51 Percent Of All American Workers Make Less Than 30,000 Dollars A Year

Padawanbater2

Padawanbater2

Well-Known Member


"We just got more evidence that the middle class in America is dying. According to brand new numbers that were just released by the Social Security Administration, 51 percent of all workers in the United States make less than $30,000 a year. Let that number sink in for a moment. You can’t support a middle class family in America today on just $2,500 a month – especially after taxes are taken out. And yet more than half of all workers in this country make less than that each month. In order to have a thriving middle class, you have got to have an economy that produces lots of middle class jobs, and that simply is not happening in America today.

You can find the report that the Social Security Administration just released right here. The following are some of the numbers that really stood out for me…

-38 percent of all American workers made less than $20,000 last year.

-51 percent of all American workers made less than $30,000 last year.

-62 percent of all American workers made less than $40,000 last year.

-71 percent of all American workers made less than $50,000 last year.

That first number is truly staggering. The federal poverty level for a family of five is $28,410, and yet almost 40 percent of all American workers do not even bring in $20,000 a year.

If you worked a full-time job at $10 an hour all year long with two weeks off, you would make approximately $20,000. This should tell you something about the quality of the jobs that our economy is producing at this point.

And of course the numbers above are only for those that are actually working. As I discussed just recently, there are 7.9 million working age Americans that are “officially unemployed” right now and another 94.7 million working age Americans that are considered to be “not in the labor force”. When you add those two numbers together, you get a grand total of 102.6 million working age Americans that do not have a job right now.

So many people that I know are barely scraping by right now. Many families have to fight tooth and nail just to make it from month to month, and there are lots of Americans that find themselves sinking deeper and deeper into debt.

If you can believe it, about a quarter of the country actually has a negative net worth right now.

What that means is that if you have no debt and you also have ten dollars in your pocket that gives you a greater net worth than about 25 percent of the entire country. The following comes from a recent piece by Simon Black…

Credit Suisse estimates that 25% of Americans are in this situation of having a negative net-worth.

“If you’ve no debts and have $10 in your pocket you have more wealth than 25% of Americans. More than 25% of Americans have collectively that is.”

The thing is– not only did the government create the incentives, but they set the standard.

With a net worth of negative $60 trillion, US citizens are just following dutifully in the government’s footsteps.

As a nation we are flat broke and most of us are living paycheck to paycheck. It has been estimated that it takes approximately $50,000 a year to support a middle class lifestyle for a family of four in the U.S. today, and so the fact that 71 percent of all workers make less than that amount shows how difficult it is for families that try to get by with just a single breadwinner.

Needless to say, a tremendous squeeze has been put on the middle class. In many families, both the husband and the wife are working as hard as they can, but it is still not enough. With each passing day, more Americans are losing their spots in the middle class and this has pushed government dependence to an all-time high. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 49 percent of all Americans now live in a home that receives money from the government each month.

Sadly, the trends that are destroying the middle class in America just continue to accelerate.

With a huge assist from the Republican leadership in Congress, Barack Obama recently completed negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Also known as Obamatrade, this insidious new treaty is going to cover nations that collectively account for 40 percent of global GDP. Just like NAFTA, this treaty will result in the loss of thousands of businesses and millions of good paying American jobs. Let us hope and pray that Congress somehow votes it down.

Another thing that is working against the middle class is the fact that technology is increasingly taking over our jobs. With each passing year, it becomes cheaper and more efficient to have computers, robots and machines do things that humans once did.

Eventually, there will be very few things that humans will be able to do more cheaply and more efficiently than computers, robots and machines. How will most of us make a living when that happens?…

The robopocalypse for workers may be inevitable. In this vision of the future, super-smart machines will best humans in pretty much every task. A few of us will own the machines, a few will work a bit… while the rest will live off a government-provided income… the most common job in most U.S. states probably will no longer be truck driver.

For decades, we have been training our young people to have the goal of “getting a job” once they get out into the real world. But in America today there are not nearly enough good jobs to go around, and this crisis is only going to accelerate as we move into the future.

I do not believe that it is wise to pin your future on a corporation that could replace you with a foreign worker or a machine the moment that it becomes expedient to do so. We need to start thinking differently, because the paradigms that worked in the past are fundamentally breaking down.

