The Middle Class and Working Poor's Lifelong Losing Game — in 10 Slides

[unhappycamper]

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/richard-eskow/58344/the-middle-class-and-working-poors-lifelong-losing-game-in-10-slides

The Middle Class and Working Poor's Lifelong Losing Game — in 10 Slides
Economic Equity | Economic Policy
by Richard Eskow | September 16, 2014 - 8:54am

They say a picture's worth a thousand words. If that's true, the following ten images could provide the lyrics for a thousand blues songs. The graphs are taken from series of recent reports which, when considered together, create a paint-by-numbers picture of the lifelong losing game faced by working Americans.

The chorus to our blues song goes like this: The middle the class and working poor are increasingly trapped in a cycle of economic decline, a downward slope which stretches from their golden youth to their sunset years. And there's no way out, unless we find one for ourselves.



Total student debt in this country now exceeds the total credit card debt held by all Americans. The amount of debt held by each individual borrower has also soared, rising by more than 50 percent:







~snip~

It should be noted that this accelerating difference in income between the wealthy and the rest of us has taken place since the financial crisis, and since both a Republican and Democratic administration went to such great lengths to rescue the banking industry. It should also be noted that this gulf of inequality has been widening for some time: