The End of the Middle Class

He can come over my house and I will pull it for free and include a shot of whiskey just like they did it in the old days. Lets take a pole, only people over 40 can vote. Who did not see this coming a long time ago, say at least 20 years in the past? The problem was just compounded because of the easy credit available to all. 

Haha, VERY funny video. There are some true points in it and some incorrect and bad ones. Here's a list of important points:

When you take a loan from the bank to finance a car, you pay thousands of dollars in interest back to the bank.

    True, but you have to remember debt is a good think as long as it's used for             working capital. In the case of a car (unless you live in a city with outstanding         public transportation), you're using the car to get you places like a job which make     you money. Therefore the car ends up being working capital which you converted     cash for a loan into.

With only $40k a year, I'll never be able to afford to buy a house since I shouldn't take on debt.

    True, debt is a bad thing if it's not working to make you money. Because the             house isn't something that is used to make you money (unless you're renting it         out), you are not wise to buy a house in the long term unless you have enough         cash to buy most of it outright (and only because at that point you will save money     in the long run). So owning a house is for the most part a bad investment for most     people, especially if you plan on selling your house and moving somewhere else         for retirement/old age.

The economic recovery is just for gambling in the stock market.

    False, the recovery is happening just isn't the 100 meter sprint Obama said it         would be. Nature doesn't rebuild a forest, that went up in a blaze, overnight. It         takes years if not decades to rebuild from ashes.

One of the problems with the bell curve population model for Western style economies is the assumption that a middle class should exist as well as the requirements to obtain status in said class.
    The first assumption says that it should exist when most of history has shown that economic populations should be an inverse bell curve with the lower end having a much higher density status than the high side (more poor people on the low side than rich people on the high side). This doesn't mean there can't be a middle class, just that it's much smaller than either the poor or rich classes (was also usually populated by the high skilled and highly educated people). This doesn't mean society will fail as we know it because somehow the human race managed to survive through those "horrific" eras of economic lopsidedness. What it really means is that we just lost what really matters in life trying to have the excess that the rich have.
    While history also shows us that being poor usually means not having food to eat, no education, and disease more rampant this is more likely due to a problem with societal infrastructure rather than due to monetary access. Modern society has much better to access to food and hygiene than it did in past civilizations. It's already been proven that one of the biggest causes to longer lifespans that have managed to prevail in current times is better access to nutrition as well as food storage mechanics (refrigerators do a LOT in terms of bacteria growth). So we already see that many things for longer and healthier lives are already in society and you don't need to be rich nor make 60k year to obtain them.
    The second assumption are the requirements to be in the middle class. One of them generally is considering higher education provided by college which is a horrible fallacy in today's society. Most people learn to do the job they get out of college, from training which is provided by the job. If you look back to the fifties, sixties, and seventies you find that most of the white collar jobs then didn't require college degrees, just training. Most of those same jobs these days now require a bachelors degree in something. Doesn't matter the subject, just that you have one. WHY wouldn't it matter the subject, is that not important? No, because the education you obtain at college has nothing to do with the function you will serve at the job you get. It was just a rat race of the late 70's and 80's which turned into a standard for the 90's and beyond. This means that most people waste a number of years in college screwing around (I don't mean they didn't study, just that they're not doing more productive work), instead of getting valuable experience on a job. Not only this but they end up spending a lot of money (if not mounting debt) on something that provides nothing more than a certificate of "requires a bachelors degree" line you see on job postings.
    These two points made show that two of the biggest monetary problems in America (higher monetary requirements throughout life as well as expensive generic useless learning, aka college) are a creation of expectations and one that could be solved simply by a societal shift.

For those people who say college is important because most kids don't know what they "want" to do coming out of high school and need college to figure it out are the same people who lived in Cali back in the sixties with rich parents who could finance that lifestyle. They were called hippies at the time. In reality few people know or can do what they WANT to do in life. What you find out is that you end up being happy with what you are good at as a function of satisfaction derived from ability rather than paycheck. This isn't to say college and higher education isn't important for some people. STEM is one place where college is entirely essential as it would take too long and be too financially burdening for a company to undertake the training of one of these individuals. This is one of the reasons they are paid more than the average individual, however, to assist in the compensation of that addition labor and cost of higher education. Ironically these are also the people that are suppose to make up most of the middle class. Given the size of STEM populations in American college you can see why the middle class can exist but should be much smaller than it is today.

To conclude, "middle class" is just a label and people forget that life can be lived and a family can be raised on 30-40k. You just can't own a house or other major types of excess that the rich have had for centuries. There is nothing wrong with the lower classes and with today's societal infrastructure should end up being exceptionally better than they have been in the past.

Methinks the Hamster has been nipping at the Starbucks water bottle a wee bit much today. But I enjoyed the soliloquy. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow...

Red Beans and Rice.... Will  raise the level of class by one...