolove — back to his hometown to put the thermometer in the anus of the locals.
As a piece, it was like NPR’s, commented upon last week here.
Sokolove’s place of maturation was Levittown, something he notes along with his two previous missions to consult the heevahavas, conducted during the presidential race. I mocked it back in 2008 here:
Michael Sokolove had returned to his old home ‘burg, Levittown, in Pennsyltucky. As everywhere in the state, it’s “whiter, older and less educated than the rest of the nation.”
There is mention of Reagan Democrats, white men who turn into Republicans the instant they find a candidate on the other side of the fence who seems like a strong and manly daddy-figure. Maybe John McCain in the general election.
They’ll be union workers come upon hard times by the closing of a local steelworks, in Levittown — US Steel’s Fairless Works, as opposed to Bethlehem Steel in the Lehigh Valley. The same kind of union workers, who more often than not, voted for Republicans and social and economic policies inimical to their standard of living and chosen livelihood.
It is a place that can seem like a relic: older, whiter and less educated than much of the rest of America.
However, outside the reusable thought — which is not entirely true since good education has been in decline everywhere, the air seems to have gone out of Sokolove. His is a glum thing, devoid of the usual belligerent Tea Party quotes or profound wisdoms of the power drinkers at the neighborhood bar. Surprisingly, there’s even one statement, from a fired worker, that he won’t be voting for the GOP. The Republicans, he mused, had put up “nut jobs” for election, in retaliation against those who voted for Obama.
Sokolove no longer has a stake with these people, just like the rest of his journalism brethren so fond of covering them. However, he may be signalling he’s more than a little worried about what will happen when and if the GOP takes control in Congress. That would be the rational way of looking at the world.
However, it’s still Pennsylvania, and the politician in defense of his seat, a Democrat named Patrick Murphy, is not looking good. Mass unemployment, personal catastrophe, obvious national decline, the accelerating destruction of what remains of the middle class, all piled together at the worst time for the Democratic Party.
After a desultory canvassing trip with Murphy on a rainy night, Sokolove concluded:
Several people shook Mr. Murphy’s hand and commented on how cold it was. They couldn’t believe that he was outside on such a horrid night. But they let him stand at the door. No one invited him in for so much as a cup of hot tea.
Census workers were treated worse. At least they didn’t call the police on the guy for interrupting sports tv.
“Made in China” as a liability has probably saved Barbara Boxer’s Senate seat here in California. Boxer’s recent political ad on Carly Fiorina, which now exists in two forms, one showing an HP office in Shanghai seems to have put a stake in her rival.
With mass unemployment in the daily news, the segment of Fiorina aridly saying work needed to be done elsewhere while enjoying life at the top is a show stopper.
It exploits class anger, of course. And over the weekend the New York Times ran a story — here — over its political utility:
In the past week or so, at least 29 candidates have unveiled advertisements suggesting that their opponents have been too sympathetic to China and, as a result, Americans have suffered.
The ads are striking not only in their volume but also in their pointed language.
In journo-fashion, it found an expert — someone from the swell class and unaffected by the Great Recession — to explain, not so expertly:
“China is a really easy scapegoat,??? said Erika Franklin Fowler, a political science professor at Wesleyan University who is director of the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks political advertising.
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The ads are so vivid and pervasive that some worry they will increase hostility toward the Chinese and complicate the already fraught relationship between the two countries.
Hmmm. The Boxer ad is notable for making Fiorina, and by extension her company, HP, the “easy scapegoat(s).” While there is a “Made in China” stamp in it, there’s an assertion that jobs were sent to Bangalore, instead of Burbank, too.
China is the destination of outsourcing. But it takes two to do the deal. On the other side of every one, US big business. The thought — that corporate America is antagonistic, even psychopathically adverse, to much American labor, isn’t in the Times’ report.
“Never mind that there is hardly any consensus as to what exactly constitutes outsourcing and how many of the new overseas jobs would have stayed in American hands,” waffles the piece.