So what advice would you give to a young adult today that is looking toward the future?"

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/10/goodbye-middle-class-51-percent-of-all-american-workers-make-less-than-30000-dollars-a-year.html

https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2014


Is this a system worth saving?
 
ginwilly

ginwilly

Well-Known Member
That's sick.

Just curious. Out of that 51%, how many are single earners? I mean if we are counting the part-time soccer mom in that stat it's pretty misleading wouldn't you say? Is the high school senior delivering pizzas count in that 51%? How about the retired guy who is Mr Ranger on the weekends at the golf course, is he in that stat?

Got an agenda you wanna push Pad?

The amount of people not working really is nuts. I keep hearing about how great the country is doing now, but then you post that and now I'm not sure.

Thanks Obama!
 
Padawanbater2

Padawanbater2

Well-Known Member
"The national average wage index (AWI) is based on compensation (wages, tips, and the like) subject to Federal income taxes, as reported by employers on Forms W-2. Beginning with the AWI for 1991, compensation includes contributions to deferred compensation plans, but excludes certain distributions from plans where the distributions are included in the reported compensation subject to income taxes."

The current economic climate is the result of 35 years of failed economic policy

 
G

god1

Well-Known Member
Padawanbater2 said:
..... So what advice would you give to a young adult today that is looking toward the future?" ...
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30K barely qualifies for the middle class, if in fact it still does.
But why are you surprised, nearly 50% of income earners don't pay federal income taxes.

Graduate high school, pick a worth while major and pay your own way through college; you'll be fine Pad. And definitely don't attempt to start a family on burger flipping wages.
 
Padawanbater2

Padawanbater2

Well-Known Member
god1 said:
30K barely qualifies for the middle class, if in fact it still does.
But why are you surprised, nearly 50% of income earners don't pay federal income taxes.

Graduate high school, pick a worth while major and pay your own way through college; you'll be fine Pad. And definitely don't attempt to start a family on burger flipping wages.
Click to expand...
The vast majority of non-income taxpayers fall into three categories:
  • 17 percent includes students, people with disabilities or illnesses, the long-term unemployed, and other people with very low taxable incomes. Also included would be people like our soldiers in foreign wars who are exempted from paying income taxes while they are on active duty in a war zone.
  • 22 percent of people who did not pay federal income taxes in 2009 are people aged 65 or older who have modest incomes (and do not have earnings).
  • 61 percent are working people who pay payroll taxes but are not paying income taxes.
Let us assume, for the sake of this discussion, that you may think it only fair that everyone pay something in income taxes—even non-payers that may belong to a particularly hard pressed group evoking more sympathy than someone in a different classification of non-payer. To make this happen, we would need to consider what policies would have to be changed in order for all Americans to be required to do their part.

Let’s begin with a particularly sympathetic group for most Americans, the disabled, including veterans and others unable to work—or unable to work very much —due to their disabilities.

While some could argue that even the disabled living solely on their disability benefits have a responsibility to pay taxes like the rest of us, requiring them to take a portion of their disability check and paying it over to the government as incomes taxes would increase the likelihood that these people would end up with insufficient money to care for themselves. The result of this would be an increased number of disabled Americans finding themselves more dependent on other government programs—such as welfare. Thus, whatever would be gained via income tax would likely end up costing the government more through the provision of the other benefits that would come into play when the disability benefit, minus income taxes, becomes insufficient to support the individual.

In the case of students, it seems reasonable to assume that full-time students working to support themselves as they get their degrees operate on very tight margin. That was certainly my own experience as I struggled to work as many hours as possible while getting both my undergraduate and advance degrees while struggling to keep a roof over my head.

Were we to require these kids to pay income tax, they would likely be required to borrow money in order to make tax payments or, in the alternative, run up a debt to the IRS—including the annual interest and penalty charges—which they would have to pay once they join the full-time workforce. In some instances, the requirement to pay income taxes would make working while studying an impractical solution, requiring some kids to forgo their education. This certainly seems counterproductive when considering that these people are likely to become the taxpayers of the future.

