The Oligarch Recovery – Low Income Americans Can’t Afford to Live in Any Metro Area

Redistribution

The Oligarch Recovery – Low Income Americans Can’t Afford to Live in Any Metro Area (Liberty Blitzkrieg, Sept 1, 2015):

We were told we needed to bail out Wall Street in order to save Main Street. Well the results are in…

Wall Street has never done better, and Main Street has never done worse.

From the Huffington Post:

Low-income workers and their families do not earn enough to live in even the least expensive metropolitan American communities, according to a new analysis of families’ living costs published Wednesday.

The analysis, released by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, is an annual update of the think tank’s Family Budget Calculator that reflects new 2014 data. The Family Budget Calculator is a formula designed to determine the income “required for families to attain a secure yet modest standard of living” in 618 different communities across the country that the U.S. Census Bureau defines as metropolitan areas. The formula uses data collected by the government and some nonprofit groups to measure costs of housing, food, child care, transportation, health care, “other necessities” like clothing, and taxes for families of 10 different compositions in these specific locales.

The updated Family Budget Calculator shows that even the most affordable metropolitan areas in the country are beyond the reach of millions of American families with incomes above the official federal poverty level. The official federal poverty level for a family of two parents and two children in 2014 was $24,008, according to the EPI. But the least expensive metropolitan area in the country for this family type is Morristown, Tennessee, where a family needs an income of $49,114, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s budget calculator.

The Economic Policy Institute also estimates that minimum-wage workers — who almost universally earn less than the federal poverty level — lack the income needed to make an adequate living in any of the communities surveyed, even if they are single and childless. The think tank notes that this includes minimum-wage workers living in cities or states with a higher minimum wage than the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour, or $15,080 a year for a full-time worker.

Even families with incomes closer to the middle of the earnings spectrum lack the means to maintain an adequate standard of living. The nation’s median household income was $51,939 in 2013 — the most recent year in which data were available — not much higher than the cost of living in the relatively inexpensive Morristown.

Where’s our hero when you need him?

bernanke-the-hero

5 thoughts on “The Oligarch Recovery – Low Income Americans Can’t Afford to Live in Any Metro Area”

  1. The social mobility that this economy enjoyed from 1945-2000 was incredible. Thanks to NAFTA, the plundering of the economy by our dreadful leaders, bankers and international corporations, 50% of Americans live in poverty.

    Conversely, working age Americans make up slightly over 200 million. Of that, 93.8 million struggle with long term unemployment…….While our mendacious leaders and media say we are at full employment, homelessness and poverty continue to grow.

    Social mobility is down to a crawl, there are no opportunities left for most people. Greedy guts took them all……

    Without real growth, there can be no mobility, no opportunity and no new wealth.

    China is a huge example of our very worst…..they kept their worst games, and added Enron Accounting and other western corrupt games to their economic arsenal……

    Some of my friends have quoted JP Morgan and other 19th century oligarchs “The market goes up, the market goes down, it fluctuates”. I agree, but what they don’t seem to get is the fact the US is no longer the center of the world economy…….

    We are finished. The great 18th century enlightened experiment, the US republic, has failed. Greed and corruption did it all while the people slept.

    Reply

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