Pocketbook Pain: The Rapidly Rising Cost Of Living Is Absolutely Killing The Middle Class In America
By Michael Snyder
TheEconomicCollapseBlog.com
November 9th, 2015
All over America, the middle class is dying and poverty is on the rise. One of the primary reasons for this is the rapidly rising cost of living in the United States. The cost of just about everything that average families shell out money for on a regular basis – food, rent, health insurance, etc. – is rising much faster than wages are. In a previous article I noted that the federal poverty level for a family of five is $28,410, but 51 percent of all American workers are making less than $30,000 a year at this point. We have seen an explosion in the number of people in this country that are considered to be “the working poor” and it gets worse with each passing year.
One of the most frustrating things for me personally is the rising cost of health insurance. Barack Obama promised that his program would result in a decline in health insurance premiums by as much as $2,500 per family, but in reality average family premiums have increased by a total of $4,865 since 2008.
Just recently, I got a letter informing me that my health insurance premiums would be going up by close to 20 percent in 2016. That is on top of an increase of more than 30 percent in 2015. Sadly, the exact same thing is happening to millions of other families all over the nation. The following comes from TruNews…
The Obamacare increases for 2016 have been released. Premiums will increase 3 times faster than officials claim.
Every state is different. Every insurer is different. New Mexico residents, for instance, can expect increases of 8 to 40 percent for the second-lowest cost silver plan. But for people in other states, including Arkansas the cost will increase less than 4 percent. Overall the average increase is 20.3 percent, according to analysis by The Daily Caller News Foundation, instead of the 7.5 percent originally asserted.
And of course it isn’t just health insurance. Every time I go to the grocery store I am stunned by the prices.
They often try to hide the price increases so that we will not notice them. Sometimes when I go food shopping I notice that some of my favorite things are “on sale”, but the sale prices are what the old “regular prices” used to be. And food companies just keep shrinking package sizes, but the amount we have to pay stays the same or goes up.
Unfortunately, our food dollars are never going to stretch any farther than they do right now. Thanks to erratic global weather, food prices are quickly moving higher. In fact, according to the Crux global food prices just rose by the most that we have seen in three years…
The effects of El Niño are starting to reach the dinner table, with global food prices rising the most in three years on supply concerns for everything from New Zealand milk to sugar in Brazil and Southeast Asian palm oil.
An index of 73 food prices increased 3.9%, the biggest jump since July 2012, to 162 in October, the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization wrote in a report Thursday.
The return of the El Niño weather phenomenon is changing weather conditions around the world, damaging crops with too much rain in some areas and not enough in others. The price of sugar increased more than that of any other commodity in the FAO report, soaring 17 percent, the most since September 2010. Excessive downpours in Brazil, the world’s largest producer, have slowed harvesting and reduced the amount of sweetener that can be extracted from cane.
The Rest…HERE