With respect to the long-term unemployed, you can—and no doubt do—have your own opinion as to how many of these people should be working and paying taxes rather than existing on welfare programs. However, it is important to grasp that this question, while highly relevant to overall American policy, is irrelevant to this particular debate.

While you may feel that too many people who qualify for welfare possess the ability to work for a living and should be doing just that, the fact remains that earning no money means that there is no income on which to pay taxes. Thus, a rational review of the taxing structure (which is what we are doing here)—when it comes to income taxes—cannot take into consideration the ‘rightness’ or ‘wrongness’ of the long-term unemployed as those issues are, necessarily, a part of the welfare discussion. As I say, whether someone should be doing more to get a job or not, if they are not earning an income, they are simply not going to be paying income taxes.

As for the second largest group of non-income taxpayers, the senior citizens, an effort to increase the income tax responsibilities for this class would necessarily require that we place an increased level of income tax on their social security benefits.

As the law currently stands, Social Security beneficiaries pay income taxes on their benefits if they have total income in excess of $25,000 as an individual, $32,000 if filing a joint return with a spouse. They also pay income tax on any income they may earn separate and apart from their social security receipts.

Does it make sense to require an elderly married couple, bringing in less than $32,000 a year, to pay income taxes? Maybe. But keep in mind that as we take more of their benefits checks via higher payments on income taxes, we move them closer and closer to the welfare roles where the cost to those of us who do pay income taxes becomes far more substantial. It is also worth noting that the process would also begin to negate the entire point of the Social Security system.

In the instance of these two groups—which form just under 40 percent of everyone not paying federal income tax—most Americans appear to believe that we are on the right course choosing to allow these people to survive on their fairly meager earnings or benefits without the obligation to pay income taxes. Whether this is the result of a national sense of decency or a pragmatic assessment that requiring them to pay more in taxes simply shifts the burden onto government by bringing them closer to more expensive forms of government support for the needy, we appear to be okay with these people getting a pass.

That leaves the roughly 60 percent of non-income taxpayers—Americans who work, earn an income and are, nevertheless, exempted from paying the income taxes the rest of us are required to pay. Keep in mind that we are talking about roughly 30% of the population when we consider those in this category.

So, who are these people and why are they getting a pass?

Overwhelmingly, these are the people who go to work each and every day but earn so little money that policymakers have determined it counterproductive to force them to pay income taxes. These are the people who mow your lawn, flip your burgers and, generally, fill any number of jobs that provide an income that walks the line between the ability to support a family and having insufficient money to keep it all together."

http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2012/09/19/the-real-truth-behind-the-47-percent-why-arent-these-people-paying-federal-income-taxes/
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ttystikk

ttystikk

Well-Known Member
god1 said:
30K barely qualifies for the middle class, if in fact it still does.
But why are you surprised, nearly 50% of income earners don't pay federal income taxes.

Graduate high school, pick a worth while major and pay your own way through college; you'll be fine Pad. And definitely don't attempt to start a family on burger flipping wages.
Click to expand...
You're a complete idiot. If that's all it took, the economic situation would be shockingly rosy compared to this. After all, nearly a quarter of all Americans have a college debts. Why don't they make over $50k on average?
 
C

ChesusRice

Well-Known Member
god1 said:
30K barely qualifies for the middle class, if in fact it still does.
But why are you surprised, nearly 50% of income earners don't pay federal income taxes.

Graduate high school, pick a worth while major and pay your own way through college; you'll be fine Pad. And definitely don't attempt to start a family on burger flipping wages.
Click to expand...
Its not 50% of income earners.
It's 50% of americans. Hey I am all for Kids, the invalids and retirees going out and working. Child labor is underrated
 
Padawanbater2

Padawanbater2

Well-Known Member
ttystikk said:
You're a complete idiot. If that's all it took, the economic situation would be shockingly rosy compared to this. After all, nearly a quarter of all Americans have a college debts. Why don't they make over $50k on average?
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I don't understand why people can't just admit the current economic situation in America is a mess and very far from recovery

Supply side economics works when there is demand. Right now, that's the problem, very low demand because people can't afford to buy anything. We need to shift economic policy to focus on stimulating demand, otherwise we're in for a much longer recession that could very well turn into a depression.
 
ttystikk

ttystikk

Well-Known Member
Padawanbater2 said:
I don't understand why people can't just admit the current economic situation in America is a mess and very far from recovery

Supply side economics works when there is demand. Right now, that's the problem, very low demand because people can't afford to buy anything. We need to shift economic policy to focus on stimulating demand, otherwise we're in for a much longer recession that could very well turn into a depression.
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It already IS a depression. Read your own statistics!

