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Going Broke on $50,000: The Story of the Struggling American Middle Class. The $50,000 Median Household Budget. Posted by mybudget360 in Employment, baby boomers, banks, budget, debt, economy, frugal, government, income, investing, recession, retirment planning, savings, wealth preservation 3 Comment ..The recent recession is exposing how many American families have been treading on the edge. Problems were already in the system before the recession began but the downturn in the economy was the ultimate catalyst. Many families were using credit cards as a means of supplementing a decade of stagnant wages. The median household income for the entire country is $50,740. In addition we have 34,000,000 Americans now receiving some form of food stamps. They are not part of the middle class group. Yet when we dig deeper into the data, it is clear why so many Americans are going broke on $50,000 a year Norton's comment: And now you know why it is a struggle! And it is going to get worse so...

Jesse's Café Américain : "Until the median wage improves, there will be no recovery"

Upside: Fix-it man is doing fine | Marketplace From American Public Media : "The Upside Upside: Fix-it man is doing fine Not everyone has the money to buy a new refrigerator or washing machine. So when large appliances break, people call on repairman David Khorsandi to get their machines back in working order. He explains why his phone has been ringing non-stop" Norton's comment: This could be my Plan B..........keeping food on the table. No bad!

Paul Craig Roberts: Americans: Serfs Ruled by Oligarchs : "The great American superpower and its 300 million people are being driven straight into the ground by the narrow interest of the big banks and the munitions industry. People, and not only Americans, are losing their sons, husbands, brothers, and fathers for no other reason than the profits of US armaments corporations, and the gullible American people seem proud of it. Those ribbon decals on their cars, SUVs and monster trucks proclaim their naive loyalty to the armaments industries and to the whores in Washington who promote wars" Norton's comment: Ugh! this rings true. Being led to our demise by gullibility and fear mongering and the illusion of a Great matho American ego.

Op-Ed Columnist - Is Obama Punking Us? - NYTimes.com : "What disturbs Americans of all ideological persuasions is the fear that almost everything, not just government, is fixed or manipulated by some powerful hidden hand, from commercial transactions as trivial as the sales of prime concert tickets to cultural forces as pervasive as the news media." Norton: this is a good summary of the pervasive ill-ease that many of us feel about the conduct of the fixes that are moving forward: the economic, health, sustainable energy promotions... most seem still rooted in the same power mechanisms on wall st and corporate board rooms, and congressional behavior that got us to this disaster in the first place. And then we have the Republicans that are doing their best to throw gasoline on the fires of change. Obama is right. Our current course, be it economics, deficit, national debt, health care is unsustainable. It seems to me that public education is lacking to discern truth from the f...

August 12, 2009 By Arthur Hill The PerfChart below shows the key commodity related ETFs and the S&P 500 since early March. As the stock market surged, the US Oil Fund ETF (USO) and the Base Metals ETF (DBB) were the only two commodity ETFs able to keep pace. The Natural Gas ETF (UNG) remains the weakest of the group - by far

Jesse's Café Américain: If You Read Nothing Else About the Financial Crisis Read (and Remember) This... : "The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises.If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time." "...The mood that accompanied these measures in Washington seemed to swing between nonchalance and outright celebration: finance unleashed, it was thought, would continue to propel the economy to greater heights...Looking just at the fina...

Mega-Bear with the S&P since 2000 by dshort.com: by Norton: So where do we go from here? If you can wait awhile and tolerate potential drop in oil and commodities in the interim, then it seems that the LT future for various commodities (hard assets) looks the best by category and may outpace even blue chip and tech sector favorites.

EBAY | Snapshot The crash's hidden losers [The Philadelphia Inquirer]BY Knight Ridder/Tribune — 12:06 PM ET 08/05/2009 Aug. 5--Will someone please tell me how this happened? I'm not talking about Jon and Kate and their troubled televised marriage. Or Arlen, Joe and their congressional cage match -- two recent attention grabbers in the ignore-the-economy media swirl. I'm talking about something that's not all over the news, but all over the nation, and hitting particularly hard, in my opinion, at Generations X and Y. I'm talking about how middle-class life, and its promise of generational upward mobility, is unraveling before today's younger workers have had the chance to collect even a fraction of their due. I'm talking about you! You're invisible . . . to policymakers, to the media, to yourselves. And many of you seem more worried about Jon, Kate and the kids. Even if you've done all that your parents, teachers or college mentors told you to do back...

Rail traffic: The economic indicator that's not improving : "If you're skeptical of the economic data that pundits tout as a sign the economy is starting to recover, you're not alone. In fact, you might have one very good reason to believe that economic activity is still tepid and is not showing signs of improvement. Stock research house Zacks points out that rail traffic, a direct indicator of economic activity, hasn't recovered at all. Rail shipments in the last four weeks are down 18.6 percent compared to 2008, which is comparable to the 18.8 percent year-to-date decline versus the same period in 2008." Norton: It is not over yet.