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Modern history. reporter: the american middle class, the historic back bone of the u.s. economy, is struggling through a lost decade, losing ground and shrinking in numbers. that s the conclusion of a new report from the pew research center, which found that in the past ten years, family incomes at all levels have declined. the first time that s happened since the end of world war ii. there are fewer people in the middle now than there used to be and they have a smaller share of a shrinking pie. reporter: not only did incomes fall, but so did median wealth. what people own minus what they owe. it went from about $130,000 in 2001 to around $93,000 in 2010. who do middle class americans blame for this? in a survey 62% said congress. 54% faulted banks and financial institutions. 47% said big corporations. only 8% blame the middle ....
Exaser bad it income inequality. they pushed up upward mobility. we don t want to divide up a shrinking pie more equitably and fairly. we want to grow the pie for everybody. if the pie is growing nobody cares about income inequality because everybody is getting ahead. megyn: is this unnecessarily devisive? i don t think so. it s an accurate representation of what happened to america over the last decade. where the republicans and mark are in a bind. if you look at the fox poll that came out today, more people say the president improved the economy, they say he hurt it. that s in the poll that came out today. let s go through this quickly. the stock market is at a 12-year high. corporate profits are at an historic high. the auto industry had record profits. we have seen the unemployment rate drop by 2 percentage points in the last three years. ....
Before markets force us to fix them. that s why it s not one side is working to solve the problem and it s a different world view. i didn t mention fiscal. i mentioned cap and trade. one party is will to dproms r compromise and the other isn t, that s a big discussion going on. i can see that. i can see on a fiscal front why people say this is a problem about spending that won t get fixed. i should point out that taxes as a percentage of gdp are thes he s since the early 1950s. if you extended all of the bush tax cuts, where things are headed, at the end of ten years, if you kept all the tax cuts in place, they would be above the historical average. automatically if we recover. yeah. that s why who knows if we are? if we re in zero growth, everybody is screwed. i m serious. here s the biggest fear for me. aside from the fact that we re going to melt the planet. we re entering a period of you talked about this, you made a the shrinking pie. ....
Shrinking pie. it s the habitat a union organizer said deer are nonviolent animals, you shrink their habitat and they fight each other. this was a union organizer talking about fighting each other. the broad context, politics of austerity, restraint, cuts, sacrifice, who is going to pay. that s when you get sort of who has their hands on the share of the pie. austerity is great for those who already have. if you had your run and accumulated your cash, your income may be low, your wages are declining but your wealth is far more significant than those who have yet to build either income or wealth. that s a big difference between older and younger generations. this whole frame of generational conflict is tailor made for what republicans are trying to do. we, the side i consider myself on. the young people. which side are you talking about in this quadrant. on the political side, the ....
Last few years. but isn t that indicative of a larger trend that s going on? we have corporations where ceos essentially have a cottage industry, where their interests are not necessarily aligned with the long-term health of the corporations. or the country. down to the workers and the rest isn t this problem broader than just the financial industry? isn t that simply sort of the canary i think one of the things that happened with sort of hyperglobalization is a lot of multinationals. now, they re not really in america, they hover over america, okay? and in this world, in this world, they can basically go anywhere now, all right? and the question is, you know, how do we create an environment here where they re going to want to go here, all right? because now they can go anywhere. don t we need to create an environment where they can t finance america s policy to their detriment? it seems like we are going backwards on immigration. why, exactly, do you think that is? and ....