Supply side economics is bullshit and always was.
 
Padawanbater2

Padawanbater2

Well-Known Member
ttystikk said:
It already IS a depression. Read your own statistics!

Supply side economics is bullshit and always was.
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It's bullshit if that's all we use

The best solution is a mix of both imo, classical when supply slows, Keynesian when demand slows

Check out this video from the Khan Academy;


A good quote I heard recently that puts this in perspective;

"Capitalism introduces crisis' of surplus', not shortages"
 
ttystikk

ttystikk

Well-Known Member
Padawanbater2 said:
It's bullshit if that's all we use

The best solution is a mix of both imo, classical when supply slows, Keynesian when demand slows

Check out this video from the Khan Academy;


A good quote I heard recently that puts this in perspective;

"Capitalism introduces crisis' of surplus', not shortages"
Click to expand...
What's currently going on in our economy is a reflection of who is running it. This makes a mess of Keynesian economics because it's socio-political in nature and the observed economic conditions are effects, not causes.
 
Padawanbater2

Padawanbater2

Well-Known Member
ttystikk said:
What's currently going on in our economy is a reflection of who is running it. This makes a mess of Keynesian economics because it's socio-political in nature and the observed economic conditions are effects, not causes.
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I'm not sure I understand what you mean exactly
 
ttystikk

ttystikk

Well-Known Member
Padawanbater2 said:
I'm not sure I understand what you mean exactly
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The classical and Keynesian models are economic models. Our economy is being skewed for political reasons, not economic ones, therefore political solutions must be found.

Less John Maynard Keynes, more Thomas Piketty.
 
Padawanbater2

Padawanbater2

Well-Known Member
ttystikk said:
The classical and Keynesian models are economic models. Our economy is being skewed for political reasons, not economic ones, therefore political solutions must be found.

Less John Maynard Keynes, more Thomas Piketty.
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Aah, gotcha

That's a good point. Lets talk political solutions! How do we solve this problem using political solutions?
 
ttystikk

ttystikk

Well-Known Member
Padawanbater2 said:
Aah, gotcha

That's a good point. Lets talk political solutions! How do we solve this problem using political solutions?
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First, find a candidate that speaks to the real problems and suggests appropriate solutions. Bernie Sanders leaps to mind, in my case. Then spread the word about solutions to our current mess to all of friends and suggest that supporting Mr Sanders would be a good step in the proper direction.

The democratic caucus in each state is where nominees are decided on the local and regional levels. If you want your democratic convention representative to be supporting your candidate, you need to register as a democrat and then find out from your local democratic party office when and where the caucus will be held.

I'll be doing this in the spring here in Colorado. I've never done it before, so I'll be very interested in the process.

I'm using the democratic process (as I currently understand it) as my example because I was speaking about supporting Mr Sanders specifically. I'm sure the process on the republican side is similar.
 
ttystikk

ttystikk

Well-Known Member
Padawanbater2 said:
Aah, gotcha

That's a good point. Lets talk political solutions! How do we solve this problem using political solutions?
Click to expand...
We can't win with money. We have to win with ideas. People will listen to good ideas, especially if they include prosperity for everyone.

It's that 'everyone' thing that's key. The income and wealth gaps are at such acute levels that our society is about to turn on itself. The powers that be don't think it's a problem, but if our society hours off the cliff, they fall too.

The upside is as bright as the dark side is terrifying, however; imagine what fifty percent more spending power in the hands of the middle class could do for the economy! I refuse to subscribe to the notion that as robots take over manufacturing and service positions that jobs for people will become scarce. Linotype operators were thrown out of work by the advent of the movable type printing press, but no one saw that as a threat to economic equilibrium. I believe that more people will do more creative work- because I've seen it happen time and again.
 
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