“The Democrats cite studies this year from the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research organization, that assert three million jobs have been outsourced to China since 2001 because of the growing trade imbalance.
“But Republicans, backed by some academics, say the number is much smaller. Indeed, Scott Kennedy, director of the Research Center for Chinese Politics and Business at Indiana University, said that most of the jobs China had added in manufacturing through foreign investment had come from Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea, not from the United States.”
Journalism reasons: Somewhere between the two extremes must be the truth.
Here’s another truth.
And some more, in a longer and amusingly mocking form, even if you don’t get all the jokes (tip o’ the hat to the reader who originally pointed it out):
Ha Ha Ha America was done three years ago, China Toilet Blooz around the same time, although the latter wasn’t burned into my homemade slide show until this year.
Last week, A4 of the Wall Street Journal had one story entitled Strategy This Year: Bash China.
The last sentence: “But Democrats unsuccessfully pushed a measure to end corporate tax deductions for expenses related to shifting jobs overseas.”
Its opinion page featured an essay by Dee Woo, from Beijing, where that person “teaches in the economics department at the Beijing Huija Private School.
Woo wrote ‘the US Will Lose a China Trade War.” “Before a strong yuan created any US jobs in manufacturing, it would kill jobs at Wal-Mart and elsewhere …” Woo wrote.
And if the Chinese ever get to believing that the dollar is “useless paper,” it will be very bad for this country. China is good for American corporations, Woo added. Which would seem unassailable.
“Building a harmonious society is the Chinese government’s most important imperative,” Woo informed Journal opinion page readers. “Once a Chinese person can make a living, he rarely challenges authority.”
Which is another way of saying mass unemployment leads to political and national instability.
With its mix of rural and industrial, mining and manufacturing, big cities and sprawling suburbs, Pennsylvania is a natural as a battleground state. But this season, the pendulum seems a more apt metaphor. And with hard times hanging on as they are all across the so-called rustbelt, Pennsylvania seems poised for a potentially big swing back toward the GOP.
It was only little more than two years ago that the national media was obsessed over Pennsylvania and its curdled white southern state-like interior.
Hit in the chops for decades by GOP policies, it nevertheless tends to always vote against its self-interest.
The NPR fellow doesn’t look at the old maps and take into account how narrow the margins of victory were for Democrats. The interior red of the state, which I wrote about at the time, even though sparsely populated, speaks volumes.
After Kerry.
Obama vs. McCain.
The statistics were striking in one respect during Obama’s election. GOP margins shrank in the interior.
However, that part of the state — still like Arkansas or a white country southern place in the interior — never liked Barack Obama.
If you still wander out to the newspaper of the Lehigh Valley — one of the markers for deindustrialization in the rustbelt — you can’t find a single local blog that stands for anything Barack Obama campaigned on. Even the token Dem places, if you can discern them, hew to the right.
And so the NPR reporter wanders from Pennsyltucky white voter to voter, getting exactly the same Republicans-who-insist-they’re-Democrats and hardened GOP who speak about throwing the majority party out in November:
[Florence Troyan] is a Democrat who says she’s thinking of voting for the Republican for Congress this year just to shake things up. And that even though she says she still supports President Obama.
Maybe.
More of the same:
Bob Curtin is an electrical contractor. His business is way down. He says he’s not a Tea Party member, but he likes their message. He’s a registered Democrat. His vote this year?
Mr. BOB CURTIN (Electrical Contractor): I’m not sure. I’m very up in the air right now what I’m going to do. I cant say that Im decisive on anything right now as far as, you know, who Im going to vote for. But Im going to vote.
NPR swell: But he says he’s not happy with the Democrats.
Seated three stools over is retiree Mike Oktishuk, who chimes in with some pride that he didn’t vote for President Obama.
The reporter from NPR, like most upper tier journalists, can always leave Pennsylvania. The outcome of the November elections won’t have an impact on him.
If the Pennsyltucky voter helps put the GOP back in power, they’ll have another two years of enduring very personal catastrophe before they get an opportunity to express their anger again.
