Moving this video to curiousity's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 3 days.

*beg

Sending this video to Beggar's Corner to plea for a little attention - beg requested by original submitter curiousity.

They bring up some interesting points, but I smell some BS here. First of all, the guys driving around in those boats and hummers may be middle class but they're also likely hugely in debt with little savings to their name. And I don't think you can say that things are better today for the middle class compared say to the 70s when you look at the fact that pensions are all but extinct, most companies have stopped matching 401k payments, a lot of employees have to pay some or even all of their own medical insurance, and the average American is floating around $9000 in credit card debt just to stay afloat. It's really the debt that's a killer these days. People are too busy paying off debt to save money and I think in the long run that's going to cause some huge problems when it's time for them to retire and there's no pension and barely any social security to fall back on.

There will always be a middle class due to the Bell curve. Any way you care to measure however, inequality (the difference between two opposite points on the distribution curve) is growing in many countries. In the US it has been growing by leaps and bounds.

It doesn't matter so much if everyone is becoming wealthier. Human psychology is such that relative wealth is incredibly important to us.

Very good discussion of these trends here:
http://www.onpointradio.org/shows/2008/03/20080307_b_main.asp

Nice link. I've noticed those are the kind of stats that are missing when people talk about how the wealthiest Americans are earning so much more...

Weathiest 400 Americans:
"Their share of the nation's income has doubled since 1995. And the tax bill of our happy gazillionaires? Well, it's fallen by almost half in that same period, from 30 to 18 percent."


>> ^fissionchips:
There will always be a middle class due to the Bell curve. Any way you care to measure however, inequality (the difference between two opposite points on the distribution curve) is growing in many countries. In the US it has been growing by leaps and bounds.
It doesn't matter so much if everyone is becoming wealthier. Human psychology is such that relative wealth is incredibly important to us.
Very good discussion of these trends here:
http://www.onpointradio.org/shows/2008/03/20080307_b_main.asp