Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkebmhTQ...

Some of the root cause 'changes' I've noticed started when I was graduated from college in 1968. One of the first 'gifts' I got was an ad from Sears to get a credit card. Mom and dad, who'd lived through the Great Depression, never had credit cards and abhorred debt. I grew up in a house that had no mortgage.

But after that period, credit cards made lots of money for banks and allowed tons of people to avoid 'delayed gratification' so long as they could keep up the minimum payments. Good Living was a credit card swipe away. Debt exploded.

Subsidized college loans (lower-than-free-market interest rates) created excessive demand and today kids are trying to figure out who they can hit up to pay off their loans.

Big advance in intellect and knowledge of economics, there, eh? Not.

Yep, every price or statistic quoted in treatises like that one should/must include normalization and graphs to show the relative cost and changes in price over at least the past 50 years, or someone is just blowing smoke up your butt.

In 1969 I bought an expensive car... sticker price around 50% of my gross income. But I had no debt, was living at home, had a good-paying job, negligible expenses and paid cash for the car after saving my income for a year!

Normalizing all that stuff shows me that today, looking at average home and car prices and average incomes, little has changed, other than the amount of debt people carry... and bitch about. And I didn't OWN a TV until I owned a home and turned about 45! But it was one of the biggest, best TVs you could buy back then, and I paid cash for that, too.

As others have said, the laws are what they are. Back in the 70's, you could deduct credit card interest, auto loan interest, etc... if you didn't have much earned income, would have been easy to bury it.

I believe the rich are always better able to stay on track when economic times are rough for others. I do not begrudge them their wealth or blame them for the travails of the middle class. Naturally when they keep doing what they have always been able to do and prosper while government policies destroy middle class opportunities the disparity will grow. Certainly the cronyism that some benefit from should be stopped, but that is a constant given. The real problem is the policies that encourage middle class jobs to go overseas, stifle entrepreneurship, small business formation and for capital to leave the country for greener pastures.

In 1970 Nelson Rockefeller didn't pay ANY taxes. Explain that one to me.

After much reading of confusing tax stuff, I have to correct myself. You pay 0% on long term capital gains for only the first part of it. The second part, which is when (if it were considered income) it would have moved you up a tax bracket is taxed at 15%. The third part gets taxed at 20%.

That all makes capital gains roughly half of what income tax is.

So I guess it isn't as unfair as I originally thought it was.

which can be either good or bad CG

If the people moving in are moving in because the bracket value itself is declining, that is not a good thing

Was a study really needed to figure this out? That has been the favored outcome of the left(commies) since the beginning of the movement. What has been favored is the collective, two classes, the rich elite(ruling) and everyone else. A middle class is just a roadblock to the true progressive purpose.

Nice find. Well done.

When a nation disassociates the value of production from a fixed standard, this is what you end up with - an ever-increasingly warped value in the market itself. Inflation is universally destructive because it undermines achievement itself and most especially investment. Inflation works against the entrepreneur and the investor by demanding an ever increasing income flow just to break even. It works against the landowner by devaluing rent. It works against banks and institutions of lending by forcing them to account for inflation using higher interest rates. And it works against consumers by encouraging manufacturers to produce shoddy goods which constantly need to be replaced in order to pay off their loans.

The only people who benefit from inflation are governments who borrow too much money.

A few thoughts -

1.) Whats up with the Santiago, Chile byline, and what does that have to do with Pennsylvania? It seems to be more of a propaganda article.

2.) It makes blanket statements that simply are not true for much of the country.
- For example - the 1970 versus current cost of Univ of Pennsylvania. Isn't that an Ivy League or nearly so?
- 2012 price is $42,734, big deal, I paid over $10,000 at the Univ of Minnesota in the late 1990s and my GI Bill covered most of it. Think creatively, don't whine & moan about it.
- If the "median" income is $49,486 for a family of 2 working adults in Pennsylvania, are around $12.00 an hour each, I'm going to guess they are not investing that in a college degree there, or military experience, etc. $12.00 is less than the minimum wage in Seattle for example, and basically starting pay for a college student/level in most parts of the country, or half what a McDonalds worker makes in Williston, ND, or less than a high school student in the BWI corridor. Blanket statements like that are pretty dumb to make, when there are different places to live and different schools to attend. My wife and I are in the top 3% or so of earners, and I don't feel like I could afford to send my kid to USC or Cal Berkeley or whatever. He's fine going to a state college and will get the same degree.

- Umm... the "price of a piece of paper". You mean the ability to create scholar-grade documents or creative writing skills that make the difference between selling pest control or burglar alarm services door to door or selling aircraft for Boeing or something? (for someone in the sales field for example). No offense to home services stuff, but its the difference between a couple of hundred dollar commission and millions in commissions.

