Current path leading to more hardship

Vernos Branco, Las Vegas

Thursday, Dec. 23, 2010 | 2:03 a.m.

I’ve written a few opinions warning of corporate greed, especially in the banking industry, that will be the demise of the middle class. It looks like we’ve reached that point, and I hope it won’t get any worse.

The Working Poor Families Project just reported: “New data from the U.S. Census Bureau show that in 2009, there were more than

10 million low-income working families in the United States. Between 2007 and 2009, the share of working families who are low income — earning less than 200 percent of the official poverty threshold — increased from 28 percent to 30 percent. This now means that nearly 1 in 3 working families in the United States, despite their hard work, are struggling to meet basic needs. The plight of these families now challenges a fundamental assumption that in America, work pays.”

Meanwhile, according to Joseph Marr Cronin, Massachusetts’ education secretary, and Howard Horton, president of Boston’s New England College of Business and Finance, the next bubble to burst will be student loans and higher education.

These two conditions should make Americans wake up to reality. People need to understand that as long as we cater to the wealthiest 2 percent, we all will suffer. If we continue on this path, the middle class will be the new poor, unable to fund national security or the two wars we are engaged in.

After 10 years of the George W. Bush tax cuts, very little has been done by corporate America to rectify our economic downturn. When will they assume responsibility for their actions that caused this recession?