It's the economy stupid!

Without a question, it is NOT a robust economy, as both the Republicans and my brother Richard in Connecticut have been trying to tell me for what seems like decades.

During my entire lifetime--or at least the past thirty years, I seem to have been watching the middle class sinking in both size (its proportion of the population) and the ability to own a home, have a couple of cars and raise more than one child whose education might not put the family into simple straight-out poverty.

One of my daughters and I were running through a number of ways in which the economy seemed to be tanking (like the stock market early last week and the week before), and we came up with quite a list.

For starters, Bernie Sanders (on his Senate website) mentions that "5.4 million Americans have slipped out of the middle class and into poverty; nearly seven million Americans have lost their health insurance; median household income has gone down by nearly $1,300 [note from Mediawingnuts: this figure was between 2000 and 2005, the latest year for which we have accurate data, but it is down by almost 4% in only the past year, according to the US treasury] ; three million manufacturing jobs have been lost; the real earnings of college graduates have gone down by about 5 percent; entry level wages for male and female high school graduates have fallen by 3.3 percent and 4.9 percent, respectively; and three million American workers have lost their pensions" in only the past two years.

And you can add to that the fact that the deficit is at record highs--not made any better by Friday's bailout of the stock market.

Take a good long look at the above pie chart and you can clearly see America for what it really is. Those of us who "think" we are in the Middle Class might wonder just how long we have left ...