The Facts Are These

"As is now painfully evident, the economic growth of the Bush era was largely an illusion. Poverty worsened during most of the boom years and middle-class pay stagnated, as most gains flowed to the top. In a recent update of their groundbreaking series on income trends, the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez found that from 2002 to 2007, the top 1 percent of households — those making more than $400,000 a year — received two-thirds of the nation’s total income gains, their largest share of the spoils since the 1920s." (from The New York Times editorial, 9/15/09)

The data is finally in; definitive proof of what we have long surmised through our own anecdotal evidence. We the middle class gained nothing over the last ten years. Instead, we were living large on cheap credit and/or home equity gold and as the editorial goes on further to say, "Because many if not most Americans gained little to nothing from the Bush “growth” years, they have found themselves especially vulnerable to the recession." Yes many of us have colossal debt and many of us have lost our jobs. Double Whammy.

Too bad it takes so long to compile the data required to validate our observations. We are the people on the ground, we know what is going on. Now, the economy is supposedly turning around and whether we believe it or not, it appears to be leaving many of us behind. Not good, I say. Not good, at all.