Obama Fails to Stem Middle-Class Slide He Blamed on Bush
By Mike Dorning – Apr 30, 2012 5:30 PM PT .Facebook Share LinkedIn Google +1 127 Comments
Print QUEUEQ..Barack Obama campaigned four years ago assailing President George W. Bush for wage losses suffered by the middle class. More than three years into Obama’s own presidency, those declines have only deepened.

The rebound from the worst recession since the 1930s has generated relatively few of the moderately skilled jobs that once supported the middle class, tightening the financial squeeze on many Americans, even those who are employed.

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Job Fair Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
A job seeker during a job fair hosted by the State of New York on April 12, 2012 in Brooklyn, New York.

A job seeker during a job fair hosted by the State of New York on April 12, 2012 in Brooklyn, New York. Photographer: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
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Obama Fails to Stem Middle Class Hollowing Out Mark Duncan/AP
Surviving members of the Doolittle Raiders and other attendees watch a flyover of B-25 bombers at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Ohio, the birthplace of aviation.

Surviving members of the Doolittle Raiders and other attendees watch a flyover of B-25 bombers at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Ohio, the birthplace of aviation. Photographer: Mark Duncan/AP
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Obama Fails to Stem Middle-Class Hollowing Out Google Inc. via Bloomberg
A Google Inc. experimental self-driving car, seen here in this handout photo, is one of several developments in artificial intellingence technologies cited by Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Center for Digital Business and co-author of the book “Race Against the Machine”.

A Google Inc. experimental self-driving car, seen here in this handout photo, is one of several developments in artificial intellingence technologies cited by Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Center for Digital Business and co-author of the book “Race Against the Machine”. Source: Google Inc. via Bloomberg
.“It started long before Obama, but he hasn’t done anything,” said John Forsyth, 58, a railroad-car inspector and political independent from Lebanon, Ohio. “He kept pushing this change, change, change, and he hasn’t done anything.”

Underlying the erosion of the middle class, defined by some economists as the middle 60 percent of income earners, are trends that stretch back decades, including competition from lower-wage workers overseas and technological advances that allow factories and offices to produce more with less labor.

As a candidate in 2008, Obama blamed the reversals largely on the policies of Bush and other Republicans. He cited census figures showing that median income for working-age households — those headed by someone younger than 65 — had dropped more than $2,000 after inflation during the first seven years of Bush’s time in office.

Yet real median household income in March was down $4,300 since Obama took office in January 2009 and down $2,900 since the June 2009 start of the economic recovery, according to an analysis of census data by Sentier Research, an economic- consulting firm in Annapolis, Maryland.

1% Get 93%
A president who attacked Bush’s policies for favoring the rich has overseen a recovery in which the wealthiest 1 percent captured 93 percent of per-capita real income gains in 2010, according to an analysis of tax data by Emmanuel Saez, an economics professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

On average, families in the top 1 percent saw their inflation-adjusted incomes rise by $105,637 that year from 2009, according to Saez.

While there is no settled definition of middle class, the middle 60 percent of households nationwide in 2010 earned between $20,000 and $100,000, according to the U.S. Census.

In and around Dayton, Ohio, a region that has endured a wrenching shift from dependence on the auto industry to new sources of growth such as distribution warehouses and information technology, disappointment with Obama is often balanced by wariness of his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney.

“I don’t know if there’s anybody I’m going to vote for,” Forsyth said of the candidates.

Limited Opportunity
While the U.S. unemployment rate fell from a peak of 10 percent in October 2009 to 8.2 percent in March, the jobs data that dominate public discussion obscure a shift that has limited opportunity for workers such as Forsyth.

Ninety-five percent of the net job losses during the recession were in middle-skill occupations, such as office workers, bank tellers and machine operators, according to research by economists Nir Jaimovich of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and Henry Siu of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

The job growth since has been clustered in either high- skill fields inaccessible to workers without advanced education or low-paying industries, they found.

