Last gasps of middle class

The engraving isn't completed, but you can easily fill in the tombstone's final few blanks.

It will read:

America's Middle Class. RIP

By every statistical measure, the gap between our nation's richest and poorest continues to widen. Sadly, that gap is not being filled by tens of millions of Americans who make a good living, impact infrastructure lightly and, generally speaking, improve the quality of life around them.

Our middle class, once the pride of the nation and its virtual backbone, is dying.

Here is just a sampling of 22 statistics supporting that conclusion as recently published by Business Insider (businessinsider.com):

• Ten percent of Americans now earn about 50 percent of our national income.

• For the first time in our country's history, more than 40 million Americans now receive food stamps.

• The number of American millionaires actually rose 16 percent from 2008 to 2009 despite the Great Recession. There are now 7.8 million U.S. millionaires.

• About 21 percent of all children in the U.S. are living below the poverty line. This is the highest rate in 20 years.

• For the first time in history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the U.S. than all individual Americans put together.

• In 1950, the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average worker's paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has ballooned to 300-500 to 1.

• Almost half of all Americans have less than $10,000 saved for retirement.

• More than 60 percent of Americans "always or usually" live paycheck to paycheck. That figure is up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.

This staggering, lingering recession has not leveled the financial playing field in our country, as some surmised it would. It has made the rich richer and the poor poorer.

The solution isn't to lower the ceiling of income potential. It's to raise the basement.

Employers, elected officials and other opinion leaders must remember that jobs, good-paying jobs for qualified applicants, must remain the No. 1 objective if our nation has any hope of resuming its role as global leader. Energy invested in creating good jobs will not be energy wasted.

On an individual level, each of us still has some control over our fate. If you don't have a job or your job is low paying without likely advancement, work to make yourself more marketable. And the key to tapping your own potential, as well as our nation's, is education.

Education - meaningful, useful, self-empowering education - can lift most people from meager conditions. Not only will it help land bigger paychecks, but it will open new vistas to an old world.