I was reviewing some discussion of the economy today, and I ran across a link to an hour-long video of Elizabeth Warren lecturing in early 2007 at Cal Berkeley. Her topic was the decline and precariousness of the middle class in the U.S.



Ms. Warren is a scholar of bankruptcy law, one of the country's most astute observers of the economics of the middle class, a Harvard Law professor, and in service at this time monitoring some of the hare-brained schemes of our Treasury and Federal Reserve for Congress.

The take-away from this video - a generation ago, there was a single wage earner in the typical Mom/Dad/two-kid household. Today, there are two wage earners, and yet after all the fixed costs (housing, health insurance, child care, transportation) of maintaining a middle-class life, they have substantially LESS from their combined earnings than did the 30-years ago single-earner household.

This kind of thing is the eventual source of big social and political trouble. Especially when coupled with the growing perception that legislators and the executive branch are in cahoots with the big Wall Street and corporate interests, at the expense of main-street types.

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