Government Is Destroying our Standard of Living

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American Thinker:

Finally, the change in net worth has made the mainstream media. The statistics, as reported in the NY Times, are horrific, as are the implications for the future of the country.

 

Net worth may be the best single measure of a country's well-being. Median net worth is a reasonable marker for the standard of living. Medians (or averages) are not good measures to capture what is happening at the lowest or highest ends. (More about that below.)

 

In the simplest terms, net worth is the value of a person's assets minus his liabilities. If this measure is growing, a person is becoming better off. If it is shrinking then that person is becoming worse off, at least in terms of wealth.

 

Shocking Drop in Net Worth

 

Conditions economically (and politically) may be getting so indefensible that even the NY Times feels compelled to report them, in this article by Anna Bernasek, which reported:

 

The inflation-adjusted net worth for the typical household was $87,992 in 2003. Ten years later, it was only $56,335, or a 36 percent decline, according to a study financed by the Russell Sage Foundation. Those are the figures for a household at the median point in the wealth distribution -- the level at which there are an equal number of households whose worth is higher and lower. But during the same period, the net worth of wealthy households increased substantially.

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The median American household lost a third of its wealth in the last 10 years

 

The median American household saw its wealth decline by more than one-third in the past decade, according to a new estimate published by the Russell Sage Foundation.

 

Researchers writing for the left-of-center think tank found that median net worth declined from $87,992 in 2003 to $56,335 in 2013. The study examined data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a longitudinal survey of American households run by the University of Michigan.

 

Median household wealth peaked at just under $100,000 in 2007, right before the housing bubble burst and the financial crisis began. While the researchers for the Russell Sage Foundation found that households in the top 10 percent have recovered the wealth levels of 2003, lower-wealth households have not.

 

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“There are very few signs of significant recovery from the losses in wealth experienced by American families during the Great Recession,” they wrote.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/the-median-american-household-lost-a-third-of-its-wealth-in-the-last-10-years/article/2551380