10 Infuriating Graphs About Life in America If You're Not Rich

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http://www.alternet.org/10-infuriating-graphs-about-life-america-if-youre-not-rich



They say a picture’s worth a thousand words. If that’s true, the following ten images could provide the lyrics for a thousand blues songs. The graphs are taken from series of recent reports which, when considered together, create a paint-by-numbers picture of the lifelong losing game faced by working Americans.

The chorus to our blues song goes like this: The middle the class and working poor are increasingly trapped in a cycle of economic decline, a downward slope which stretches from their golden youth to their sunset years. And there’s no way out, unless we find one for ourselves.

Born Indebted

It begins with the ever-growing mountain of debt which students must acquire in this society in order to receive a college education. Since 2007, the last year before the financial crisis which Wall Street created, total student debt has more than doubled:



Total student debt in this country now exceeds the total credit card debt held by all Americans. The amount of debt held by each individual borrower has also soared, rising by more than 50 percent:



The average amount now owed per student is now more than $27,000. And because job prospects are poorer for young people than they’ve been in recent memory, many are having difficulty paying back these loans: