Immobility

David Callahan has a great article, The Income Mobility Myth.

• The majority of the new jobs created during the presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were low-wage positions with no benefits.
• Today, about a third of poor families with children include a parent who is working full-time.
• The conservative mobility narrative trumpets the wealthy as "job creators" and agents of opportunity. But that story is exactly backwards in some respects. Corporations and the wealthy have embraced a set of strategies for improving the bottom line that have spelled downward mobility for many workers. For example, when a company moves its back office accounting work overseas, executives and shareholders in that firm may get a nice return as profits go up. But a bunch of college grads lose their jobs.
• African-Americans and Latino households lost over half their median net worth during the most recent boom and bust - even as the Wall Street insiders who invented the subprime securitization machine and capitalized predatory lending outfits got unbelievably rich.

Go read the entire article.