Where's the Middle Class?

Something has happened in the last decade or two that I don't fully understand, and it's my guess that lots of people don't understand it well.  It seems to me when I'm looking around that our middle class has come close to disappearing, that we no longer have that class of people who are able to live comfortably while still putting money away for those little extravagances such as vacations or a new car.

Instead, we have plenty of people who have risen to the ranks of the lower-upper class who have more money than they know what to do with, and end up spending it lavishly and ending up in debt, anyway.  On the other end of the spectrum, we have many more people who have fallen into the ranks of the upper-lower class, people who have worked hard for years and years and years, but who now are living basically paycheck to paycheck and not doing very well at all.  They're not able to afford vacations in hotels, and instead plan their time away visiting relatives or camping.  And saving money for retirement, or for helping the kids to pay off student loans?  Forget it.

Where has this phenomenon come from?  Well, it's pretty easy to see that the profit-making companies are doing their best to maximize profits at the expense of others--when they decide they have to have a four-billion-dollar profit instead of a two-billion-dollar profit, where do you think that money comes from?  It comes from the people who have to spend the money on their services and products.  And the CEO's that earn millions of dollars a year?  Who pays their salaries?  You do, my friend.  It's quite simple, actually.

The worst part is that this disappearance of the middle class probably won't be reversed.  We already see lots of indications that the people with financial power in this country are taking steps to further disempower people who don't have much money, and things promise to get worse with high gas prices (we're paying for the profits for the speculators, not for the gas), high food prices, and lower wages.  It will be a sad day when the middle class is no more, for then our country will definitely be split in two--a small minority who are the haves, and a large majority who are the have-nots.  And then what?

Just a Start

Today's a good day to start.  Had a nice phone call with the bank this morning, the one that holds the loan on our RV.  We've been wanting to make payments, but with my wife out of work for more than a year, we've fallen behind.  She just found work, so now we can start paying again--and the bank doesn't want our money unless we can come up with $5,000.  In the past two years, I've been laid off for six months, and my wife for twelve, yet we kept up payments as long as we could, even to the point of going without just to pay.  And now some not-so-friendly guy with an accusatory attitude who has never met me or my wife tells me we have to come up with 5K in order to keep it, because they won't accept the $500 a month we're now able to pay when my wife starts working.

How does this make sense?  We've told them all along that we'll start paying when we can; now we can, and they don't want our money.  And they want to take the RV now, even though we've never received any notice that they plan on repossessing it.  Phone calls like this with comfortably employed people in an office somewhere are infuriating, and the situation makes me wonder what else we could have done.  Where there's no money, obviously, there's no opportunity to pay. . . .