"Gary R Coffman" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 12 Aug 2003 04:24:28 GMT, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:
Well, you can take the position of the conservative think-tank, the Cato
Institute, and point out that a careful analysis of the quintile
divisions
of family income in the US indicates that the middle class is doing just
about as well as it's done since the early '70s.

Then, like the Cato Institute, you could ignore the fact that it now
frequently requires two incomes for a family to remain in the middle
quintiles, where it once required one.

A doubling of job seekers in the marketplace can do that.

I suppose it could, but did it? There was a lot of discussion about it in
the late '70s, but the idea was pretty well dismissed because there was no
correspondance between unemployment and the numbers of women enterring the
workforce. The correspondance that was a lot clearer was the decline of
unions.

I always remember one anecdote, from my college roommate, who had been a
teacher but who quit and took a job at Dodge, driving cars off the end of
the assembly line to the parking lot for $22/hr. That was almost twice what
he had been making as a teacher.

Ed Huntress