In an attempt to close the gap, Dems have latched onto Toomey’s Wall Street past, hammering the Republican for opposing financial regulatory reform and supporting deregulation. Toomey’s an easy target for economic-centered attacks. As a Wall Street banker, Toomey helped pioneer the use of some of the same financial products that have caused fiscal chaos for American towns, cities, and states. He spent years as a derivatives trader for Chemical Bank and at Morgan Grenfell, a British financial firm. While at Morgan Grenfell, Toomey focused on things like interest rate swaps—complicated debt instruments that poisoned many a municipality’s portfolio. Shortly after he was elected to Congress in 1998, a trade magazine rejoiced that “now the derivatives industry can claim representation by one of its own.” Toomey parlayed his trading experience into a spot on the House banking committee, where he crusaded against regulation of financial markets—especially derivatives. And unless Sestak can stage an epic comeback, Toomey will soon be back in Congress, with a vote on banking regulation, if not a seat on the upper chamber’s powerful banking panel.
It needs repeating that the voters in the interior will almost always go against themselves.
They hate those unlike them and they cleave to the failing white man’s delusion that supporting business tycoons and their enablers is something to do because they wishfully believe that if just for a little more luck, they’d be there, too.
That luck never seems to come their way, or any semblance of economic fairness at all, doesn’t seem to matter.
While they may rail against the bailout and the wealthy people in Washington, when it comes down to it they still harbor the hard kernel belief that they might be part of a class-less society, or at least one in which they share something with the old customary rulers — their whiteness. Its irreconcilable — but the human brain can carry such collisions around for a lifetime.
In “Class: A Guide Through the American Class System,” Paul Fussell wrote that bitterness was often not very far from the surface here. It has never been new.
It has many reasons to always be close to breaking through, not all coming from the prole’s susceptibility to crazes, delusions, rip-off advertising and the myths concerning values or the supposed lack of them among Democrats — although these are certainly strong.
Fussell believed class consciousness was rock solid in this country. In one way, yes. However, in others, delusions and illogic cloud the picture.
“Anyone uncertain about class consciousness in this country should listen to a working-class father whose son was killed [in Vietnam],” Fussell wrote, specifically addressing the S-2 deferment, one college students used to escape the draft. “Class” was published in 1984.
“I’m bitter,” Fussell quoted the man as saying. “You bet your goddamn dollar I’m bitter. It’s people like us who gave up our sons for our country. The business people, they run the country and make money from it. The college types, the professors they go to Washington and tell the government what to do … But their sons, they don’t end up in the swamps over there, in Vietnam. No sir.”
But in the end, they have always voted for the worst patrons of the ‘business people’, anyway. And they will again.
The Democratic Party always runs afoul of it, Too much Max Baucus, Bart Stupak, Ben Nelson — pick your favorite among the feckless. Not enough Alan Grayson.
It is easy to understand the great anger in the Tea Party, or the hinterlands of Pennsyltucky. The urge to give a presumed tormentor a good punch in the face when you get the opportunity to swing is strong and human. It’s a motivator even if the result eventually has you wondering why things are worse come 2012.
DD can only marvel at the many folk music videos the opposition puts on YouTube, all with more enthusiastic fans than anything from my side. The music may be bad, the lyrics awful, the sentiment horribly misguided.
One thing it doesn’t lack is gutsiness; the willingness to be taken for a fool in letting the raw shout of hurt out.
Unemployment and “a static economy” have set into stone conditions in which “the mass of Americans now find themselves” moving down. So they’re always going to be bitter. It’s a natural state and it should be very worrying to any sane national leader who wonders how a big complicated nation can compete on the world stage when its working class is demoralized, only rising to strike out at the polls every couple years.
“There used to be room at the top,” Paul Fussell wrote in Class.
The farce of “Hot Jobs” news stories on Yahoo remains a relentlessly good mine for gallows humor. You can tell a lot about the state of the nation — failed — by observing the labor it’s hiring.
The new name for bedpan technician is “Home Health Aide.”
