Even a broken clock is right twice a day:
"This is a make-or-break moment for the middle class and all those who are fighting to get into the middle class. At stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home and secure their retirement."-- President Obama, quoted
here, Dec. 6, 2011
The fact is the moment has already broken against the middle class.
Nobody is fighting to get
into the middle class. The middle class is fighting to
stay middle class, and is losing.
The president, who only now protests that he would rescue the middle class as the election season heats up, has actually presided over its demise, turning the middle class into the working class renters of yesteryear, and worse, according to this story from August 5, 2011 at CNN Money (
link):
Home ownership is on the decline and, according to a recent Morgan Stanley report, the United States is fast becoming a nation of renters.
Last Friday, the Census Bureau reported that the percentage of people who owned a home had dropped to 65.9% during the second quarter -- its lowest level since the first quarter of 1998 and a far cry from the high of 69.2% reached in late 2004.
Yet, in a research paper issued a week earlier, Morgan Stanley (MS, Fortune 500) analysts Oliver Chang, Vishwanath Tirupattur and James Egan argued that the home ownership rate is even lower than the Census Bureau statistics say.
In fact, once they factored in delinquent mortgage borrowers (the ones who are likely to lose their homes at some point), Morgan Stanley calculated that the home ownership rate is more like 59.2%.
That's the lowest level since the Census Bureau started keeping quarterly records back in 1965 (before that, it recorded home ownership rates once a decade). The Census Bureau's statistics, however, do not factor in mortgage delinquencies.
When it comes to savings, the president speaks of modest savings and secure retirement as his goals for us, when the actual picture is a grim present and a worse future.
A survey using 2009 data and making the rounds in May 2011 said nearly half of Americans couldn't come up with $2,000 for an emergency within 30 days (
link).
And just two days ago a story (
link) reported on a different survey which suggests that over half of the 151 million American workers have less than $25,000 saved while over half of the already retired are in the same boat:
More than half of all workers, 56%, say they have less than $25,000 in savings, according to a survey by the Employee Benefit Research Institute. ...More than half of retirees, 54%, report they have less than $25,000 saved. That's up dramatically from 2006, when 42% said they had less than that.
The most recent data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (
link) confirms that there has been a steady decline in the personal savings rate under Obama from 5.3 percent in 2010 to an annualized rate of 3.8 percent in the third quarter of 2011, a nearly 30 percent decline from what was already an inadequate level.
Some unemployed and now homeless families in hardest hit states like Florida are reduced to living in their cars, trucks and vans because shelters are already full. Their plight was the subject of a recent story (
link) on 60 Minutes.
The American middle class is under siege on every front, from jobs, to homeownership, to family formation, to savings, to retirement. All this has unfolded under Obama's watch, who vacations, golfs, parties, fund-raises and speechifies, railing against business and the rich at every opportunity. But it is the middle class which is disappearing as he speaks, and he's done nothing to stop it.
The true meaning of class warfare.
