The world's population of everyday normal millionaires heh since the year 2000 has more than quadrupled to 52 million

 ... There is not much data on individuals in the $50 million to $1 billion range, which distorts the picture, according to Mazeau. He also said the wealth growth among middle and lower wealth brackets is underappreciated. For instance, the number of individuals with $1 million to $5 million, whom UBS dubs “everyday millionaires,” has more than quadrupled since 2000 to about 52 million.

“They have more wealth collectively than all the billionaires in the world,” he said. “It is often overlooked how much wealth is rising and is going towards the middle of the pack.”

The middle of the pack. Yeah right.

It takes $33 million in 2025 to be a 1913 millionaire. 

More in "The U.S. added a thousand new millionaires a day in 2024: Report".

Meanwhile . . .

 

 

Hey! She grew up middle class!

She sat for the cover as Hurricane Milton was bearing down on Florida, because people who lose everything in a hurricane will need light, attractive reading in the aftermath.

 

The middle class couldn't afford restaurants under Obama-Biden, eleven years later they can't afford even fast food under Biden-Harris

 You got what you voted for, good and hard.

 

Kamala Harris wants to build the middle class by throwing $3,000 rent-subsidies at people instead of making this an economy which provides full-time jobs at potential

 Building the middle class may be a ‘defining goal’ under a Harris presidency — how that may shape a key tax credit

53% working full time today would mean 8 million more people working full time than do. 

Full time jobs are the indispensable key to homeownership.

 

53% worked full time in 2000

49% worked full time in 2024

Democrat media are not covering this story: If re-elected Joe Biden promises to let Trump 2017 tax cuts expire

 President Biden vowed Friday that former President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts would lapse next year if he’s re-elected and “stay expired” — meaning higher taxes for middle class and low-income Americans — prompting a hasty walk-back by aides.

Biden, 81, lambasted Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), which permanently lowered corporate taxes from 35% to 21% and temporarily lowered personal income tax rates through 2025, as a giveaway to the rich in a speech to electrical union members in Washington.

More.

Lyin' Joe Biden's IRS is auditing the middle class, not the rich as promised

 Discussed here:

 "As of last summer, 63% of new audits targeted taxpayers with income of less than $200,000," reports the Journal. "Only a small overall share reached the very highest earners, while 80% of audits covered filers earning less than $1 million." ... 

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was a bit sassier. "Contrary to the misinformation from opponents of this legislation, small business or households earning $400,000 per year or less will not see an increase in the chances that they are audited," she wrote in a letter to Rettig. ...

The IRS had set a goal of hiring 3,700 new agents in the first year of boosted funding. Instead, in the first six months, they'd hired 34.

Awkwardly, "revenue agent staffing had actually decreased by 8%, or more than 650 employees, between the end of fiscal 2019 and March 2023," per a previous watchdog report. And it's not just hiring that's in trouble: The agency has completed just 33 percent of its fiscal year 2023 milestones outlined in its strategic operating plan, which is…tough given that the year is over.

You should read The Untold History of the Biden Family about Joe's so-called middle class dad

It's a doozy, in The New Yorker no less, here, August 15, 2022:

Relatively little has been known about the President’s father, whose story reveals a family’s fraught relationship with money, class, and alcohol.

The rentier class at CNBC, FinTwit, Wall Street, is in a panic about Fed rate hikes and just lies this morning about the latest battle: Payrolls beat expectations but CNBC says payrolls slowed

 Well yeah, they slowed from 315k, but that was EXPECTED.

The parasites who derive their main livelihood from the returns on financials are in a panic over Fed rate hikes designed to reduce inflation. Whether those will do that or not is beside the point.

This is all about their carry trade. 

The Fed has been making cheap money available since December 2002 to restart the stock market and it has hardly stopped . . . until lately. The politics of inflation have finally caused the Fed to pivot on this long-standing policy, and they couldn't be more angry.

The top 10% borrow at cheap government rates and plow the money into private financial products which pay higher rates which the 90% have to pay. They prosper, gloriously, off the difference. But increase their cost of borrowing and you are diluting the gravy train.

Ever since the Fed started raising rates in earnest earlier this year, the rentiers have been trying everything they can to get them to pivot, without success.

This morning the hope was that a really poor employment report would get the Fed to back off, except the 263k figure beat expectations of 250k.

The Fed is likely to stay the course and keep raising rates.

CNBC paints this as slowing in keeping with the rentiers' rhetorical narrative aimed at the Fed, which has a dual mandate to maximize employment and maintain stable prices.

Never mind that the dual mandate is nuts since unstable prices exact a far greater cost on the people than unemployment ever does. Inflation doubling makes everyone pay 100% more for everything indefinitely, whereas unemployment affects fewer and is definitely cyclical.

And never mind the Fed has NO mandate to suppress interest rates, buy securities, and bail out the world.

But I digress.

You are being lied to and manipulated . . . constantly.

Because they can, and it works.

 

Global fascists wrecked the US middle class, and now they want to wreck it some more

 UN Calls on Fed to Halt Rate Rises...

Bloomberg economic model forecasts 25% tariffs between democratic and autocratic countries would roll back globalization to 1990s levels and leave the world 3.5% poorer

Arguably that would be a good thing for American workers, but Bloomberg doesn't care about that.

 

For three decades, a defining feature of the world economy has been its ability to churn out ever more goods at ever lower prices. The entry of more than a billion workers from China and the former Soviet bloc into the global labor market, coupled with falling trade barriers and hyper-efficient logistics, produced an age of abundance for many.But the last four years have brought an escalating series of disruptions. Tariffs multiplied during the US-China trade war. The pandemic brought lockdowns. And now, sanctions and export controls are upending the supply of commodities and goods.All of this risks leaving advanced economies facing a problem they thought they’d vanquished long ago: that of scarcity. Emerging nations could see more acute threats to energy and food security, like the ones already causing turmoil in countries from Sri Lanka to Peru. And everyone will have to grapple with higher prices.