In March, 3.2 million fewer Americans held sales and office jobs than five years earlier, and 1.2 million fewer were employed in transportation and production fields, all areas that typically pay middle-income wages, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Dayton’s Dreams
By contrast, the number of better-paid managerial and professional employees grew by almost 2 million over that period and employment in lower-paying service jobs expanded by 1.5 million.

In Dayton — the birthplace of aviation and such inventions as the mechanical cash register, the self-starting car engine, the stepladder and cellophane tape — these trends have diminished incomes and curtailed dreams.

Mandy Copeland, a 34-year-old occupational therapy assistant, and her husband, a heating and ventilation technician, have given up hope of trading their three-bedroom ranch house for a home with a basement that they could turn into a recreation room for their three children.

Eighteen-year-old Alex Ray recently decided he would wait on attending a four-year college and instead spend his first year at a local community college. His father, Tom Ray, a 47- year-old information-technology project manager who only recently regained a wage cut his employer imposed during the recession, praised his son for a “very mature” choice that he estimated would save $20,000.

Falling Birthrate
Fewer children are being brought into the world; the birthrate in Montgomery County, where Dayton is located, has fallen every year since 2007, in keeping with a national trend. Even the rituals of death have changed.

To save money, families are increasingly choosing cremation over burial, said Anne Dunbar, co-owner of a funeral home in the Dayton suburb of Springfield. Others are forgoing memorial services for simple graveside ceremonies. Rather than flowers or donations to a charity, 15 to 20 families a year now ask that newspaper obituaries include a plea for contributions toward funeral expenses, she said.

‘The Real Majority’
The challenges facing residents in this Ohio city about 60 miles north of Cincinnati have been emblematic of the issues that have moved centrist swing voters ever since the 1970 publication of “The Real Majority,” a top-selling political analysis. Authors Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg created a mythical 47-year-old Dayton housewife to argue that her most pressing concerns had the potential to turn presidential elections.

Today, the most pressing concern for Lisa Meeks, 47, is making herself “more marketable” to potential employers. Meeks, who left her pre-school teaching position because her hours were reduced, now rides the bus to Sinclair Community College in the morning and then boards another bus to get to her new job, working the evening shift as a call-center manager.

“I’m still seeing people struggling,” said Meeks. “You hear people saying, ‘I’ve put in four job applications and I haven’t heard anything back. What am I doing wrong?’”

Though the scale is greater, the workplace shifts that Dayton and the rest of the country are seeing parallel the Bush- era job trends that Obama criticized four years ago, when he said that during President Bill Clinton’s administration “the average American family saw its income go up $7,500 instead of go down $2,000, like it has under George Bush.”

Stopping Downturn
Arriving in the White House during a financial crisis, Obama concentrated on stopping a downturn that many economists feared could turn into a depression. He pressed for an $831 billion stimulus package and an auto-industry bailout. He cut taxes for middle-class workers and backed a health-care overhaul that he said would help middle-income families by keeping medical costs down and easing access to insurance coverage.

To promote a skilled workforce, the Obama administration has stressed support for education, including aid to local schools to reduce teacher layoffs. It has emphasized infrastructure improvements to promote competitiveness and backed clean-energy technologies that could provide future jobs.

Romney says deficit spending to finance the stimulus, uncertainty generated by the health law, and tighter regulation of the financial industry have deterred businesses from hiring. He backs reductions in government spending and tax cuts, including for wealthy “job creators” to spur investment.

Nothing Obama has accomplished in office so far has stopped what Siu calls “the hollowing out of the middle.”

No Overnight Fix
Just 19 percent of registered voters believe the president’s policies favor the middle class, compared with 25 percent who say they benefit the rich, according to a CBS-New York Times poll conducted Feb. 8-13. Still, asked to choose which candidate would do a better job protecting the middle class, 49 percent say Obama and 39 percent Romney, according to an April 5-8 ABC News-Washington Post poll.

