America's earnings recession just got worse

Weak global growth is closing consumers' wallets, while the strong dollar is only making iPhones and other American goods more expensive for foreign buyers. Add on still-low oil prices and Corporate America is facing major headwinds.
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Stephen Moore: Obama's Economy Hits His Voters Hardest

SEPT. 3, 2013 - Young people, single women and minorities have fared the worst during the past four years.

Excerpt: Each month the consultants at Sentier analyze the numbers from the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey and estimate the trend in median annual household income adjusted for inflation. On Aug. 21 [2013], Sentier released "Household Income on the Fourth Anniversary of the Economic Recovery: June 2009 to June 2013." The finding that grabbed headlines was that real median household income "has fallen by 4.4 percent since the 'economic recovery' began in June 2009." In dollar terms, median household income fell to $52,098 from $54,478, a loss of $2,380. ✧ What was largely overlooked, however, is that those who were most likely to vote for Barack Obama in 2012 were members of demographic groups most likely to have suffered the steepest income declines. Mr. Obama was re-elected with 51% of the vote. Five demographic groups were crucial to his victory: young voters, single women, those with only a high-school diploma or less, blacks and Hispanics. He cleaned up with 60% of the youth vote, 67% of single women, 93% of blacks, 71% of Hispanics, and 64% of those without a high-school diploma, according to exit polls.

See how these demographics fared at WSJ Online
(Hat tip: Jeff) Read More......

Obama’s Shallow Inequality Speech And The Presidency That Might Have Been

By Ben Domenech
If income inequality is the defining challenge of our time, why did President Obama spend so much time on policies unrelated to it? Why did he go down a policy path which led in the opposite direction? And why, even today, is he bypassing any possibility of brokering a bipartisan effort to combat “the defining challenge” and instead prioritizing a clumsy, tired, politically dead-end solution – minimum wage hikes – which without question has a negative effect on low-skill job creation while aiding his powerful union allies? Read more at the Federalist... Read More......

WSJ: The New American Divide

WALL STREET JOURNAL, 1/21/2012 - The ideal of an 'American way of life' is fading as the working class falls further away from institutions like marriage and religion and the upper class becomes more isolated. Charles Murray on what's cleaving America, and why.

CHARLES MURRAY: America is coming apart. For most of our nation's history, whatever the inequality in wealth between the richest and poorest citizens, we maintained a cultural equality known nowhere else in the world—for whites, anyway. "The more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people," wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, the great chronicler of American democracy, in the 1830s. "On the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: They listen to them, they speak to them every day."

Americans love to see themselves this way. But there's a problem: It's not true anymore, and it has been progressively less true since the 1960s.

People are starting to notice the great divide. The tea party sees the aloofness in a political elite that thinks it knows best and orders the rest of America to fall in line. The Occupy movement sees it in an economic elite that lives in mansions and flies on private jets. Each is right about an aspect of the problem, but that problem is more pervasive than either political or economic inequality. What we now face is a problem of cultural inequality. Read more at WSJ...

—Mr. Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His new book, "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010" (Crown Forum) will be published on Jan. 31.

RELATED:
Bradley Lecture by Charles Murray, February 6, 2012: Alternative Futures for a Fractured American Culture (Full video will be posted at this link within 24 hours)
AEI: Society and Culture - About the book | Murray on "Coming Apart" | How thick is your bubble? (20 question quiz) | What They're Saying About "Coming Apart" Read More......