More.

The story never mentions how those newly introduced extra billion plus workers reduced economic outcomes for the already established middle classes around the world, especially in America where the full time job of the 1990s became a thing of the past.

If I'm repeating myself, I don't care.

 

 

 

The left is phony, a clerisy suffering from Tourette's Syndrome, the bourgeois tool of neoliberalism: Brexit fascists! Trump fascists! Yellow vest fascists! Trucker fascists!

 Tom Slater, here: 

 

Essentially every time working-class people have revolted against the establishment in recent years the left has joined with the centrists to denounce them as fascists. The Brexit vote? Fascists! The Trump revolt? Super fascists! The gilets jaunes? French fascists! It’s like a tic at this point, a form of political Tourette’s bred of the left’s profound disorientation. ... today’s leftists are so cloistered, so bourgeois, so much more comfortable in the faculty lounge than on the factory floor, that they not only can’t lead these revolts, they really don’t want to. ... Supposed radicals – up to their eyeballs in divisive intersectionalist politics – have become the useful idiots of a neoliberal ruling class keen to put voters firmly back in their place . . ..

Housing affordability turned down again in 2020 as housing prices climbed ever higher and incomes fell

The key to joining the middle class has always been the full-time job, without which you cannot afford a house.

The rich have taken away the keys.

If this keeps up America will be just like Cuba

The average age of a car on U.S. roads rose to 12.1 years in 2021, according to IHS Markit. The average age had been 11.9 years in 2020. In 2002, the average age was 9.6 years. ... Car shopping site iSeeCars publishes a list of the longest-lasting cars on the road. Recently, it found that 16% of the Toyota Land Cruisers on the road have at least 200,000 miles on them. Meanwhile, at least 2.5% of several other models — from car makers including Toyota, Honda and General Motors — also have at least 200,000 miles on their odometers.

The story never mentions that a declining middle class finds it increasingly difficult to afford newer vehicles.

More.

 

The default position of liberalism is to blame obstruction by reactionaries for republican failure, not the revolutionary impulses of the autocrat

"The republicans made me seize power".

You know whose side they are on when people talk like this. Spengler long ago observed how liberalism is all about tyranny, but does anyone still read him?

"The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is all that Liberalism sets out to be."

The voices opposed to the US Senate filibuster, are, to put it bluntly, not related to our founding.

"However high-minded":

Caesar would soon seize autocratic power, and Cato would commit suicide rather than live under Caesar’s rule. Goodman and Soni argue Cato’s obstructionism — however high-minded — was a contributing factor to the Roman Republic’s collapse. America’s Founding Fathers, however, idolized Cato. George Washington’s soldiers staged a play about Cato at Valley Forge.  Patrick Henry’s famous quote, “Give me liberty of give me death,” is derived from a line in that play.

This box of rocks graduated with honors from Boston University with a BA in international relations and economics in 2011

John Maynard Friedman strongly disagreed:

How can I accept the Communist doctrine, which sets up as its bible, above and beyond criticism, an obsolete textbook which I know not only to be scientifically erroneous but without interest or application to the modern world? How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia, who with all their faults, are the quality of life and surely carry the seeds of all human achievement? Even if we need a religion, how can we find it in the turbid rubbish of the red bookshop? It is hard for an educated, decent, intelligent son of Western Europe to find his ideals here, unless he has first suffered some strange and horrid process of conversion which has changed all his values.

Club for Growth and Freedom Works both stop funding Justin Amash, so he'll just have to tap the family Chinese tool company fortune made on the backs of America's downward-spiraling middle class

Story here, whose author has probably never once in his life seriously thought about trimming legislative power overreach.

With the budget deficit topping $1 trillion again, Larry Kudlow promises a middle class tax cut proposal for later in the year

The American people are for two incompatible things, spending and tax cuts, and Trump is giving it to them, good and hard.

Story.

Trump insists to Laura Ingraham that we don't have enough workers even though over 3 million more prime age workers aged 25-54 aren't even in the labor force 20 years on from 1999

Average number "Not in labor force" aged 25-54

1999: 18.785 million

2019: 22.102 million

--------------------------

+3.317 million after 20 years, despite recent declines

The last 20 years have been a disaster for American workers with Bush and Obama outsourcing good middle class jobs to cheaper labor markets around the world, especially China.

Trump was supposed to fix this, and now he's parroting the arguments of the people he ran against.

It's pitiful and awful. 

Watch Ingraham grill Trump here. Unfortunately Laura's command of the data is merely derivative and shallow, which leaves her simply to argue against Trump that he didn't campaign on bringing in foreign labor, which is an excellent political point by itself, but she didn't own the president on this one the way she could have with the facts. She's smart enough to understand that lack of wage pressure refutes the idea of a labor shortage, but didn't dig deeper to find the surplus labor.

Lunch box Joe promises to sacrifice blue collar workers on the altar of a green economy

All Democrats had to do is run sane, normal people for president to beat Trump, and they can't find any.

Free movement of peoples to the US will destroy it, same as free trade

Generally speaking, the protectionist system today is conservative, whereas the Free Trade system has a destructive effect. It destroys the former nationalities and renders the contrast between proletariat and bourgeoisie more acute. In a word, the Free Trade system is precipitating the social revolution. And only in this revolutionary sense do I vote for Free Trade.

-- Karl Marx, Appendix to Elend der Philosophie, 1847.