What the Media Isn't Telling Us

I was doing a little surfing and tripped over a site that provides previews of on-line text books. The quote below stunned me, not that it's a surprise, but that there has been no media coverage of the facts. I suspect like me, many people have noticed while pay checks have gone up, it's buying power is no better or worse than it was 20 years ago.
There has hard data out there since the mid-1990's that the middle class and working class is taking it in the nose and the media hasn't picked it up! It is apparent that government policies since the Nixon era have been squeezing the middle class. The have been a couple of short reprieves during Democratic Administrations in the White House, but the predominance of Republicans on Pennsyvania Avenue and it's recent control of Capital Hill have crushed the working class and basically frozen the middle class in place while billionaires have become a dime a dozen.
Doesn't that piss you off? Everytime I see a $100,000 car on the road, I think about the disparity and hunger in the working class. If that's not class warfare, what is it?
Macroeconomic Changes Affecting the Family

Many contemporary parents feel that they are working harder than their own parents did, just to maintain a modest standard of living. Many researchers agree: "Families seem to be in a situation where they have to run as fast as they can just to remain in the same place" (Zill and Nord, 1994 : 11). Because of an increase in income inequality, poverty, and homelessness in the past 30 years, some families fell out of the race no matter how fast they tried to run, whereas a growing number of families are watching the race from their penthouses. Unequal Income Distribution The expansion in the U.S. economy in the past 25 years has not benefited all families. Instead, income inequality has increased since the late 1960s (Karoly, 1993 ). The rich have gotten richer and the poor have gotten poorer. Income inequality in the United States is greater than in any other Western, industrialized nation (Galbraith, 1998 ; Bernstein, McNichol et al., 2000 ).


The Census Bureau uses several methods to measure income inequality. One of the most common methods is the share of combined household income, by which households are ranked from lowest to highest on the basis of income and then divided into quintiles, or fifths. Census Bureau data and other studies on household incomes show that the rich are getting richer, the middle class is shrinking, and the working class is barely surviving. A /social class / is a category of people who have a similar standing or rank based on wealth, education, power, prestige, and other valued resources.