30 years of incentivizing spending and penalizing saving and we end in a situation where 47% of us can't come up with $400 in an emergency.

Good essay by Neal Gabler.

And then there is the destruction of the small platoons of support that exist between the State and the individual:

//Everybody's broke -- well not everybody. But, as the NYT article pointed out, not only is the money gone but so too are the things sacrificed on the altar of progress. Family and pride, to name two factors which saw previous generations through the hard times, but were regarded as obstacles to recent progress, are gone too. Marriage rates have declined and divorce rates have risen with the disastrous results that critical theory would never have anticipated. The NYT article says "in 2005, unmarried middle-aged men were 3.5 times more likely than married men to die from suicide, and their female counterparts were as much as 2.8 times more likely to kill themselves." In this age of nonstandard families, who would have thought it?

Loneliness as a cause of suicide is now suspected in even 'advanced' European societies. NPR's Rebecca Hersher explains that Greenland, part of Denmark, has the highest suicide rate in the world, so bad that even the suicide hotline respondents are driven to depression. One of the hotline workers told Hersher there was a clear pattern to Greenland's suicides. "Love, she says. Or, loss of it."//

Yay! Social Mobility!!!

The left has been trying to get rid of middle class values for 100 years.

Obviously, getting rid of the middle class is the best way to do that.

The decline has less to do with the power of the “one percent” per se than with the drying up of opportunity amid what is seen on Wall Street and in the White House as a sustained recovery. Despite President Obama’s rhetorical devotion to reducing inequality, it has widened significantly under his watch. Not only did the income of the middle 60% of households drop between 2010 and 2012 while that of the top 20% rose, the income of the middle 60% declined by a greater percentage than the poorest quintile. The middle 60% of earners’ share of the national pie has fallen from 53% in 1970 to 45% in 2012.

This group, what I call the yeoman class — the small business owners, the suburban homeowners , the family farmers or skilled construction tradespeople– is increasingly endangered. Once the dominant class in America, it is clearly shrinking: In the four decades since 1971 the percentage of Americans earning between two-thirds and twice the national median income has dropped from 61% to 51% of the population, according to Pew.

Roughly one in three people born into middle class-households , those between the 30th and 70th percentiles of income, now fall out of that status as adults.