Statistical Snapshot of the Murder of the Middle Class

A contributor to ZeroHedge goes through the numbers to show that The Housing Bubble Broke The Middle Class, by destroying one half the net worth of the American middle class. Other important items:

Wages now account for the lowest percentage (51%) of total personal income since the government first began keeping the statistics. Since the crash of 2008, the amount of total personal income coming from direct government transfer payments has zoomed from a historical average of 12.5% to 18.3%.

. . . 70% of the increase in personal income was simply money borrowed by the Federal government (recall the $1.6 trillion annual Federal deficit) and distributed to the citizenry. In other words, people aren't making more money--the Central State is simply borrowing more and it's being counted as "income" when it's distributed.

This amply shows the utter bankruptcy of present U.S. policies. Rather than borrowing money to keep millions of Americans barely living at the edge of subsistence, our government could be using its sovereign powers to create money, and use it to pay millions of Americans put back to work repairing America's broken infrastructure (the American Society of Civil Engineers calculates $2.2 trillion is required just to get our already existing infrastructure back into fully usable condition. No money borrowed, and the new money created is going directly into creating new wealth for the country.

So here's the reality: over one-fourth of all households are at or below the poverty line: 28 million.

The top 10%--10.5 million households--own the vast majority of the financial assets ($45 trillion)(the total owned by non-profits is not broken out).

The next 10% own 10% of this wealth, or about $4 trillion. So the top 21 million households own 93% of all financial wealth.

The Great Middle Class between those in poverty and the top 20%--56 million households-- owns about $2.7 trillion in financial wealth, and the millions with mortgages own an additional $1 trillion in home equity. That comes to $3.7 trillion, or about 6.5% of the total household net worth.

Read the entire article.