[theknife]

Originally Posted by Mazer

Malk, the Dow wasn't the only metric I cited.


You can't help but complain about a good thing.


By real terms you mean personal anecdotes? I prefer facts, thank you.

as you wish:

The U.S. economy is indeed strong. Although growth is slowing, it's essentially been steady since mid-2001. September's unemployment rate was a low 4.6 percent and the Dow Jones Industrial Average reached record highs last week.

But through September, the growth in hourly wages was flat or negative for 27 of the previous 29 months, according to Labor Department data. Wages for blue-collar and nonmanagerial workers - 80 percent of the work force - are growing at a 3.9 percent annual rate, the Labor Department reported in September. Consumer-price inflation, however, is rising at the same rate. That means prices are rising as fast as wages.

Workers are barely keeping up. Health care, wages and energy prices are consumers' top three economic concerns, according to a Gallup poll in September.

Here's how the hypothetical median-income family - half of four-member families earn less, half earn more - is being squeezed.

The typical family paid, on average from 1999 to 2004, about $865 a year to heat a home with heating oil or $586 with natural gas, according to the National Energy Assistance Directors' Association.

Last winter, however, it cost $1,496 to heat a home with heating oil and $946 with natural gas. Those are increases of 73 percent and 61 percent.

Then there's gasoline. The nationwide average for a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline was $2.22 on Monday, according to AAA. That's 57 percent higher than $1.41, the average price for a gallon of gas during the second week of October from 2000 through 2003.

Health insurance costs have risen even faster. The premiums workers pay for employer-provided health insurance rose an average of 7.7 percent this year - and have increased 84 percent since 2000, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a health-issues research center.

Average employer-paid family-health coverage now is estimated to cost $11,480 annually, and workers pay about $2,973 of those costs in premiums, Kaiser said. That's $1,354 more per year than workers paid six years ago.

"Health-care costs outpace the cost of just about everything in our economy," said James Klein, the president of the American Benefits Council in Washington. "Most of that cost burden is increasingly shared with workers."

Some 66 percent of the nation's employers have higher employee co-pays this year, 56 percent raised premiums and 56 percent increased deductibles for participants, according to a recent survey by The Society of Human Resource Management.

In 2001, the family paid $397 a month for health insurance. Today they pay $717 a month. They're hoping to cut that to less than $500 a month by taking a plan with higher deductibles for medical services.

the economy may look good on paper but the middle class is not benefitting from the current economic growth.

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/15781393.htm