You probably saw the story the other day that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that real wages in 2005 had dropped 0.9 percent from the year before.
That was big news because in 2004 overall real wages were flat. For the first time as long as wage records have been kept, American workers' income had not increased in two straight years.
There was other disturbing economic news that came at about the same time but didn't get as much publicity.
For instance, the Federal Reserve not so surprisingly found that "growing numbers of American households face mounting debt and financial instability."
Roughly 76 percent of households carry a debt load averaging $55,300 or about 128 percent of the median household income. That's not surprising either since costs for health care and education alone have been rising well above wage increases, not to mention the cost of gas for the car and natural gas for the furnace. Many American workers are now sacrificing annual raises so that their employers can afford to pay the increases in health insurance.
All of that has caused a 10 percent average family increase in credit card debt and a proliferation of bigger home equity loans almost all of it, of course, in America's middle class.
"Grim economic news gets grimmer" by Dave Zweifel, The Capital Times
Humm... Wonder if the Whitehouse could be so obsessed with something else that they cannot pay attention to the real world, real Americans?
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