Susana Garcia snuggles with her granddaughter Phia Garcia, 9 months, with her daughter Cathya Garcia at left. With earnings of less than $13 an hour, she sees herself as part of the lower class. (Bob Chamberlin / Los Angeles Times /September 13, 2013)
On September 16, 2013, Emily Alpert writes in the Los Angeles Times:
Chris Roquemore once thought of himself as working class. But it’s hard to keep thinking that, he said, when you’re not working.
The 28-year-old father said he sparred with his supervisors at a retail chain about taking time off after his mother died — and ended up unemployed. Since then, Roquemore has worked odd jobs and started studying nursing at Long Beach City College, trying to get “a career, not a job.” All those changes, in turn, changed the way he thought of himself.
Roquemore is among the small but surging share of Americans who identify themselves as “lower class.” Last year, a record 8.4% of Americans put themselves in that category — more than at any other time in the four decades that the question has been asked on the General Social Survey, a project of the independent research organization Norc at the University of Chicago.
READ: How poverty can affect brainpower
The rising numbers surprised some researchers and activists even in light of the bruising economy. For decades, the vast majority of Americans have seen themselves as “middle class” or “working class.” Even during earlier downturns, so few people called themselves lower class that scholars routinely lumped them with working class. Activists for the poor often avoid the term, deeming it an insult.
When people call themselves lower class, “we’ll say, ‘You’re not lower than someone else. You just have less money,'” said Michaelann Bewsee, co-founder of Arise for Social Justice, a Massachusetts low-income rights group. But many don’t consider it insulting today, Bewsee said.
“They’re just reflecting their economic reality,” she said.
This deplorable situation will worsen as long as we as a nation fail to address the REAL problem at the root of income inequality and poverty––CONCENTRATED OWNERSHIP of wealth-creating, income-generating productive capital. And to advocate for solutions that systematically broaden private sector individual ownership of the formation of FUTURE productive capital investment to empower EVERY American to accumulate over time a viable capital trust (super-IRA) portfolio of stock in diversified companies and reap the full earnings payout of corporate earnings as dividend income to support their livelihood and retirement.
As we seek to eliminate human toil jobs by substituting non-humans means of production for human means and accomplish new feats that only technology can produce, the reality is that private sector job creation in numbers that match the pool of people willing and able to work will constantly be eroded by physical productive capital’s ever increasing role.
Given the current invisible structure of the economy, except for a relative few, the majority of the population, no matter how well educated, will not be able to find a job that pays sufficient wages or salaries to support a family or prevent a lifestyle, which is gradually being crippled by near poverty or poverty earnings. Thus, education is not the panacea, though it is critical for our future societal development. And younger, as well as older people, will increasingly find it harder and harder to secure a well-paying job––for most, their ONLY source of income––and will find themselves dependent on taxpayer-supported government welfare, open and disguised or concealed.
While arguments point to measures that will benefit “educated” Americans, the authors fail to address the necessity for broadened private sector individual ownership of FUTURE productive capital asset economic growth, connecting people with individual super-IRA-type Capital Homestead Accounts (CHPs) by which to build viable, sustainable diversified ownership portfolios in America’s corporations and future corporations, and to provide financial security in retirement.
See “Education Is Critical To Our Future Societal Development” at http://www.nationofchange.org/education-critical-our-future-societal-development-1373556479
See “Financing Economic Growth With ‘FUTURE SAVINGS’: Solutions To Protect America From Economic Decline” at NationOfChange.orghttp://www.nationofchange.org/
http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-lower-class-20130916,0,5616335.story
