With the unemployment rate rising and many wages shrinking, the figures show the danger of being overextended on credit.
In short, American spending power is declining, and this has become a downward spiral: As wages shrink, workers spend less, and that limits demand for workers at the businesses that once captured their dollars.
The latter has a millionaire executive among its leaders but is seen as drawing its support from rural areas, small businesses and workers afraid of seeing their wages shrunk by a wave of immigration if the European Union admits Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic.
But it is not just the poor who improved their wellbeing: with a median household income of only about $800, the vast majority of Brazilians were set to gain from the rising wages, shrinking unemployment and significantly increased pensions that the past decade had brought.
As wages shrink, rents rise and benefits are cut, Jane sees the citizens who could be described as collateral damage: a stroke victim left with large lapses in memory sanctioned by the jobcentre for forgetting an appointment; a care worker earning barely a tenner a day because her travel costs come out of her pocket; a PhD student who lost his house and now lives in a Tesco car park.
With wages shrinking since the economic downturn, many shoppers have begun to change the way they go about filling their weekly shopping basket.
During that same decade, public-sector white-collar workers (those working in state-owned enterprises) saw their real wages shrink by 8percentt, and, for those in government administration, by 23percentt.
If he wants to rejoin the Merseyside club he will have to agree to a deal which would see his weekly wage shrink from £38,000 to £20,000.
I was disappointed that I didn't hear more from the president as far as how we were going to help those middle-class families," said Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash)., the top woman in the GOP leadership. "I thought he painted a little rosy picture of how things are, at a time when people continue to see their wages actually shrink, take-home pay shrinking.