Future job prospects are good for the multi-skilled home oxygen & drainage tubing techs/wheelchair pushers/pill caddy fillers, reassigned from the clinic to duty where the elderly and infirm are being warehoused in place. “Help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” rings across the land, louder every year.
These are $20k/year jobs with little benefits. (Considering the nature of the work, they actually should be compensated much more richly.) So if you live in the big city, unless you’re bunking up with multiple roomies or your spouse has a better paying gig, you’ll be consuming bagloads of freeze-dried noodles.
Much better prospects await those who can capitalize on national paranoia and the war on terror infrastructure, a guarantor of job creation because it actively searches for new enemies and, therefore, always has a growing need for staff.
Yahoo Hot Jobs recommends career futures in Homeland Security:
If you are looking for a challenging career with high stakes, consider Homeland Security. The Department of Homeland Security, which was formed as a result of the September 11 attacks, is responsible for everything from cyber security to border protection. As just one example of this career’s growth pattern, in August 2010, President Obama signed a $600 million bill that pays for 1,000 new Border Patrol agents.
It’s true. Job fairs now have the guys in green from Border Patrol. However, this is only good if you’re young and strong. It leaves all the middle-aged middle class office-workers, the ones you see being fired and crying or stating their intent to commit suicide on HBO’s reshow of Up In the Air this month.
And while you may not know dick about chemical or biological terrorism, unlike me — which doesn’t really matter anyway since observing reality isn’t part of the job description, there doesn’t seem to be any obstacle to a career in homeland security other than a college degree.
Related to Homeland Security jobs are solid conditions for “forensic accountants.”
Like Homeland Security workers, they’re an outgrowth of trouble — mostly of our own devise. There’s a law enforcement/justice demand for people to slowly wind their way through the government’s list of potential corporate and Wall Street crooks generated due to the economic collapse.
The systemic fraud in the home foreclosure predator business, as practiced by the same banks which brought on the economic calamity, guarantees this as a boom industry.
The tip of the iceberg is well-described here at Digby.
And, as noted previously here — regionally, the prospects are good for engineers who can get their feet in the door of the flying robot assassin business at General Atomics.
Today’s Los Angeles Times informs:
Indeed San Diego drone builder General Atomics Aeronatical Inc. will hold a job fair Saturday. It is hiring up to 60 engineers, technicians and machinists, a month.
Now that the fantasy of Hot Jobs has been dispensed with once again, a headline in yesterday’s LA Times Business section read: “Jobs remain a booming US export.”
“Though some American firms are bringing overseas work back home, evidence is growing that companies are moving more jobs than ever to China and other countries — a move that could exacerbate efforts to bring down the nation’s stubbornly high unemployment rate,” reports the newspaper.
“One sign of increased off-shoring is the rising number of applications for Federal Trade Adjustment Assistance which usually goes to factory workers who lost their jobs because their work was sent overseas or was undercut by cheaper imports … For the six months that ended Sept. 30, workers at about 1,200 offices and plants nationwide were approved for Federal Trade Adjustment Assistance.”
This is up 20 percent from the previous half-year, the newspaper reported.
“President Obama has complained the US tax system encourages companies to invest and hire abroad, but a bill that would have ended certain tax credits and deferrals to companies expanding or moving overseas was voted down in the Senate last week,” the newspaper concluded.
A Los Angeles Times business story on Small Business Administration-backed loans is here.
The very small beer about this has to do without it will be a boon for job creation because everyone is in dire need of access to capital.
How will that capital be spent?
The Times furnishes an interesting example:
Kent Peterson, who owns an engineering company in Long Beach with his twin brother, Kevin, said he has already swung into action on the remodel he is planning with his loan money.
Peterson had put off construction on his project to redo the offices of P2S Engineering as his loan — approved way back in the spring — languished while Congress bickered over the small-business-stimulus legislation.
“It’s going to be a fantastic space when we’re all done,” said Peterson, who plans to make his offices more energy efficient, install a gym and create new windows in the building. “We’re really looking forward to it.”
