California construction employment back to 1997 levels. California building permits at all time record low.
Solving the California state budget crisis just got that much tougher. Estimated tax revenues came in nearly $3 billion less than expected wiping out a steady stream of months where things seemed to be improving at least on the revenue front. And this should come as no surprise. California has done very little to wean […]
Middle class getting pushed into poverty and working poor status – The cloaked recovery for the middle class. How 30 percent of the poor are unemployed.
Over 6.5 million of the 15 million unemployed Americans have been out of work for 27 weeks or more. As a percent, this is the highest number of long-term unemployed we have had since the Great Depression. What is not discussed in this recession is the working poor and middle class have taken on the […]
How much do average Americans make after the Great Recession? Examining the income of U.S. households. 65 percent of U.S. households live on $65,000 or less.
In order to understand the middle class, we first have to draw a line in the economic sand. Many in our society would like to believe that we live in a classless system but this isn’t true especially when we look at the financial data. This classless belief has been shattered with the current structure […]
The Future of U.S. Housing – Projections of Household Formation, Loan Modification Data, 500,000 Option ARMs Still Active, and a Decade of Stagnation.
Take what you knew about projecting housing for the last fifty years and throw it out the window. The big problem with using models post-World War II is that they base growth on a baby boomer population that was the largest affluent middle class cohort known to the world. That model is now disappearing. Some […]