My complaint is not that I don’t have enough money, or even that I don’t make enough money. I’m not after anyone else’s money, and I’m not even saying I’m not happy overall. My happiness frankly doesn’t come from how much money I have or how many nice things I have.

My problem is that I’m facing the reality of our country being over 50 trillion dollars in debt, and that every day that passes the money I *do* have buys less.

I’m facing the reality that because it constantly takes more money to buy the same things, my wages are not stagnating, they are actually falling every day, every month, and every year.

So even though I’m actually setting aside money in savings, and have been, (contrary to most) I have to face the fact, that by doing so I’m actually losing money, because inflation is growing faster than my interest – and it is only going to get worse if we don’t fix it.

I’m facing the reality that this “downturn” or “recession” or “hiccup” or whatever pretty word people are putting on it this week is going to be a lot worse than a lot of people are letting on, and I have very little buffer to deal with it.

Thankfully, I have little to no debt to deal with because of the choices I have made or we’d be even worse off. But the debt everyone else is holding that they won’t be able to repay is still going to hurt me. Especially when the government decides to go around bailing people, corporations, and banks out.

I don’t care about owning a boat, or a jetski. I don’t care about world travel. I just want to know that the salary I was more than adequately feeding, clothing, and educating my kids with 3 years ago, that barely covers them now – despite the only change in lifestyle being towards a more conservative and thrifty one – will still feed them three years from now. Today I don’t have that confidence.

Drew might as well have spit in my face with this video, and I (and apparently many other people given these threads) don’t appreciate it. If what he meant is what you said, then again, he did an extremely poor job of communicating it.

He should’ve made that more clear in the video. Sorry Balko, but this was definitely Drew Carey’s worst work so far.

Rising income inequality matters because it effects the bargaining position of the average person. And all these people with lots of STUFF doesn’t in and of itself equal a better standard of living. They’re probably in debt up to their eyeballs like most Americans, and this growing debt is eating away at people’s independence and ability to control their futures. No doubt Fed monetary policies have a lot to do with the middle class’s access to more consumer goods, and the cheap, fiat financing to fund it. But when a large, monopolistic central bank makes decisions that bails out corporations and banks and dishes out cheap money out of thin air for banks to markup and sell to people, that’s just the free market in action, eh?

Taste the difference: http://leftlibertarian.org

The real case to be made is statistical, and that’s tricky to do in a video. It’s also controversial, because by some measures wages haven’t gone up, and statistical controversies are even more boring.

The house has grown from a 2 bedroom, one bath small house to a 4-bedroom with 2.5 baths. The transportation has gone from the family car to having at least one car for every driver in the household. The education has gone from going to public school and graduating high school to getting into a ‘good college’, where prices are inflating tremendously for no good reason. And where we used to have the family TV set, now we have TV’s for everyone, with the big-screen in the living room for events (remember, 20″ used to be a ‘big screen’).

All those changes are because of choices people make. You can justify them however you want. “We *need* two vehicles because we both have to work.” “We *need* a bigger house.” But the bare fact is that the scope, if not the items, has changed significantly. And that ANYONE can keep up with this stuff, much less most people (and yes, most people do, no matter what the doomsayers complain) is due to the increases in productivity. People ARE better off.

As for the mandated vacation and all that crap: if you want more vacation, then take it. What you want is more time off with the same amount of pay. How’s that work? Why should someone be forced to GIVE you that. Who’s gonna make up that difference? It’s easy to say ‘the boss’ should, but why?

PNG, how many of your employees have canceled their cable TV or cell phones for the winter to pay for their heating oil? What’s ‘rotten in Denmark’ is that they want something for nothing.

http://tinyurl.com/32q6u8

GAINS ONLY FOR A TINY SLICE

Yet concern is rising that the gains from free trade may increasingly be going to a small group at the top. For the vast majority of Americans, Dartmouth’s Slaughter points out, income growth has all but disappeared in recent years. And it’s not just the low-skilled who are getting slammed. Inflation-adjusted earnings have fallen in every educational category other than the 4% who hold doctorates or professional degrees. Such numbers, Slaughter argues, suggest the share of Americans who aren’t included in the gains from trade may be very big. “[That's] a very important change from earlier generations, and it should give pause to people who say they know what’s going on,” he says.

I think the next ten years are going to show that globalization and free trade, while a net positive perhaps, have been highly overrated.

We see this all day long. With health care, they don’t tell you the number of people who don’t get health care; they tell you the number of people without health insurance. Why? Because even healthy people can be scared by that, and there are a lot more healthy people than sick people.

It’s about fear.

I’ve liked Carey’s vids so far, but this new one just begs Moore to show him how it is done properly.

I will use my brother for an example. He is a non-college graduate who delivers pizzas for a living. His wife is a home health care worker when she is working.

They live with their three kids in a very nice Dallas suburb in a 4 bedroom house with an in ground pool and hot tub in the backyard. They have a big screen TV with Tivo and DirecTV. They regularly vacation in Florida and Colorado. They drive decent cars, mostly to the kid’s soccer games. They have several home computers with high speed Internet access and Xbox Live.

Growing up 35-40 years ago, we never came close to that lifestyle, even though both our parents were college graduates and our father worked a professional job with a well established company.

Thank you, Drew Carey, for the excellent video.

Balderdash!

Real Wages Fail to Match a Rise in Productivity

As a result, wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation’s gross domestic product since the government began recording the data in 1947, while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share since the 1960’s. UBS, the investment bank, recently described the current period as “the golden era of profitability.”

Time Off for the Overworked American

Last year, 25 percent of American workers got no paid vacation at all, while 43 percent didn’t even take a solid week off. A third fewer American families take vacations together today than they did in 1970. American workers receive the least vacation time among wealthy industrial nations. And it is no thanks to the U.S. government –127 other countries in the world have a vacation law. We — the crackberry denizens and Protestant ethic superstars — do not.

Poverty in America Today

The United States is a nation pulling apart to a degree unknown in the last twenty-five years. A decade of strong national economic growth in the 1990s left many of America’s communities falling far behind median national measures of economic health. Despite the investments in transportation and public facilities infrastructures, massive movements of capital and people, and the expectations of most regional economists over the past forty years, the nation’s regional development patterns are becoming more uneven. Income inequality is on the rise. The number of communities falling behind the national economic average is increasing. This tendency has been most pronounced in recent years, when trade liberalization and globalization have greatly opened the American economy.

CEO Pay Soared in 2004 as U.S. Economy Stumbled

Exploding CEO pay is a relatively recent phenomenon in U.S. history. For example, in the 1960s, the average CEO earned around 40 times what the rank-and-file workers earned. Today the average CEO makes over 500 times what the average worker earns. And the gap continues to widen, year by year.

Are you flipping kidding me?

I run a small business(less than 20 employees)in sourtheastern NY, LI, when my workers need to resort to putting their home heating fuel deliveries on their credit cards something is seriously rotten in Denmark.

I could post links to pertinent articles all day long that state, the obvious, the middle-class in the US has been getting a raw deal across the board with regard to income related matters.

Perhaps you and your ilk can climb down from your ivory-towers and take a look?

Because that restlessness is an attractive quality it also feeds into the gene pool and so the idea that having a platform on which we’re more likely to succeed (the modern world) makes us happier before we, as individuals, have succeeded is false.

It’s funny that so many of us aspire to happiness while holding in highest esteem those historical figures that were least happy with what they saw.