Even 101.5 Gets It

When even Jim Gearhart's radio station reports something like this, it's hard to ignore:

Even as the economy begins to pick up, an increasing number of Garden State families are struggling to make ends meet…while it seems the states wealthiest residents are getting richer and richer.

New data from the IRS confirms that the median income for the typical middle class family has held steady - for the past 20 years - while those earning more than 380 thousand dollars a year have seen their incomes increase - by a whopping 33 percent!

Rutgers economist James Hughes says that has happened for several reasons.

"The loss of manufacturing jobs…removed a lot of middle class jobs" he says, "and the same thing is now happening to white collar information processing positions…that broad middle class sector of jobs has been contracting over the past 10 years."

At the same time, he points out the growth of the stock market - even with the recent downturn - has helped the wealthy become even wealthier, because "the more affluent residents are the ones most likely to own stocks - those in the middle and at the bottom end are not stock owners."

Hughes adds the middle class hasn't become the under class yet, 'but it has the potential to do so in the future - particularly if corporate America keeps doing its leading edge investment in the overseas growth markets - not in the United States…while the rich are going on vacation, the middle class are heading to the dollar store."

Millennium Radio NJ - Copyright 2010. All Rights Reserved.

A financial transactions tax would certainly help; instead, we're going to continue the madness of giving business tax breaks without even doing serious cost-benefit analysis on whether or not they work.