- Ah, yeah, real estate asset price inflation does help quite a bit if you only save 5% - most families control a much larger asset through the mortgage leverage. If you don't have a mortgage, you pay rent, so its an inescapable expense for a large asset with a lot of leverage. (A 5% increase in a $200,000 home is $10,000, or probably more than the payments totaled on it that year and would be 20% of the income for the people in this example while $200k @ 4 times gross earnings would be a realistic price point for the couple if they lived relatively frugally).

- if a workplace 5% invested, often, that is matched by the employer (or get a different employer). 5% + 5% = 10% invested, plus the growth. In 2 years, that's like $12,000 saved/invested. Not bad on minimum wage (using their example).

3.) Who wrote this? Citing studies from UC Berkeley and the London School of Economics? There are no two more liberal places on the planet.. "Workers of the world unite!". The UK has a lot to lose as far as their best & brightest going to the US - of course they want it to sound horrible.

Here's the cold, hard truth. I used to work in the finance industry years ago, and for a while, I reviewed and underwrote mortgage applications. You see a lot into people's "bad choices" doing that. Here's a few "mantras" I found:

1.) The "shakier" the income, the more they tended to spend on flashy stuff - a Porsche, etc.. While it was a lot of income - such as at a technology startup, what's the long term prospects for whatever money-losing enterprise it was of the day? I saw a lot of 20-somethings with software engineering degrees working for a startup, living in an apartment, with a $700/month BMW lease (always for 5 years it seemed like).

2.) No idea what it is about being a blue collar apprentice (a plumber can make a lot - his or her apprentice doesn't). Just because they "might" make a lot of money some day if they have their own shop, etc., doesn't mean they have it now. but they always had the F250 turbo-diesel with 4 more years of $750 / month payments on it, and the $40,000 ski boat loan. Sometimes it was the "toy hauler" and the his & her quad runners.
- Now, driving a used Toyota pickup or something at $250 / month, and skipping the ski boat and the toy hauler until you can afford to buy one - would have been an extra $1000 a month invested or buying the family home... but... "poor" choices.

3.) I do agree with the private enterprise investment comment, you can only invest in stuff like oil & gas or private mortgage markets if you are an accredited investor... either a million cash-on-hand or a $250,000+ income. What they are missing though is that the entry-point for most of those is a minimum of $50,000 or $250,000 investment - so someone on $49k a year isn't going to be doing that anyway.

4.) Wage stagnation is a fact of life with 15%+ unemployment or partial unemployment. Blame that on the democrats... they like to have a dependent society, brings in more democrat voters. Salaries and wages are like any other supply & demand curve, fewer people in the market create more demand and wages rise.

The type of people you are talking about don't normally pay a lot in taxes because they don't have active "earned" income. Income tax is "income tax". Passive income from investments is taxed much lower to incentivize saving and investing. It's open to anyone, not just the "wealthy". The top 5% pay more than 50% of the taxes in the US... it seems rather odd to make a statement like this, as it just isn't founded in reality.

The real campaign money issue is candidates promising large groups of voters government benefits and services to be paid for by other smaller groups of voters.

I do get the gist and I have no trouble with the people that actually earned their wealth. I just don't care for the people that got it through government coercion and it is even worse when it is an elected official or former elected official that got it though that same tactic.

Often I realize that we of the 21st century overwrite our thoughts onto others...especially those who have lived in past decades and centuries.
Thank you for noticing that as well. We don't have cable, Wii and we bought a fixer-upper...which keeps us busy.
Priorities are often the problem with folks.

Another commercial. Gee, thanks for the "education"...

Point taken because it's such a mixed bag nowadays. Orren Boyles do seem to permeate the landscape. I'm soooooo disappointed in Warren Buffet and a few others. There are some Hanks and Dagnys out there, too. Forbes magazine puts out some pretty decent bios on these people.

I wrote what I did to illustrate the dynamics of wealth in a free market system. In a socialist/communist system there is only one apex: government. Yes, the 2nd 1% as well as the 3rd, etc., are apexes of wealth, too. In a robust dynamic economy they can be rising to the 1% or falling from the 1% or anywhere in between. Hopefully, you get the gist.

That is what government intrusion does. The nanny state gets people elected.

"The fact that capital gains is 0% "
Are long-term capital gains not taxed?

True enough I suppose and yet so many insist that the employer owes employees something more than the employer and employee have mutually agreed to... and many employees seem to vote for candidates who express such.

"everyone is self employed."
Yes!

I have this belief that everyone is self employed. It is only the employers that recognize this.

I would argue that it is the 2nd 1% and below that create most of the wealth in this country. I believe to top 1% include too many government officials and crony's that get their money through government favors to consider them the apexes. :)

watch the policy. It leads the bad choices