According to some recent studies, the American middle-class is in decline. Studies show that for over a decade the average American is losing ground in light of their economic well-being. The causes of this decline are many and complex, they include the lose of high paying jobs, the outsourcing of work that was once done in American factories, the rise of foreign competition, which includes the so-called third world work force, the increase of rules and regulations, which tends to make doing business in America more difficult. As a result of all of these reasons, the fact is that the vast American middle-class is in trouble. In the recent past, congress, presidential leadership, and predatory banking innovations have combined to destroy the basis of middle-class wealth. This wealth was based on the acquisition of a house that, over time, becomes the reservoir of wealth based on a growing equity, or wealth reserve. In recent years rising home costs, due in part, to innovative mortgage instruments and the encouragement of banks to grant equity loans has proven to be a deadly result to the growth and maintenance of middle-class wealth. This tendency was complicated by a loss of fiscal discipline on the part of the younger generation because they have failed to maintain financial controls over their debt. Debt can be translated into risk and risk and most citizens cannot handle risk. As a general rule, in an economic turndown asset values decline thereby increasing the risk factor. Most middle-class citizens simply do not understand the nature of risk and that in times of economic turn-down risk increases to determine who will move up and will move down the socio-economic ladder. In recent years with the rise in individual debt there has been a rise in risk-taking that has destroyed many middle-class families. To a great extent government -- local, state, and national -- have failed to educate the public regarding the relationship between debt and risk and this failure is responsible for the growing destruction of the middle-class family. In recent months the government, specifically congress and the president, prove that they too are ignorant of the relationship between debt and risk, they recently have allowed the financial standing of the United States to slip into a dangerous decline.
Loading…}