According to a new report from Oxfam, the wealth and income that the world's richest people accumulated last year would be enough to eliminate world poverty four times over. Ben Phillips, a campaign director at Oxfam, said that extreme wealth is now one of the major obstacles to solving the problems of extreme poverty. The $240 billion the top 100 billionaires in the world made in 2012 would completely eliminate extreme poverty, the report concludes.

The vast majority of America's workers have largely been shut out of the nation’s economic growth over the past three decades, reports the 12th edition of The State of Working America from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). Released today and available online, the report finds that the typical American family has added hundreds of extra hours of work each year, while also earning better education credentials, yet is still struggling to keep up.

Given what we noted about America’s workers living paycheck to paycheck, the new data, released yesterday by Pew Research Center, are no surprise (click on chart to enlarge):

Since 2000, the middle class has shrunk in size, fallen backward in income and wealth and shed some—but by no means all—of its characteristic faith in the future.

Surprising, no. Horrifying? You betcha.

In the past generation, the rich did get richer and the poor did get poorer, according to a new report from the Pew Center on the States. Project manager Erin Currier of Pew's Economic Mobility Project says the report, "Pursuing the American Dream: Economic Mobility Across Generations,"

calls into question the quality of the opportunity Americans believe exists in the United States.

This is a cross-post from Huffington Post by Stan Sorscher, labor representative for the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace/IFPTE Local 2001 (SPEEA/IFPTE).

Many American voters seem ready to run our country as if it were a business.

Every wonder why it’s so hard to get a millionaires’ tax passed?

We all know that the gap between 1 percent and the rest us has grown to obscene proportions. Their wealth has soared while ours has stagnated or fallen over the past decade and more.

More troubling news on the downward economic spiral of America’s working families. In 2010, median household income declined and the poverty rate increased, according to U.S. Census Bureau data announced this morning.

So, even as there are still 4.7 workers for every one job, the jobs that are being created are primarily low-wage—and the wages in those jobs have fallen disproportionately, according to a new report by the National Employment Law Project (NELP).

From the first quarter of 2010 through the first quarter of 2011, the most recent data available, lower-wage occupations grew by 3.2 percent, with retail salespersons, office clerks, cashiers, food preparation workers and stock clerks topping the list. Mid-wage occupations, including paralegals, customer service representatives and machinists, grew by only 1.2 percent, while higher-wage occupations declined by 1.2 percent, which includes occupations like engineers, registered nurses and finance workers.

The median net worth of white households is 20 times greater than that of black households and 18 times greater than that of Latino households, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center, which attributes the increase to the decline in the housing market and the ensuing recession. From 2005 to 2009, inflation-adjusted median wealth fell by 66 percent among Latino households and 53 percent among black households, compared with just 16 percent among white households.

Outside the navel-gazing world that has become Washington politics, where deficit-cutting is king and jobless workers ignored (with a few notable exceptions), 25 million are unemployed, underemployed or have stopped looking for work, and wages are essentially flat. Workers are struggling to get work that, in many cases, just doesn’t exist (there are 4.7 workers for every ONE job).