A couple viewpoints on the middle class getting beaten up by the great recession

From CalculatedRisk.com and his link to CNBC's interview with Whitney:

And an excellent piece by Warren, the Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel created to oversee the banking bailouts, entitled America Without a Middle Class:

The crisis facing the middle class started more than a generation ago. Even as productivity rose, the wages of the average fully-employed male have been flat since the 1970s.

But core expenses kept going up. By the early 2000s, families were spending twice as much (adjusted for inflation) on mortgages than they did a generation ago -- for a house that was, on average, only ten percent bigger and 25 years older. They also had to pay twice as much to hang on to their health insurance.