A recent report produced by the National Association of Colleges and Employers revealed the most damning Obama administration statistic I have so far seen. It reports that during the last three years (’09 – ’11), those college graduates unable to find a job has risen to 45%, a tripling of this tragic outcome. During the last three years of the Bush Administration, that dark period from which “change” was so desperately needed, the percentage of permanently unemployed college grads stood at 15%.
As I point out in my book, Lessons from Fallen Civilizations, most great civilizations, on their way to collapse, impoverish and ultimately eliminate their middle classes. I write:
In AD 161, during the reign of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, there were about 3,000 officials and bureaucrats in the Roman imperial government. By the abdication of Emperor Diocletian in AD 305, there were 35,000. In the same intervening years, taxes rose from what the small farmer could produce in two days a month to half his monthly output. By mid-fourth century, the empire exacted such an onerous level of taxation that many of its citizens defected, abandoned their lands, and joined the Barbarian invaders.
Today, there are many metrics which point to the destruction of the American middle class family:
- In 2011, entry level college-educated men earned an average $21.69 an hour, an inflation-adjusted drop of 7.6% from 2000.
- With the Bush tax rates about to expire: the top capital gains tax rate is scheduled to rise from 15 to 43.4%. This will immediately hammer the value of all American pension and savings portfolios by 25 to 30%.
- The marriage penalty comes back.
- The payroll tax rate jumps, limiting the ability of business to raise wage rates and hire.
- The death tax is restored, wiping out the inheritors of small farms and businesses.
- A whole long list of Obamacare taxes on small businesses will take effect depressing wages and new hires.
From my book, I write:
According to the IRS data for fiscal year 2011, the top 2% of American earners made $299,307 or more, and already paid a whopping 53% of all federal income taxes. The new American majority instinctively knew that the real tax burden always falls on the middle class in a capitalist society because that is where the vast majority of country’s taxable income is generated. It understood that taxing the rich and the promise of free health care for all was simply part of a familiar con. Most Americans awakened to the fact that individuals making $200,000 a year were hardly rich, nor were there enough of them to feed Obama’s welfare state leviathan.
The middle class was his target. The president’s real plan was to extract the money from the middle class in a myriad of ways—fees, hidden taxes, higher Medicare deductibles, penalties and fines, carbon taxes, special assessments to cover failing hospitals and school districts, crony capitalist value-added taxes, and the biggest hidden tax of all—inflation. Despite a floundering economy constrained by a fear of what the mountains of Obama’s new regulations would mean, US food and fuel prices rapidly climbed while the buying power of the middle class fell. In one year, from August 2010 to August 2011, the value of the American dollar fell 32% against the Swiss Franc. The new American welfare state was destroying the small investor’s capital at an alarming rate and violating.
And in all this, the fact that our young college graduates who cannot find gainful employment while saddled with student loan debt, may be the most fearful indicator of all. If not reversed, it may signal that a vast number of the American middle class will see their children who played by the rules, studied hard, but were unable to even enter the middle class.