They are going to install a gym. It is, as we all know, of signal importance to always be your buffed-est.
You may ask, “Why this focus on the dreadful US economy and prospects for the middle class, Dick?”
Well, mass unemployment leads to political instability, as we’ve seen.
Political instability is a serious threat to everyone’s security.
If you don’t address it satisfactorily, soon Victoria Jackson’s “There’s a Communist In the White House” has half a million views on YouTube, along with everything that suggests.
Here’s an astounding video (with some jump-on-the-grenade quality) of some harmonica pro extolling the virtues of his $180 Harrison. He gets through the entire video without once actually coming right out and saying the thing’s price.
In fact, the entire video is from the point-of-view of rationalizing the cost without ever mentioning it. It’s awkward in its cognitive dissonance but standard for selling extravagances for the haves now that we can’t make things everyone can afford in this economy.
Your run-of-the-mill viewer, even your pro, is going to be hard pressed to tell any difference between the harmonica this guy has recorded and any other harmonica they’ve heard on blues and rock records over the years. That’s a fact.
The next videos clear the mind, reminding how far the above rubbish is from where it started.
The hype about trade war is unjustified — and, anyway, there are worse things than trade conflict. In a time of mass unemployment, made worse by China’s predatory currency policy, the possibility of a few new tariffs should be way down on our list of worries.
For the truth is that U.S. policy makers have been incredibly, infuriatingly passive in the face of China’s bad behavior — especially because taking on China is one of the few policy options for tackling unemployment available to the Obama administration, given Republican obstructionism on everything else. The Levin bill probably won’t change that passivity. But it will, at least, start to build a fire under policy makers, bringing us closer to the day when, at long last, they are ready to act.
Good news, lads! Good news! At least we killed the Mojo Deluxe Blues & Rock harmonica. 400 views and counting. Onward and upward!
The new Guitar Center shopper arrived in the mail this week.
I get them regularly. Three years ago the thing was filled with offers indulging the stupid dilettante with money — boutique goods made by US brand manufacturers who had outsourced their everyman stuff to China. (Or maybe not so stupid person investing in a piece of ugly furniture they believe will appreciate significantly in value simply because it is ostentatious, rare and preposterous. Unlike off-shored guitars, which never gain in value, winding up at pawnshops and worth less than a case of decent beer to the seller.)
But lately the shopper has taken on a bit of a desperate quality.
Which brings us to the extreme high-end of the American custom market, where often mediocre instruments attain intelligence-insulting pricing, indicating the total extinction of common sense and the middle class.
American relic guitar luthiers could give Eddie van Halen a precise replica of his 1977 axe, complete with cigarette burn marks, ugly sticky tape, lousy but freakishly unique paint job and power drill holes.
In the Summer edition of DD’s Guitar Center catalog it is said, “Ed has partnered with Fender to bring you the Edward van Halen Frankenstein replica guitar — a faithful reproduction of one of the world’s most recognizable instruments. The red, black and white body … has been put through an aging process to replicate the original, down to every last scratch, ding and cigarette burn.”
List price: $25,000.
New guitars allegedly “worth” $25,000 dollars are never played where other people hear them. And DD never wants to meet someone who would pay such money. Neither does he wish to meet scary Eddie van Halen, who probably wouldn’t have even paid one thousand dollars in the late-Seventies for any electric guitar.
Instead of saving to send your layabout parasite of a kid to college, get a Gibson Jimmy Page Doubleneck relic reissue, cheap at $8,000. Or splurge for a Paul Reed Smith Doubleneck Dragon, $32,000. You know you deserve it.
Outside of these extravagances, almost all the merchandise in Guitar Center was either made in China or Indonesia.
Consider that for a moment.
The business of rock ‘n’ roll instrumentation was built on a foundation of American made guitars and amplifiers. Period.
Essentially, all the brand American companies — if they didn’t go out of business — turned themselves into custom shops for the high end. Except for the company that was always a custom shop for the high end — Mesa Engineering.
