Middle Class: Why we are screwed. Rich People with inherited wealth are taking most of the money AND DON'T PAY TAXES or ship it overseas.

http://latest.com/2016/04/lets-understand-why-were-so-screwed-economically/?utm_source=realfb&utm_medium=facebook

So let’s listen to economist Paul Krugman explain why we are so screwed. Not we will be screwed, or maybe things will go that way, or we will in the future. Nope, it already happened, though most of us haven’t yet figured it out.

Krugman, and the economist he discusses in the video, Thomas Piketty, paid attention in math class, and the other classes, too. That’s why they understand this stuff and I work here still trying to suss out why no matter how many hours I stay on the job and how much I save, it is never enough.

In case you’re reading this on your 15 minute break at Target (the video referenced is 24 minutes long), I’ll try to summarize.

The American Dream (Patrimonial Capitalism)

The myth of the American Dream is the dominating factor in keeping people mostly complacent in the United States. You know it — work hard, and your life will improve. Well, maybe not your life, but your kids’, or at least your grandkids’. If that doesn’t work, it is the fault of the Irish immigrants, or the darn Chinese, or those welfare freeloaders. Ask Donald Trump how it all works.

The thing that makes the myth so powerful is that the tiny percent that is true sounds better than the 99 percent which is a lie. As long as near-constant growth could be assured, enough pieces would fall to the the lower and middle classes to make the Dream seem real. It helped that a kindly media would promote the heck out of every exception, whether it was the shoeshine boy in the late 19th century who went to college, or the plucky guys who invented some new tech in their garage and became billionaires. See, you can do it too, just like if we run hard enough, everyone can be in the Olympics. It’s just a matter of wanting it, right?

The Undeniable Reality of the Now

The bulk of the industrial jobs are gone and never coming back; ask Detroit, or Gary, or the people in Youngstown and Weirton. People have been talked out of most union jobs, convinced somehow that organizing was not in their own interest, and now they somehow find themselves accepting whatever minimum of a wage they can get. Food stamps and other need-based programs are finding more and more middle class users, as suburban people who once donated to charities are now lining up out front of them. Health care paid for by our own taxes is a give away to lazy people. This is the stuff Bernie Sanders talks about.

Like gravity, the universe doesn’t care if you “believe” it or not; it is just true, independent of what you “think.” That you have been taught this all is something you can choose to believe or not is the weight that holds us all down.

Drilling Down Into Our Miserable Lives

In case you have a few more minutes on your break, or if you’ve been laid off since starting this article, here are some more things happening out there whether you believe in them or not. You can read more about all of this in Thomas Piketty’s book, Capital in the Twentieth Century.