The Destruction of the American Middle Class

Commentary
Since money-printing went into permanent high gear after the dotcom crash in 2000, the top 1 percent of households have gained $20 million each in inflation-adjusted net worth. Likewise, the top 0.1 percent or 131,000 households at the tippy top of the economic ladder have gained $88 million each in inflation-adjusted net worth.
Needless to say, the net worth gains available to the wage-earning classes are almost exclusively from what they manage to save after absorbing the relentlessly rising cost of living. And we do mean relentless. Even though the CPI tends to undermeasure the cost of living on Main Street owing to its flaky hedonics’ adjustments for “quality” and other statistical razzmatazz, this imperfect proxy for the cost-of-living is still up by 82 percent since the turn of the century….