Can you believe the odious craftsmen at Fender responsible for the $25,000 Eddie van Halen guitar were actually revered a couple years ago? It tells you all you need to know about economics in present day America.
However, in the October 2010 Guitar Center shopper, almost all the goods shown are made by slave labor in China.
You have your Epiphone Guitars, used-to-be American factory made, now down market Gibsons made in China. (Sometimes Korea, a few years ago.)
You have your $119 Fender “Strat” — made you know where. Fender amplifiers, all made in China, except for one tube model at the high end of the range.
One could go on and on, page after page after page of stuff invented here for middle class Americans, made by middle class Americans, now all gone to China.
Paradoxically, the shopper features an interview with country music mega-star Keith Urban. Urban chats about his collection of vintage US-made guitars and amplifiers. Some of them were lost in the Nashville flood, he says.
It’s a pity. The cognitive dissonance.
Guitar Center employees, who are all rock musicians, probably make a little above minimum wage plus commissions.
What they think about working amidst the $4000 custom Gibson Les Pauls (plus the $9000 Gibson double-neck, the $4000 Gibson jumbo acoustic, and the $1200 Fender P-Bass) they can’t afford is unknown.
One wonders, for a moment, what the worker discounts are like.
From today’s business section:
In one of their final actions before returning to the campaign in their districts, members of House voted 348 to 79, with dozens of Republicans joining in support, for a bill that would open the way for the US to slap tariffs on Chinese goods … But the bill faces an uncertain future in the Senate …
But major business groups representing a diverse array of trades — including cattle ranchers, Los Angeles freight forwarders and Wall Street firms — lined up against the bill, saying it would do more harm than good for economic growth and job creation.
Turning back the clock is impossible. But smashing Fender and Gibson’s Chinese-made imports with tariffs would be a very good thing, if only from the perspective of boosting mental health. It would cause these firms, and their competitors, discomfort. Such discomfort would be great right now, particularly if sending even more things to Asia wouldn’t soothe it, for what were quintessentially US firms which had, long ago, been dedicated to quality musical instruments made by Americans for the same.
Their CEOs might consider banding together with others to go before Congress to lobby for better pay, a living wage for their potential consumers.
I won’t hold my breath waiting for that to happen.
In the front section of the newspaper, defeated by GOP filibuster, a rider on the tax cut legislation: “A bill to punish firms that send US jobs overseas was blocked …”
And on the Opinion page, this gem:
Income inequality [in China] is another major concern [to the Chinese]. Cities and provinces have raised the legal minimum wage. In Guanghzhou, for example, it’s now [$164] a month …
“Marvelous,” as Dirty Harry Clint Eastwood used to say.
Related: The $180 blues harp. Everyman instrument gets upgraded to Swiss watch status symbol.
As the recession shook Americans’ confidence last year, new figures show that weddings for people 18 and older dropped to the lowest point in over a hundred years.
A broad array of new Census Bureau data released Tuesday documents the far-reaching impact of a business slump that experts say technically ended in June 2009: a surging demand for food stamps, considerably fewer homeowners and people doubling up in housing to save money.
The government revealed that the income gap between the richest and poorest Americans grew last year by the largest margin ever, stark evidence of the impact the long recession starting in 2007 has had in upending lives and putting the young at greater risk.
The top-earning 20 percent of Americans — those making more than $100,000 each year — received 49.4 percent of all income generated in the U.S., compared with the 3.4 percent earned by the bottom 20 percent of wage-earners who fell below the poverty line, according to the newly released Census figures.
A different measure, the international Gini index, found U.S. income inequality at its highest level since the Census Bureau began tracking household income in 1967. The U.S. also has the greatest disparity among Western industrialized nations.
Three states — New York, Connecticut and Texas — and the District of Columbia had the largest gaps in rich and poor, disparities that exceeded the national average. Similar income gaps were evident in large cities such as New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Boston and Atlanta, home to both highly paid financial and high-tech jobs as well as clusters of poorer immigrant and minority residents. — AP
