Stagnation: Workers get only 0.2% pay increase in 1st Quarter...

Obama has increased food stamp users, free or subsidized healthcare beneficiaries and people collecting disability. The wealthy are doing very well with the gains in the stock markets and the recovery of real estate prices. The middle class is dying. They face stagnant wages, higher taxes and higher prices on food, electricity, health insurance, travel and many other common purchases. 

Signs of a nascent pickup in U.S. worker pay proved fleeting as wages and salaries climbed in the second quarter at the slowest pace on record.
The 0.2 percent advance was the smallest in data going back to 1982 and followed a 0.7 percent increase in the first quarter, the Labor Department said Friday. In the 12 months ended June, wages and salaries were up 2.1 percent compared with a 2.6 percent year-over-year gain in the first quarter.
The yield on Treasury securities sank as the figures tempered expectations a firming job market would prompt the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates as early as September. While Chair Janet Yellen has said wages alone won’t determine policy, the unexpected slowdown means there will be even more riding on employment and growth data in coming months to bolster the case for tightening in the second half of the year.

Biden: Middle Class 'In Worst Shape Since 1920', Is Currently 'Being Killed' (Video)

Thanks Captain Obvious. If only Biden could stop being part of the problem and be part of the solution.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren refuses to define middle class income range...

Democrats and liberals claim they are for the middle class and won't raise taxes on them. of cours, the definition of middle class is evolving like so many other liberal positions...

Via Red Alert Politics:

Newly sworn-in Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) campaigned on the middle class — but don’t ask her to define it.

In an interview with the FOX News affiliate in Boston on Friday, Warren refused to assign a salary range to middle class Americans, saying it’s “not a numbers issue.”
“When we strengthen education, when we make it possible for kids to go to college, then we strengthen America’s middle class, and that doesn’t mean a dollar figure,” Warren said.

“The middle class is, by definition, a group of people in a certain income level,” the reporter said. “But you’re not willing to say that they are.”

“No…no…because I actually disagree with that,” Warren said.

The reporter argued that when writing legislation, the middle class would be defined by income levels, but Warren disagreed. She said instead that there are many characteristics that define the middle class.

“That sounds a little like a dodge, Senator Warren,” the reporter said.
“No, but it’s not a dodge,” Warren responded.

Keep on reading…

Video: Joe Biden Admits Middle Class "Buried The Last FOUR Years" (Under Obama)

I can't wait for the VP debates...

Obamacare tax to hit 6 million; mostly middle class...

President Obama claimed he would never raise taxes on the middle class. He is a liar.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Nearly 6 million Americans — most of them in the middle class — will face a tax penalty for not carrying medical coverage once President Barack Obama's health care overhaul law is fully in place, congressional budget analysts said Wednesday. 

The new estimate amounts to an inconvenient fact for the administration, a reminder of what critics see as broken promises. 

The numbers from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office are significantly higher than a previous projection by the same office in 2010, shortly after the law passed.
The earlier estimate found 4 million people would be affected in 2016, when the penalty is fully in effect. The difference — 2 million people— represents a 50 percent increase.

Joe Biden is back and he thinks "the middle class is coming back."

How is median household income being down $4,300 under Obama a comeback for the middle class?

Now that Obama has his $4 million Hawaiian vacation over, he wants to expand the middle class or something

What President Obama has actually been expanding is food stamp dependency.

WASHINGTON (AP) – President Barack Obama is pushing his economic message in Ohio, brandishing his presidential megaphone in a politically important state to make certain his appeal to the middle class is heard amid the boisterous start of the Republican campaign for the White House.

Obama was traveling Wednesday to the most Democratic congressional district in Ohio, a Cleveland suburb, a day after Mitt Romney won Iowa’s Republican presidential caucuses by just eight votes. Obama’s trip signals the White House’s intent to keep the president in the public eye even as the political world focuses on the GOP’s selection process.

