Reply #26: "2000s: The Decade from Hell for Almost All Americans But The Richest"

[bread_and_roses]

http://www.alternet.org/story/152637/2000s%3A_the_decade_from_hell_for_almost_all_americans_but_the_richest/?page=entire

By Andy Kroll

2000s: The Decade from Hell for Almost All Americans But The Richest
In recent months, a blizzard of new data has laid bare the dilapidated condition of the American economy, and particularly of the once-mighty American middle class.

Poverty Swallows America

... Consider this statistic: between 1999 and 2009, the net jobs gain in the American workforce was zero. In the six previous decades, the number of jobs added rose by at least 20% per decade.

Then there's income. In 2010, the average middle-class family took home $49,445, a drop of $3,719 or 7%, in yearly earnings from 10 years earlier. ...

... poor families watched their income shrivel by 12%, falling from $13,538 to $11,904. Even families in the 90th percentile of earners suffered a 1% percent hit, dropping on average from $141,032 to $138,923. Only among the staggeringly wealthy was this not a lost decade: the top 1% of earners enjoyed 65% of all income growth in America for much of the decade...

The swelling ranks of the American poor tell an even more dismal story. In September, the Census Bureau rolled out its latest snapshot of poverty in the United States, counting more than 46 million men, women, and children among this country's poor. In other words, 15.1% of all Americans are now living in officially defined poverty, the most since 1993...

... The epidemic of poverty has hit minorities especially hard...also did a remarkable job of destroying the wealth of nonwhite families

Another of those compilations that, even though one has read the stats elsewhere, in this story or that about housing or jobs or # children in poverty, still makes one reel when put together.