Most of the countries of Europe & Asia (Australia, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan) have laws in place that guarantee a healthy middle class: poverty, like in America, doesn't haunt their dreams.
The Washington Post just published a heartbreaking story about Dave Ramsey Jr., a working class American who fell out of the middle class and couldn't afford an urn for his father's ashes, much less a memorial ceremony.
To save money, the funeral home gave him his dad's ashes wrapped in a cloth bag:
"Like a record 23 percent of Americans who've died in the past five years," Eli Saslow writes for the Post, "the ultimate financial worth of his father's life was nothing — a number somewhere below zero."
In fact, it's worse than that, as Saslow points out, noting that Dave Jr's family is:
"[A] case study in what economists called 'backwards mobility' into the bottom 50 percent of Americans who now collectively have a negative net worth."
A "negative net worth" takes you beyond mere poverty: it means you have virtually no way to ever economically catch your breath or sleep at night without worry.
Read more at HartmannReport.com.
-Thom
