What Middle Class?

Prediction: By 2020, America will consist of two classes of citizens: the 5-10% ultra rich who can afford multimillion dollar houses and condos in every city they visit so they do not have to inconvenient themselves by staying in a richy hotel, whose luxury yachts begin to look bigger than naval ships, designer clothes are standard as are $1000 purses, etc. etc . And then the rest of us, the 90% who use to be called the middle class. This two class economic system is not coincidentally the same found in most undeveloped economies. . . which could give you a clue of where the US is headed if unchallenged.
Let these facts speak for themselves: In the last 20 years in REAL terms, tuition rates, housing, health care expenses, utility/gas/oil have all increased by at least 100% if not more (not to mention property taxes and other taxes)while the average real increase for the typical middle class worker (when he/she got any that is) was at most 1%. We all know what food prices have been doing lately. The middle class worker is falling further and further behind. Already, the spouse has been put to work to try to make ends meet. Second jobs if available. Credit cards and home equity have been tapped to the limit to help make ends meet.
Meanwhile millions of blue collar middle class manufacturing jobs, the type that would allow a family to have a middle class income and lifestyle while still permitting the stay at home mother/wife, have mostly migrated to China with millions more to come. White collar jobs such as professional and service (call centers, accountants, software programmers, radiologists) are heading to India in huge numbers (Alan Blinder famed economist as he is estimates as many as 45 million jobs are at risk of offshoring, any job that can be electronically transmitted is at risk). Almost all of these are middle class. Personal service jobs and retail/hotel/hospitality/restaurant jobs are still likely to stay--these, though, are not the jobs that allow a good middle class lifestyle. Add to the millions of jobs of small business owners lost to the Big Boxes (especially Walmart, the nemesis), whose only choice is to go to work for half the wages, and the Middle Class is hurting and it is only to get worse.
Foreclosures and bankrupcies are double that from last year with no end in sight. In my county, 25% of families were helped by the local food bank last year.
The economists solution is to get more education. But that is a farce. After all engineers and professionals, highly educated workers, can still be bought in India for 1/10 the price so all these workers may end up with is huge student loans that cannot be paid back.
The government claims the number of jobs is up, unemployment down, and the economy booming. However the number of jobs is a false number of prosperity. One manufacturing job lost at $20/hr and replaced with a retail job at $10/hr balances out as far as the economists are concern but the person working it is not as well off. The number of unemployed, underemployed and those who have given up looking is not 4% as economists may claim but in the high teens. The economy booming? Come look at all the empty plants and houses for sale in my county and I do not see a healthy economy.
As long as jobs continue to flow one way and replacement jobs are significantly lower in wages and benefits (if any benefits at all), the middle class will continue to hurt and decline. Those at the top (executives, investors, the moneyed class) will one day see a riot that will rival that of Marie Antoinette's Let them eat Cake when all those American consumers they had been counting on no longer have cash or assets to buy all those items made overseas. And then we will see a really third world country that once called itself America and great.