SSA says plurality of americans make less than $30k

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(clicky)social security administration says 51% of americans make less than $30k per annum, before taxes
also, 71 percent of all American workers made less than $50,000 last year. IOW, good bye, middle class America, hello favelas in a few more years. you can't have a middle class without middle-class incomes which are at least $20k higher [NET, after taxes]. all the good entry level middle class jobs have been shipped overseas, never to return. what politician has any answers to this that don't involve giving Richie Rich yet more tax breaks?

I would say something else to that corporate tool. BIH.

I think this is misleading.

59 million people receive Social Security benefits.

Average monthly benefit is ~$1300/month.

Likely, a huge portion of the people making less than 30k/year are SS retirees.

You're dealing with two things. It's part demographic transition, an aging society, and part cultural decay. Unfortunately, you can't fix either over night. The problem is, in a representative republic, that the fickle citizenry generally gets tired of any one ideology after about a decade at the most.

You would need political leadership strongly committed to either full-blown socialism, and all the government re-education that entails, or darn-near anarchic libertarianism.

Either way would work, if it was stuck with long enough. I guess it just depends on what your conscience can bear.

This is news?....

And not bloody common knowledge already? wtf. Good to put this information out there, but damn I'd think more people would be catching on already that the middle class is disappearing and its not because they are getting richer.

in any case, what this means is that without a viable middle class, there really can't be a democracy, it was the middle class that started demanding reforms/representation in the first place. the working class has no voice in America, especially now after citizens united.

reminds me of that mel brooks movie, "life stinks!" [highly recommended]
I suspect he woulda struggled.

What democracy? This country hasn't had a true democracy ever.

now it is a fiduciary oligarchy with token representative trappings for the masses. only money has any real representation.

Those with more guns and/or more control of resources have always managed to convince the majority of people that serving those with more serves those with less. We just live in a country and time where a few generations before us were allowed to ignore that reality and pretend that they actually matter, and to get more goods and services. But those generations are now almost all died off - only the tail end remains, and it's fast disappearing, too. Folks born after 1960 were the first to be screwed, and each next year has meant those newly born folks has simply been screwed even more. Except for a few very cases, the only people who truly still have money or the ability to move up into money are the people who have been born to folks who already have money.

The rich don't need us. They are rebuilding the world to only need them. Our worst problem is that we *could* build our own world to benefit ourselves - but almost none of us is ever really interested in that. Like we could invent our own local economies that don't interact with the power-economy. But most people are more interested in divesting themselves from reality with the offered television/movie/gaming, psych drugs, street drugs, religion, etc.

So. Screwed.