Middle-class incomes in Michigan fell between 1979 and 2007, even though the state's overall economy grew. A new study from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) shows that over the past three decades, Michigan’s middle-class workers did worse than middle-class U.S. workers in general because collective bargaining had eroded more in Michigan than in the rest of the country. 

This is the third of a four-part series describing what went wrong with America’s economy and how to fix it. See Part 4 tomorrow and read Part 1 here and Part 2: "Tell Us What You Think: What’s Wrong With the U.S. Economy? The Long Answer"—and please leave a comment to tell us what you think. (Click the chart to enlarge.) 

If we want to fix what’s wrong with our economy, we can’t just return to the way things were before the Crash of 2008.  We have to fix what was wrong before the Crash.

And what was that?  In short, it was the failure of our low-wage economic strategy of the past 30 years, which crippled the growth engine of the U.S. economy.

Remember Nuns on the Bus? This summer's inspiring anti-poverty movement arrived in New York City on Monday, where the nuns and their supporters promptly hopped off the bus and onto the Staten Island Ferry to highlight how Republican budget proposals would impact poverty programs throughout the state. The group's leader, Sister Simone Campbell, told ThinkProgress that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's comments about the "47 percent" were "shocking." 

This is the second of a four-part series describing what went wrong with America’s economy and how to fix it. See Part 3 tomorrow and read Part 1: "Tell Us What You Think: What’s Wrong With the U.S. Economy? The Real Scoop"—and please leave a comment to tell us what you think. (Click the chart to enlarge.)

If the short answer is “we’re still recovering from the Crash of 2008,” the long answer is “there was obviously something wrong with the economy long before the Crash of 2008.” 

There were obvious warning signs during the Bush years that should have set off alarm bells.  Most importantly, wages and middle-class family incomes were dead in the water.  The median income for working-age families started falling in 2000 and never recovered during the 2001-2007 recovery.

America’s middle class has been the backbone of our nation’s success. But now the opportunities and education long available to many are open only to a privileged few. In The Betrayal of the American Dream, a New York Times bestseller, Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele show how a prosperous new ruling elite has systematically impoverished our middle class and made it far less certain our children will enjoy a better life than their parents.

Join us at the AFL-CIO for the third event of our fall book series to discuss Barlett and Steele's book, The Betrayal of the American Dream, Friday, Sept. 28, at noon. Bring your lunch; beverages will be available. Books will be available for purchase and authors' signing.

Where: AFL-CIO

815 16th St., N.W.
When: Friday, Sept. 28, noon–2 p.m.

RSVP here. 

This is the first of a four-part series describing what went wrong with America’s economy and how to fix it. See Part 2 tomorrow—and please leave a comment to tell us what you think. (Click the chart to enlarge.)

The Great Recession officially ended more than three years ago, but working families know there’s still something wrong with the U.S. economy.  If we want to fix our economy, we first have to understand what’s wrong with it. (Click chart on the left to enlarge). 

Starting today, in a series of four posts and infographics, we’ll spell out what we see as the short-term and long-term causes of our economic problems and we’ll point to specific solutions.

Both Democrats and Republicans stress that the ability for people to move up the economic ladder to build better lives is at the heart of the American Dream. But new data from the Pew Center on the States pits the Republican tenet on economic mobility against another deeply held Republican belief that unions are a heavy and evil anchor on the economy that must be cut away.  

Where there is a strong union movement, there is more economic mobility. If unions are strengthened, upward mobility will increase.

When the American automobile industry was on the verge of collapse in 2009, Mitt Romney said he’d let it go bankrupt. President Obama engineered a recovery program that put this vital industry back on its feet and saved hundreds of thousands of jobs, not just at the auto plants, but up and down the supply chain and throughout American manufacturing. This new video from the United Steelworkers (USW) tells that story through the eyes of the men and women of USW Local 903 at the Gary, Ind., Dana Holding Corp. axle plant. 

Watch USW's new video and share it on Facebook, Twitter and all your social networks. 

The middle class is the great engine of the American economy, but that engine is sputtering. Today, the National Employment Law Project (NELP), the AFL-CIO and more than a dozen other worker advocate and economic research organizations are proposing “10 Ways to Rebuild the Middle Class for Hard Working Americans: Making Work Pay in the 21st Century.”

Britain has long had a reputation as rigidly divided by class, with little opportunity for people to move higher up the socio-economic ladder.

No more. There is now more upward mobility for students at British schools than in the United States, according to a new report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).