weer een prachtige bijdrage op de blog van Steve Keen dat duidelijk aantoont wat iedereen wel wist
http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2...-middle-class/
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THE REASONS BEHIND THE TRENDS
Total US national income per person rose by 99.3% over the 30 years from 1969 to 2009.[24] Why then have incomes for most Americans been stagnant or falling? Why do American families now need two incomes to have the standard of living they used to have with just one? Why aren’t today’s young adults making twice as much as their parents did were when they first entered the labor market thirty years before?
The answer is that all of the growth in the American economy over the past forty years has gone to the top half of Americans. Most of it has gone to the Top Twenty. If the US income distribution today had remained unchanged from 1969, by 2009 the average American household would have had an income of $86,479 instead of $49,777.[25] If the US income distribution had become more equal in the four decades after 1969 — as it did in the four decades before 1969 — the average American household would be doing even better.
The fact that the average American household today has an income of $50,000 instead of $100,000 can be attributed entirely to rising instead of declining inequality over the past four decades. America has far greater income than ever before in its history, but that income is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Rising inequality is killing middle America.
Sociologists and economists have been conducting detailed quantitative analyses of rising inequality for more than a quarter century now. It’s no mystery why inequality has been rising in America. As a recent 11-country comparative study concluded, the main factors that determine whether a country is equal or unequal in its income distribution are “union density, the strictness of employment protection law, unemployment benefit duration, unemployment benefit generosity, and the size of the minimum wage.”[26
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Paul