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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAmericans on Wrong Side of Pay Gap Run Out of Means to Cope
Rising income inequality is starting to hit home for many American households as they run short of places to reach for a few extra bucks.
As the gap between the rich and poor widened over the last three decades, families at the bottom found ways to deal with the squeeze on earnings. Housewives joined the workforce. Husbands took second jobs and labored longer hours. Homeowners tapped into the rising value of their properties to borrow money to spend.
Those strategies finally may have run their course as womens participation in the labor force has peaked and the bursting of the house-price bubble has left many Americans underwater on their mortgages.
Weve exhausted our coping mechanisms, said Alan Krueger, an economics professor at Princeton University in New Jersey and former chairman of President Barack Obamas Council of Economic Advisers. They werent sustainable.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-30/americans-on-wrong-side-of-income-gap-run-out-of-means-to-cope.html
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"They weren't sustainable" now who would have guessed that one .... coming out of Bloomberg, no less ...
Skittles
(153,164 posts)the problem is that now it is so much harder to climb your way out - everything is stacked against the 99%
MindMover
(5,016 posts)that is just one big YESSIREE BOB .... even more so today ....
Shandris
(3,447 posts)...of time protecting things that have copper in them because a literal pack of people will descend on it to strip it of its copper for the intrinsic value. My complexes laundromat was finally shut down for good because one guy decided he needed the copper from it (which is only trace amounts!) and destroyed a ton of equipment. This was after a not-so-mysterious string of car thefts and break-ins for trace amounts of change (!) and finally a couple of apartment robberies.
Crime goes up, meth production for escape goes up, and the rest of us try to hold the pieces together. Welcome to the poor side of life, odds of survival directly proportional to your ability to seem useful.
Laelth
(32,017 posts)-Laelth