I found an interesting article below and it agrees with my observations down in the trenches with the poor people, which includes myself, my daughter and everyone she knows, various other friends, and discussions with my landlady on this topic about her other tenants. (She owns a number of income properties). Money has been getting tighter and tighter for everyone and it’s now at the point where people just can’t make ends meet anymore and they have zero disposable income so there are no vacations, no nothing. People are getting worked to death just like in the 1800’s.

If I were to have the same buying power that I had in 1995, I would need a salary today of at least three times what I was earning plus bonuses. My net worth would need to be around–well I won’t mention the number but around 4 times what it was in order to have kept even with where I was. This George Carlin video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy4Tg_uR_Bg

is right on target because salaries and benefits have not kept up with inflation at all. A salary of $100,000 is still considered “quite high” by today’s PERCEPTIONS but in fact a $100,000 salary today is what a school teacher made not too long ago in terms of buying power. What this says to me is that American big business has pulled off a marvelous sleight of hand. Everyone’s salaries have been cut by 70 percent without actually reducing the numbers, and I’ll bet the benefits of this are flowing into somebody’s pocket. Americans today are working far longer hours and far harder for less buying power.

http://www.financialsense.com/fsu/editorials/2007/0416.html

Now who do you suppose engineered this, or is it simply the effect of profligate spending made possible by foreign confidence in the U.S. economy? What happens when that confidence wanes? What happens when Europe unifies its capital markets, as it’s now doing, and becomes a far more attractive place for big investors like China than it is now? What happens when the massive influx of capital to the United States slows down?

shuttersparks