News and Tribune giddy as Jeffersonville's middle class credentials are conjured by a shadowy web site operating from a bungalow in Frisco.

My first question: What is Simple Thrifty Living?

It's followed closely behind by: Why Simple Thrifty Living's methodology for the seven factors making up the rankings, as opposed to others?

Then there's: Why should Simple Thrifty Living be trusted over other sources?

Not to neglect: How does Simple Thrifty Living support itself, anyway?

You'll get a fair number of hits online with regard to Simple Thrifty Living's content, but good luck trying to go deeper and learn who or what is involved.

One of the writers is named Jack Ryder. Another is Jeff Hunter. There's Emily Jones, too. These sound a lot more like pseudonymous 1970s porn performers than purveyors of financial acumen ... but I digress.

Here's a press release from 2013: West Hall Publishing Announces New Expert-Focused Personal Finance Site Simple. Thrifty. Living.

West Hall Publishing and Consulting announced today that they have launched a new website, Simple. Thrifty. Living., focusing on personal finance and teaching everyday people how to live a full life without breaking the bank.

What makes Simple. Thrifty. Living. different? Professionals from every field imaginable produce the content, from psychologists to home and garden designers. Each writer brings his or her own personal and professional experience to each article.

That helps.

Here's the corporate headquarters, according to filing information.

In short, there's almost no background available about the web site, its writers or the owners, whomever the latter might be. By extension, there's almost no way of knowing whether the website is reputable or merely internet click bait.

Another question: How does something like this "middle class family list" come to the attention of the newspaper and make the front page?

Did Mike Moore's office peddle it?

One Southern Indiana?

There's a healthy dollop of self-aggrandizement from both these entities, and the antennae fairly quiver. The usual suspects love it when media fawns over them, and it shouldn't surprise you to learn that they'll generate the feedback if necessary.

There's altogether too much crowing and not enough criteria. The newspaper needs to do better.

Can it?

Will it even try?

Jeffersonville ranked best in Indiana for middle class families, by John Boyle (The Jeffersonville Tom May Content Purveyor)

SOUTHERN INDIANA — Three local Southern Indiana communities have been ranked among the top cities to live in for Hoosier middle class families.

In a list recently released by Simple Thrifty Living, Jeffersonville topped all other Indiana cities included in the report, which was 84. Coming in fourth was Clarksville, with New Albany taking the ninth spot.

According to Simple Thrifty Living, the middle class makes up roughly 52 percent of the United States' population. The socioeconomic factors analyzed for the list "have a significant effect" on families, prompting the publication to identify the cities best-suited for the families of today.

The rankings were based on seven factors — income, real estate taxes, home value, unemployment, college education, schools and job availability. Cities were compared to others in their state, with each factor given a weighted score that totaled to 100 possible points ...

"We must now rebuild America’s middle class by turning service jobs work into higher-paid, family-supporting work."

Which topic does one overhear being discussed with greater fervor, the weather or the quality of "service" recently experienced at a restaurant or retail business?

Some Southern Indiana restaurants struggle to find workers in saturated market, by Danielle Grady (Hanson Goes to Yahweh)

Other employers combat issue with high wages, opportunities

SOUTHERN INDIANA — May was the last time Cheryl Koetter had to fire someone.

The employee was abusing drugs and a liability around Cricket’s Cafe’s meat slicer. It wasn't the first incident of its kind at the Sellersburg restaurant, but not because of the drugs. Koetter's employees are often quitting unexpectedly or being fired. She's also struggling to find workers to hire.

“I’m okay right now, but I’ve been short-staffed for years,” she said grimly.

Koetter primarily blames the issue on the local workforce being unwilling to, well, work. But as the unemployment rate in Clark and Floyd counties decreases and more and more restaurants open, many, but not all, service industry employers are dealing with a smaller pool of hires.

I posted a link to the preceding on the Facebook page of the New Albany Restaurant and Bar Association, and these two comments stood out.

"They don't want to work?". Maybe they're tired of their morale being mitigated by low pay and a customer always right attitude that ensures employee dissatisfaction.

The answer to her problem is to pay more. Talent goes where the money is.

Did you know that "service workers" overall make up 45% of the nation's workforce?

Here's a view of what must happen next. Spoiler alert: it has to do with money.

The Service Class Deserves Better, by Richard Florida (CityLab)

Our nation’s future depends on our ability to provide the largest segment of our labor force with stable, family-supporting work.

More than 65 million Americans toil in precarious, low-wage service class jobs, preparing and serving us our food, assisting us in stores, supporting our office and professional work, and taking care of our kids and aging parents. The service class is the largest class of Americans by far, making up about 45% of the entire workforce. In terms of the jobs they do and the economic functions they serve, in many ways, its members represent the 21st century analog of the old blue-collar working class. And just like we upgraded those once dirty, dangerous, and low-paid manufacturing jobs during the postwar years, we must now rebuild America’s middle class by turning service jobs work into higher-paid, family-supporting work.

A new report released today by me and my Martin Prosperity Institute colleagues, Karen King and Charlotta Mellander, entitled Building 65 Million Good Jobs, outlines the size and scope of America’s service class, and describes how we can begin to upgrade their jobs.

A return to Piketty: "Reaganomics killed America's middle class."

Seven days in April ...

7 Days of Piketty: Thursday, or "Squeezing the rich ... if the world introduces a Piketty Tax."

7 Days of Piketty: Wednesday, or "Piketty's Three Big Mistakes."

7 Days of Piketty: Tuesday, or "Egalitarianism’s Latest Foe: a critical review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century."