“The economic crisis, deep recession and wage stagnation weren’t created overnight and they won’t be solved overnight,” Amy Brundage, a White House spokeswoman, said in an e-mail. “While we are making progress and the economy is growing and creating jobs, too many middle class families are still struggling to recover from the worst financial crisis of our lifetimes caused by the reckless economic policies of the past.”

Fundamental Forces
Siu and other economists attribute the phenomenon to such fundamental forces as the movement of production offshore to lower-cost countries and technological gains that have made U.S. companies more efficient. Even with 5.2 million fewer Americans employed since January 2008, the U.S. is turning out more goods and services than before the recession, one reason corporate profits hit record levels and wealthy investors prospered.

Robots are replacing factory workers. Airport kiosks are taking the place of ticket agents. Intuit Inc. (INTU)’s TurboTax software performs the work of accountants.

“This is early days. We see the next 10 years as being more disruptive than the last 10,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Center for Digital Business and co-author of the book “Race Against the Machine.” He cites developments in artificial-intelligence technologies such as those in Google Inc. (GOOG)’s experimental self-driving car, International Business Machine Corp. (IBM)’s Jeopardy-playing Watson computer, and Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s Siri voice-recognition software.

Plant Closing
That disruption is being felt in the Dayton area. Thousands of auto workers and employees at related parts manufacturers and machine-tool makers lost their jobs after General Motors Co. (GM) closed its plant in nearby Moraine two days before Christmas in 2008. Less than six months later, NCR Corp. (NCR), once called National Cash Register Co. and founded in Dayton in 1884, said it would move its headquarters to Duluth, Georgia, taking more than a thousand jobs with it.

Unemployment in the Dayton metropolitan region reached 12.4 percent in January 2010, though the jobless rate had come down to 8.7 percent in February.

Some of the lost manufacturing and office jobs have been replaced by growth in warehouse centers that take advantage of the area’s location near the intersection of two interstate highways, said Richard Stock, director of the Business Research Group at the University of Dayton.

Caterpillar Logistics, a unit of Peoria, Illinois-based Caterpillar Inc. (CAT), and Carter Logistics LLC opened distribution centers in the area. Employees at those and other warehouses are paid “above a living wage, but they’re definitely for the most part lower-middle-income jobs,” Stock said.

High Skills Needed
The other major sources of growth have been in information technology, exemplified by Teradata Corp. (TDC), headquartered in Dayton, and Reed Elsevier Plc (REL)’s Lexis Nexis unit, which has a facility in the area, Stock said

Aeronautics and advanced materials manufacturing have also expanded around Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, home of the Air Force Materiel Command and Air Force Research Laboratory, Stock said. GE Aviation, a unit of Fairfield, Connecticut-based General Electric Co. (GE), broke ground last year on a $51 million research center in Dayton.

“Those jobs are at the very high-skilled end, jobs that require quite a bit of education,” Stock said. “There are not too many jobs in the middle.”

As a result, pay has declined. Real average weekly earnings in the metropolitan area dropped to $800 last year from $817 in 2007, according to U.S. Labor Department data analyzed by Stock.

Sitting on a metal bleacher watching her 7-year-old son at an early evening baseball practice, Mandy Copeland reflected on the expectations she and her husband had six years ago when she finished the coursework that qualified her for her occupational therapy job.

“We had pretty high hopes,” she said. “Now we’re just happy we have jobs.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Mike Dorning in Washington at mdorning@bloomberg.net

AMERICAN “SHEEPLE” = A “CONFEDERACY/MULTITUDE OF FOOLS” – SO TRUE FOR HAVING ELECTED SUCH AN INCOMPETENT, UNQUALIFIED PERSON AS OBAMA, along with his radical-left, secular, socialist, America-hating regime! ****Some people have the vocabulary to sum up things in a way you can understand them. This quote came from the Czech Republic. Someone over there has it figured out. We have a lot of work to do.
“The danger to America is not Barack Obama but a citizenry capable of entrusting an inexperienced man like him with the Presidency. It will be far easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama Presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such a man for their President. The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails America . Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince. The Republic can survive a Barack Obama. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools such as those who made him their President.”

