Really, it's more the $80-100k/year crowd than the $40k/year crowd.
I'm not at all sympathetic to the upper-middle class, because it is a class of spoiled brats. As spoiled and greedy as the wealthy. These are the people -- largely Boomers -- who bought into the Reagan-Bush fairy tales of Supply-Side economics, who jumped on board when that crowd was demonizing the working class and promising that tax cuts would pay for themselves. It's the crowd that bought into the psychotic idea of Saddam Hussein attacking us with a nuclear weapon, when any sane person knows we could blow the entire Middle East off the map if we truly wanted to.
It's the Faux News crowd. The crowd that thinks Iran is our enemy, despite Iran helped us after 9/11 (and despite Iranians holding candlelight vigils in the streets of Tehran after the attacks). The crowd that spent three years obsessing over Bill Clinton's penis. The crowd that thinks missing white women and talentless idiots like Britney Spears are more important than global warming and credit-market crises on the news.
I'm always reminded of Matt Taibbi's description: The Culture of Emboldened StupidityTM.
As for your numbers on the economy, I don't know where you get them. And, as someone who actually, you know, helps produce those numbers for a living, I'm reasonably comfortable in saying that you're wrong. Were unemployment above 12%, it would be impossible to hide, and you'd see enough whistleblowing to deafen half of Washington from the agencies involved in it.
And let's keep something else in mind: Growth in M2 and M3 is not at all out-of-line with other countries/areas, including Canada, Australia, Britain and the Eurozone. I know everyone wants to see some sort of grand conspiracy in M3, but it's just not there. Where's your motherf*%&ing flag pin?
