Anything even slight center-left on this site will immediately get inundated with broken, inordinary American right+ talking points. We're not hackers here, just American middle class programmers.
This thread is full of justifications completely ignoring the fact that we almost had a full blown financial meltdown just 8-9 years ago, at the expense of the middle class, and the only thing that stopped it was extreme government intervention and then lowering the absolutely hell out of interest rates. How did the middle class survive and maintain its perceived wealth? It's not because they had the purchasing power to do so, quite the opposite. It turns out that lowering interest rates across the board implicitly creates a credit bubble (because low interest money isn't used for assets, it's used for loans). A lot of middle class Americans have maintained their standard of living (or just survived in general) off credit and they're propping up other middle class workers with that debt (notably the service industry).
Here's a quick little stat to satiate anyone who wants to go "citation pls": http://www.businessinsider.com/american-credit-card-debt-nea...
>Why would Americans be struggling when unemployment is so low? Well, having a job and having a well-paying job are two different things. And wages have largely remained stagnant in the 21st century.
We're letting a time bomb tick and tock if wages do not significantly rise over the next decade.