thanks to obozo’s feckless incompetence by manipulating gas prices to their highest ever at this time of year in an effort to force you to buy a gov’t motors volt, one of the consequences of that stupidity is… higher inflation…

that means the cost of everything has gone up, food prices are skyrocketing, peanut butter alone is up 36.6% over a year ago.. 36.6%!! in just one fucking year!! how is that helping out poor people? I suppose liberal politicians think its a 2fer because they are handling obozo’s wifes dillema on obesity at the same time… by making gas too expensive to buy, they make food to expensive to purchase healing the planet and conquering obesity at the same time???

some dumbasses think that a minimum wage should be a living wage? thats an oxymoron… everytime the minimum wage goes up the cost of everything goes up that much plus a bit more to implement it, making the need for another raise in the minimum wage to make up the difference causing the prices to go up again outpacing whatever they raise the minimum wage too.

ppl too stupid to see the cycle and how it can’t possibly work in reality, keep voting for the next guy that promises something they don’t have only to find out it isn’t enough and can never be enough. The only answer is to enhance your own skill set and earn more than the minimum wage that will out pace the next fruitcakes push to raise it.

In plain English this is called, chasing your tail. You keep running in circles doing the minimum expecting the maximum and never breaking even let alone getting ahead.

Enter one feckless, incompetent, in over his head, queer hugging negro, ass clown deluded by illusions of granduer and you have a recipe for disaster.

Spending more money than our GDP, while simultaneousely doing everything he can to lower our GDP puts in a position of fiscal collapse like Greece…

No amount of liberal wishful thinking, and/or drug induced daydreaming can change reality one bit. liberal tax and spend policies don’t work, have never worked anywhere they’ve ever been tried and simply can’t…

The sooner you dumbfucks stop sticking your hands out to gov’t to feed your dumbasses, and either put them to work or starve to death the better off all of us will be.

i decided to upload some of my home videos to youtube. I love the public library computers….., i was able to convert my home videos to cartoon characters…..
im proud of myself……
XDDDDDD

BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

here is another real dissappointment… I used to like tom hanks and thought he was a fine actor..

marrying himself to obozo, by putting on this piece of propoganda to inform the public, his fans and the reason for his exorbant wealth… I can stomach it.

fortunately he has the money to retire from the public eye. because regardless the role he play anywhere else at this point. once you’ve seen someone on thier knees puffing up obozo… whatever else they are pretending to do or be just doesn’t fly…

but how dare he not play another gay man in a movie??? i felt he understood me, he was great in Philadephia!!! he inspired me to embrace my …..errrr, status

buh bye tom hanks… you were good once…

now let’s sing along…………………

The lesson learned last night is a bitter one……just like the taste of semen from my asian boyfriend after he ate a bad batch of overly seasoned alley cat on a hot summer day. Trust me, it was not pretty! XDDDD

sing along, i even attached the music to my new favorite song……

G..g..g.. gently grip Obama’s dick
and softly place it tween my lips
while lessons and semen goes down my throat
believe i swallow everything

til the bad taste is gone
and he thrust in my mouth hard

and so I stayed up all night
slept in all day, this is my sound
think of the dicks I sucked
preparing to get fucked

never let his dick go limp
while it’s in your fruity grip
two slurps from the finish line
after his nutt, he will be mine

my lips will always suck it out
as i close my eyes and use my mouth
and tell me that i’m his man

and so i stay up all night
sleep in all day, this is my sound
think of the dicks I sucked
preparing to get my ass fucked

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-justices-poised-to-strike-down-entire-healthcare-law-20120328,0,2058481.story

August 18, 2011 Obama: The Affirmative Action President by Matt Patterson (columnist – Washington Post, New York Post, San Francisco Examiner)

Years from now, historians may regard the 2008 election of Barack Obama as an inscrutable and disturbing phenomenon, a baffling breed of mass hysteria akin perhaps to the witch craze of the Middle Ages. How, they will wonder, did a man so devoid of professional accomplishment beguile so many into thinking he could manage the world’s largest economy, direct the world’s most powerful military, execute the world’s most consequential job?

