What’s Really Squeezing Middle Class Workers?

From today's NYT: There are two different stories people tend to tell when they're trying to explain why the middle class is feeling squeezed.

The first one is about inequality. The top 0.1 percent of earners -- that's one taxpayer out of every 1,000 -- now brings in 11 percent of the nation's total income, triple the share that they did just a generation ago. This has happened because the rich have grown ever richer, while the pay of rank-and-file workers hasn't risen much faster than inflation.

The second, related story is about instability. Layoffs seem to happen more frequently than they once did, and these job losses -- combined with the spread of bonus pay -- have caused workers' incomes to bounce around a lot more than in the past. So not only have middle-class families been getting meager raises, their finances have also become more volatile.

The story about inequality is indisputably true. But we're starting to learn that the second story, the one about instability, is more complicated. It may even end up being wrong...Read the whole story HERE.