{"id":3764,"date":"2010-08-29T08:53:48","date_gmt":"2010-08-29T08:53:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zmetro.com\/?p=3764"},"modified":"2010-08-29T08:53:48","modified_gmt":"2010-08-29T08:53:48","slug":"a_tale_of_two_c","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=3764","title":{"rendered":"A Tale of Two Cities"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.star-telegram.com\/2010\/08\/27\/2429553\/a-tale-of-two-cities.html\">Ed Wallace<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>&#8220;It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness &#8230;&#8221;<Br><br \/>\n&#8212; Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859<Br><Br><br \/>\nFor the past 120 days I have pored over economic reports, commerce data, home sales across America, stats on inflationary trends and sales tax reports by state (when they can be found). I&#8217;ve sorted the data by date published, then prioritized it by importance to the economy, and looked for correlations positive or negative. But no matter how many times I read over the data, I can come to only one solid conclusion: We have now finished changing into a two-tiered economy.<Br><Br><br \/>\nThis change didn&#8217;t start with the downturn of the past two and a half years; instead, the completion of our segregation into two financial classes is what directly caused the downturn. No longer is the belief that &#8220;there&#8217;s the 20 percent of the population that live in poverty and then there&#8217;s the rest&#8221; a comfortably distant concept.<Br><Br><br \/>\nThe discomfort line now divides those who &#8220;feel afraid&#8221; that they live in poverty-like circumstances, or soon will &#8211; even if they are gainfully employed &#8211; from &#8220;the rest.&#8221; And instead of a 20\/80 split, have-nots to haves, today it may well be 60\/40.<br \/>\n<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ed Wallace &#8220;It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness &#8230;&#8221; &#8212; Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859 For the past 120 days I have pored over economic reports, commerce data, home sales across America, stats on [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,21,33,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3764"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3764\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}