Imagine a future historian examining Obama’s pre-presidential life: usheredinto and through the Ivy League despite unremarkable grades and test scoresalong the way; a cushy non-job as a “community organizer”; a brief career as a state legislator devoid of legislative achievement (and in factnearly devoid of his attention, so often did he vote “present”) ; and finally an unaccomplished single term in the United States Senate, the entirety of which was devoted to his presidential ambitions. He left no academic legacy in academia, authored no signature legislation as a legislator.

And then there is the matter of his troubling associations: the white-hating, America-loathing preacher who for decades served as Obama’s “spiritual mentor”; a real-life, actual terrorist who served as Obama’s colleague and political sponsor. It is easy to imagine a future historian looking at it all and asking: how on Earth was such a man elected president?

Not content to wait for history, the incomparable Norman Podhoretz addressed the question recently in the Wall Street Journal:

To be sure, no white candidate who had close associations with an outspokenhater of America like Jeremiah Wright and an unrepentant terrorist like Bill Ayers, would have lasted a single day. But because Mr. Obama was black, andtherefore entitled in the eyes of liberaldom to have hung out with protesters against various American injustices, even if they were a bit extreme, he was given a pass.

Let that sink in: Obama was given a pass — held to a lower standard — because of the color of his skin. Podhoretz continues:

And in any case, what did such ancient history matter when he was also so articulate and elegant and (as he himself had said) “non-threatening,” all of which gave him a fighting chance to become the first black president and thereby to lay the curse of racism to rest?

Podhoretz puts his finger, I think, on the animating pulse of the Obama phenomenon — affirmative action. Not in the legal sense, of course. But certainly in the motivating sentiment behind all affirmative action laws and regulations, which are designed primarily to make white people, and especially white liberals, feel good about themselves.

Unfortunately, minorities often suffer so that whites can pat themselves on the back. Liberals routinely admit minorities to schools for which they are notqualified, yet take no responsibility for the inevitable poor performance and high drop-out rates which follow. Liberals don’t care if these minority students fail; liberals aren’t around to witness the emotional devastation and deflated self esteem resulting from the racist policy that is affirmative action. Yes, racist.

Holding someone to a separate standard merely because of the color of his skin — that’s affirmative action in a nutshell, and if that isn’t racism, then nothing is. And that is what America did to Obama.

True, Obama himself was never troubled by his lack of achievements, but whywould he be? As many have noted, Obama was told he was good enough for Columbia despite undistinguished grades at Occidental; he was told he was good enough for the US Senate despite a mediocre record in Illinois ; he was told he wasgood enough to be president despite no record at all in the Senate. All hislife, every step of the way, Obama was told he was good enough for the nextstep, in spite of ample evidence to the contrary. What could this breed if not the sort of empty narcissism on display every time Obama speaks?

In 2008, many who agreed that he lacked executive qualifications nonetheless raved about Obama’s oratory skills, intellect, and cool character. Those people — conservatives included — ought now to be deeply embarrassed. The man thinks and speaks in the hoariest of clichés, and that’s when he has his teleprompter in front of him; when the prompter is absent he can barely think or speak at all. Not one original idea has ever issued from his mouth — it’s all warmed-over Marxism of the kind that has failed over and over again for 100 years.

And what about his character? Obama is constantly blaming anything and everything else for his troubles. Bush did it; it was bad luck; I inheritedthis mess. It is embarrassing to see a president so willing to advertise his own powerlessness, so comfortable with his own incompetence. But really, what were we to expect? The man has never been responsible for anything, so how do we expect him to act responsibly?

In short: our president is a small and small-minded man, with neither the temperament nor the intellect to handle his job. When you understand that, and only when you understand that, will the current erosion of liberty and prosperity make sense. It could not have gone otherwise with such a man in the Oval Office.

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BWAAAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAAHHAAHAA!!!