"Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks."    Karl Marx

If Karl Marx and V. I. Lenin were alive today, they would be leading contenders for the Nobel Prize in economics.

Marx predicted the growing misery of working people, and Lenin foresaw the subordination of the production of goods to financial capital's accumulation of profits based on the purchase and sale of paper instruments.  Their predictions are far superior to the "risk models" for which the Nobel Prize has been given and are closer to the money than the predictions of Federal Reserve chairmen, US Treasury secretaries, and Nobel economists, such as Paul Krugman, who believe that more credit and more debt are the solution to the economic crisis.

In this first decade of the 21st century there has been no increase in the real incomes of working Americans.  There has been a sharp decline in their wealth.  In the 21st century Americans have suffered two major stock market crashes and the destruction of their real estate wealth.  

Some studies have concluded that the real incomes of Americans, except for the financial oligarchy of the super rich, are less today than in the 1980s and even the 1970s.  I have not examined these studies of family income to determine whether they are biased by the rise in divorce and percentage of single parent households.  However, for the last decade it is clear that real take-home pay has declined.

The main cause of this decline is the offshoring of US high value-added jobs. Both manufacturing jobs and professional services, such as software engineering and information technology work, have been relocated in countries with large and cheap labor forces.  

The wipeout of middle class jobs was disguised by the growth in consumer debt. As Americans' incomes ceased to grow, consumer debt expanded to take the place of income growth and to keep consumer demand rising. Unlike rises in consumer incomes due to productivity growth, there is a limit to debt expansion.  When that limit is reached, the economy ceases to grow. 

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