7 Days of Piketty: Monday, or "The Geography of Populist Discontent."

7 Days of Piketty: Sunday, or "Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic."

7 Days of Piketty: Saturday, or "All men are created unequal."

7 Days of Piketty: Friday, or "Capital in the Twenty-first Century' explained."

 ... but I forgot this one, from way back in 2014.

Reaganomics killed America’s middle class, by Thom Hartmann (Alternet via Slate)

This country's fate was sealed when our government slashed taxes on the rich back in 1980

There’s nothing “normal” about having a middle class. Having a middle class is a choice that a society has to make, and it’s a choice we need to make again in this generation, if we want to stop the destruction of the remnants of the last generation’s middle class.

Despite what you might read in the Wall Street Journal or see on Fox News, capitalism is not an economic system that produces a middle class. In fact, if left to its own devices, capitalism tends towards vast levels of inequality and monopoly. The natural and most stable state of capitalism actually looks a lot like the Victorian England depicted in Charles Dickens’ novels.

At the top there is a very small class of superrich. Below them, there is a slightly larger, but still very small, “middle” class of professionals and mercantilists – doctor, lawyers, shop-owners – who help keep things running for the superrich and supply the working poor with their needs. And at the very bottom there is the great mass of people – typically over 90 percent of the population – who make up the working poor. They have no wealth – in fact they’re typically in debt most of their lives – and can barely survive on what little money they make.

So, for average working people, there is no such thing as a middle class in “normal” capitalism. Wealth accumulates at the very top among the elites, not among everyday working people. Inequality is the default option.

You can see this trend today in America. When we had heavily regulated and taxed capitalism in the post-war era, the largest employer in America was General Motors, and they paid working people what would be, in today’s dollars, about $50 an hour with benefits. Reagan began deregulating and cutting taxes on capitalism in 1981, and today, with more classical “raw capitalism,” what we call “Reaganomics,” or “supply side economics,” our nation’s largest employer is WalMart and they pay around $10 an hour.

This is how quickly capitalism reorients itself when the brakes of regulation and taxes are removed – this huge change was done in less than 35 years.

The only ways a working-class “middle class” can come about in a capitalist society are by massive social upheaval – a middle class emerged after the Black Plague in Europe in the 14th century – or by heavily taxing the rich.

French economist Thomas Piketty has talked about this at great length in his groundbreaking new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century ...

Essential reading: "The 'middle class' myth: Here’s why wages are really so low today."

According to Oil Can Eddie, "Class consciousness discourages office workers from unionizing."

I'd guess that something quite similar prevents neighborhoods and small businesses from organizing. Again and again, one points to Benjamin Franklin's famous utterance ...

"We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately."

... and listeners nod, while continuing their lonely determination to fight heroic and mostly losing battles, all by themselves.

That clinical definition of insanity. It's New Albany's proud motto.

The “middle class” myth: Here’s why wages are really so low today

Want to understand the failures of the "free market" and the key to getting a decent wage? Here's the real story.

By Edward McClelland (Salon)

Let me tell you the story of an “unskilled” worker in America who lived better than most of today’s college graduates. In the winter of 1965, Rob Stanley graduated from Chicago Vocational High School, on the city’s Far South Side. Pay rent, his father told him, or get out of the house. So Stanley walked over to Interlake Steel, where he was immediately hired to shovel taconite into the blast furnace on the midnight shift. It was the crummiest job in the mill, mindless grunt work, but it paid $2.32 an hour — enough for an apartment and a car. That was enough for Stanley, whose main ambition was playing football with the local sandlot all-stars, the Bonivirs.

Stanley’s wages would be the equivalent of $17.17 today — more than the “Fight For 15” movement is demanding for fast-food workers. Stanley’s job was more difficult, more dangerous and more unpleasant than working the fryer at KFC (the blast furnace could heat up to 2,000 degrees). According to the laws of the free market, though, none of that is supposed to matter. All that is supposed to matter is how many people are capable of doing your job. And anyone with two arms could shovel taconite. It required even less skill than preparing dozens of finger lickin’ good menu items, or keeping straight the orders of 10 customers waiting at the counter. Shovelers didn’t need to speak English. In the early days of the steel industry, the job was often assigned to immigrants off the boat from Poland or Bohemia.

Dwindling middle class, clueless ruling class ... drugs DO begin to make sense.

This link was forwarded to me last week (thanks W) with the comment, "Heroin as an emotional safety net?"

My personal reaction in reading this story is much the same as when seeing others that come across my screen: How does it fit New Albany?

There are similarities, but also differences. Lincoln is located in central Illinois, between Bloomington and Springfield, and equidistant between Chicago and St. Louis. The population is a little over 14,000, and just past the city limits are plenty of crops. New Albany's population is 2.5 times larger, and we're a component of a metropolitan area.

I still like our chances, even if we seem determined to permit an ingrained conservatism (read: innate blind terror) stand in the way of real progress. Almost all that we've achieved during the last decade came because we tried something "new" -- amid epic struggles comparable to the trenches in the Great War -- and yet, even faced with incontrovertible evidence that nothing could happen until the "old" was  rejected and transcended, predictably "old" thinking still mightily resists innovation.

And, given the perennial stranglehold on local political power exercised by one of the two major parties, it is impossible to avoid reaching the conclusion that two major political parties are not ideologically represented in New Albany. DINO-saurs, you know.

But the possibilities are here. Either that, or I'm the one on drugs.

Dwindling Middle Class Has Repercussions For Small Towns, by Kelly McEvers (NPR)

... It turns out that what's happening in Lincoln is happening in so many towns and communities across the country: As we recover from the Great Recession, jobs are coming back. But they are not middle-wage jobs — they are either high-wage jobs or low-wage jobs. The middle class is in serious decline. And that has all kinds of repercussions.