Is the typical American truly 'poor'? Unemployment is higher than typical, but hardly at unprecedented levels worldwide. Among the educated class, unemployment

Is the typical American truly 'poor'? Unemployment is higher than typical, but hardly at unprecedented levels worldwide. Among the educated class, unemployment (4.6%) isn't even particularly high. At the same time debt-loads among American companies are not particularly out of whack from previous economic cycles. Hell a lot of companies (Apple, Microsoft, and Google just to name three off of the top of my head) are actually sitting on pretty enormous cash positions. Hell there is concern in the economic community that there isn't enough available credit (and thus, debt) available currently. As for inflation, I'm not aware of any significant inflation issues here in the U.S. As a matter of fact the inflation rate has been trending downward for the better part of this year. http://www.inflationdata.com/inflation/inflation_rate/currentinflation.asp http://www.inflationdata.com/inflation/inflation_rate/curren... There is some concern that some treasury activity in the form of asset acquisition might stoke some minor inflationary activity, but that's purely speculative at this point.