USA TODAy… Amonth into the demonstrations that began in Lower Manhattan and have slowly spread to at least 145 other cities, attitudes about Occupy Wall Street have become a kind of political and cultural Rorschach test, in which the pattern one sees depends on the biases one brings. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., proclaimed the crowd a “mob,” and Rush Limbaugh found them “perpetually lazy, spoiled rotten.” President Obama said Sunday that Martin Luther King would have sympathized with the protests.
In the cold, hard world of statistics, economists say demonstrators’ grievances are on the mark. At bottom, the protests are about how American middle-class life is undermined by four decades of near-stagnant wages for middle-income workers and a recession that has brought an unprecedented level of long-term unemployment. Throw in the exploding inflation in two of the most common expectations of middle-class life, health insurance and college — and a double-digit percentage decline in wages of young college graduates in the last decade — and the root causes of New York’s Zuccotti Park become clear…
Data on incomes, health insurance and employment show mainstream standards of living have been stagnant since the 1970s, with upward blips during expansions wiped out in downturns, after steady growth before 1973. The downturn since 2007 has made things worse. … (more)
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