The White House’s choice of Ohio for Obama’s first presidential trip of 2012 underscores the state’s high-profile role in presidential politics. It is a swing state that went for George W. Bush in 2004 and for Obama in 2008. A top manufacturing state, Ohio has seen its jobless rate follow the national pattern; unemployment was 8.5 percent in November compared with 9.6 percent a year before. [...]

Pressing his economic agenda, Obama has said expanding the middle class is “the defining issue of our time.” His spokesman, Jay Carney, on Tuesday called it “his No. 1 focus.”

Read more here…

Middle Class Joe Biden

In great news for people making $333,000 a year, Joe Biden has declared them middle class.

At a campaign rally last week in Washington State for Sen. Patty Murray, Vice President Joe Biden said “Let me tell you what middle class is: Joe Biden.”

Well given that Joe Biden made $333,000 in AGI last year (he made $215,000 in 1998 and over $200,000 every year since), I guess that means President Obama, according to Joe Biden, is raising taxes on the middle class since he makes above that $200,000/$250,000 threshold set by the president.

We have to wonder if President Obama will now raise his pledge lie of not raising taxes on those making less than $250,000 a year.

Brave New World 2016: 4 Million Middle Class Americans Will be Paying $1000 Health Care Penalty

But...But...Obama promised to never raise taxes on those making less than $200 thousand a year. President Obama's pants should catch on fire.

AP reported:

Nearly 4 million Americans – the vast majority of them middle class – will have to pay the new penalty for not getting health insurance when President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul law kicks in, according to congressional estimates released Thursday.

The penalties will average a little more than $1,000 apiece in 2016...

RNC Chairman Michael Steele on Obamacare: "taxes are going to go up for the middle class because they have to"

RNC Chairman Michael Steele told CBS News’ Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation this Sunday, that “it’s just not believable” Obamacare won't raise taxes on the middle class. Steele, also, does a great job of defending the Republican position on health care reform.



From the video:

STEELE: The American people will walk away from this weekend’s series of interviews — I think, tomorrow night, with Letterman or whatever — and they’ll say to themselves, “So, what’s changed?”

And this is not, I think, very helpful to the president right now. He’s got to get the American people behind him. And when he says stuff like you he can do — you laid out the litany of things that, you know, he wants to get accomplished. And he says, yes, we can still do all of that.

Without raising taxes? Without creating the deficit — or increasing it? It’s just not believable.

And I think it may have nice to do the interviews, but I don’t think it advanced the debate on health care that much.

SCHIEFFER: So you think he is going to raise taxes?

STEELE: He has to. How else do you pay for it?

I mean, you know, all this cutting efficiencies — I mean, creating efficiencies and cutting costs within various programs — I mean, Washington’s been saying that for generations. I mean, that’s just not the business of government. It doesn’t do that.

And I don’t think that’s going to — particularly with something as mammoth as health care, that you’re going to be able to go on and create $1 trillion worth of savings in the health care system.

So those dollars have to come from some place. Whether you’re talking the Baucus bill; whether you’re talking the House bill, H.R. 3200, or whatever bill the administration finally settles on, taxes are going to go up for the middle class because they have to. That’s the only way you pay for this.

Americans Want Tax Cuts, Not New Health Care Spending

A new Rasmussen poll has found that a majority of Americans would prefer middle class tax cuts to new government spending on health care. Meanwhile, the Democrats are struggling to fund their health care reform. Tax increases for the middle class are still on the table.

From Rasmussen:

Fifty-four percent (54%) of U.S. voters say tax cuts for the middle class are more important than new spending for health care reform, even as President Obama’s top economic advisers signal that tax hikes may be necessary.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey, taken Monday and Tuesday nights, finds that 34% disagree and say new spending for health care reform is more important. Twelve percent (12%) are not sure.

It is important to note that this question asked about new government spending for health care reform rather than about the overall concept of health care reform itself.

The partisan and ideological divide on the question is sizable. Fifty-eight percent (58%) of Democrats say new spending for health care reform is the priority. But 80% of Republicans and 62% of voters not affiliated with either party favor tax cuts for the middle class.