Median household income crashed 1/3

by John Seiler | August 2, 2014 10:10 am

Wonder why you feel so poor? Because you are.

According to a new study by the Russell Sage Foundation[1], in the last decade median household income crashed by 1/3, from $87,992 in 2003 to $56,335 in 2013. The crash started during the Republican Bush administration, but has not been made better by the Democratic Obama administration.

Control of Congress also was roughly half Republican, half Democratic during this period. But until Janet Yellen took over this year, the Federal Reserve Board was run by Republicans Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke. So the Fed inflationism we have suffered, with prices going up as you see every day, mostly must be blamed on the GOP.

Here’s the chart:

So it’s a bipartisan disaster, with Republicans shouldering perhaps 55 percent of the blame, Democrats 45 percent.

At least we found out again, as if we needed to rerun the 1970s, that Fed inflationism and increased regulations (from President George W. Bush and the GOP congresses, as well as from President Barack Obama and the Democratic congresses), plus tax increases and wild spending increases don’t work. And unlike in the 1970s, when deficits were modest in comparison, deficits and debt don’t help, either.

The numbers also show that the “recovery” is a fraud. We’re just in a slightly less bad period of an ongoing recession caused by massive government confiscation and control of the economy.

And take a look at this chart:

It shows that, beginning with the Reagan tax cuts and recovery, wealth grew for every percentile of income except the poorest one (yellow squares), which at least held steady. The growth continued through the 1990s, when Democratic President Clinton first increased taxes, then cut taxes with the help of Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

It was only under Bush that wealth crashed, with the poor getting hurt the most, their wealth being almost entirely wiped out. Obama the didn’t make things any better, except slightly for the poor.

Median wealth now is lower than before the Reagan reforms, meaning the years of progress under Reagan and Clinton have been completely wiped out — and reversed.

Source URL: https://calwatchdog.com/2014/08/02/median-household-income-crashed-13/

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