https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2014 • 70% of all working Americans make 50k or less • 50% of all working Americans make less than 30k • 30% make under 15k The numbers above are only for those that are actually working.  There are 7.9 million working age Americans that are “officially unemployed” right now and another 94.7 million working age Americans that are considered to be “not in the labor force” aka, disabled, retired, homemakers, etc.  When you add those two numbers together, you get a grand total of 102.6 million working age Americans that do not have a job right now. At what point to do we realize that the American job market has been simply gutted? If you can believe it, about a quarter of the country actually has a [u]negative[/u] net worth right now. What that means is that if you have no debt and you also have ten dollars in your pocket that gives you a greater net worth than about 25 percent of the entire country.  So what's causing this? Trade deals, like NAFTA, and the newly proposed TPP, that allow our jobs to be outsourced as soon as it is profitable to do so with no repercussions, and increased automation of processes, have all greatly contributed to good paying jobs being lost. Why should you care? Because this is the economic climate you either already are or will be working in, and unless you're informed of the situation, you won't be able to make informed decisions about who can and will actually try to fix it and restore our middle class.