Say good-bye to the American dream.

In the oddest paring imaginable, I found this CNN Lou Dobbs segment in my stuff from June 2005 featuring Bill Moyers. Moyers came on to talk about the endangered American dream. At the time, Dobbs focused like a laser on the corporate worlds attack on the middle class (again, who’s committing class warfare?). Dobbs was a great defender of working Americans, and a harsh critic of Bush and the Republicans. Dobbs is a conservative though, and uses that old "both sides" rhetoric. 

The related stories below I though fit well with this harbinger of what was to come, even though neither Dobbs or Moyers thought it was possible.

Chicago Tribune: The percentage of Americans who owned their homes has seen its biggest decline since the Great Depression, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
The rate of home ownership fell to 65.1 percent in April 2010, 1.1 percentage points lower than it was in 2000. The decline was the biggest drop since the 1930s, when home ownership plunged 4.2 percent.

The curious story below didn't seem to want to mention a possible reason for a decline in auto sales in Dane County. Could it be the giant hit to the pocketbooks of employees of our two biggest PUBLIC employers, the UW and state government.

WSJ: Dane County was the only part of south-central Wisconsin to see new car and truck sales drop in September compared with a year ago, Reg-Track of Waterloo reported this week. Dane County dealers were down 5.54 percent, from 1,589 to 1,501.

The other eight counties in the region saw year-over-year increases, ranging from 3.88 percent in Green County to 53.98 percent in Dodge County. The south-central region consists of Columbia, Dane, Dodge, Green, Iowa, Jefferson, Lafayette, Rock and Sauk counties.