More Bad News For Working People

There's a good reason why a majority of Americans sympathize with the call for economic justice of the Occupy Wall Street movement. While the richest Americans keep getting richer, most other Americans are slowly being squeezed out of the economy and denied the American Dream -- and most of the corporate-bought politicians seem unwilling to do anything about it. Now there is new evidence of this.

The United States government has just released figures on jobs and pay for 2010 -- figures that must be reported to the Social Security Administration each year for payroll tax purposes. And those figures don't paint a very pretty picture of the economic situation in this country. According to these official government figures there are fewer people working and most of them are making less money. Here are some of the things the report showed:

* The median paycheck in America for 2010 was $26,364 ($507 a week). This means half of those working made less than this amount.

* The median paycheck of $26,364 was 1.2% lower than the median paycheck reported in 2009, and was the lowest median paycheck since 1999 (after adjusting for inflation).

* The number of Americans who had any income from work at all in 2010 was about 150.4 million -- a half a million less than in 2009.

* About 3.3% of the people who had a job in 2007 didn't earn a dime in 2010 (5.2 million people) -- and that doesn't account for population growth (which added nearly another 5 million people looking for work).

* The 2010 total wages and salaries came to slightly more than $6 trillion dollars -- lower than any of the four previous years, and equal to that of 2005 (when the population was 4.2% smaller).

But while workers are being squeezed a bit harder with each passing year, the same does not apply to the richest Americans. The report also showed:

* The number of people making over a million dollars a year increased from 78,000 in 2009 to 94,000 in 2010.

* The number of people making more than $50 million rose from 72 in 2009 to 81 in 2010.

The fact is that there is already a vast gap of wealth and income inequality between the richest Americans and the rest of America -- and this gap grows larger each year as the richer get even richer while everyone else grows poorer. And instead of trying to make the economy fairer to all Americans, the Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats want to make things worse by giving the rich (and the corporations) more and bigger tax cuts.

The failed economic policies of the government for the last 30 years is fast turning the United States into a "banana republic" -- where there are only two classes, the rich and the poor. This is why the Occupy Wall Street movement has grown so fast in this country. The people are finally waking up to the realization that they have been, and are still being, shafted. They are angry and they are demanding change.