Our guest blogger is Amanda Logan, a Research Associate at the Center for American Progress.

On Meet the Bloggers on Friday, I – along with Isaiah Poole, host Cenk Uygur, and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) – discussed the fact many Americans are hurting while only a small few continue to prosper. As CAP Senior Fellow Scott Lilly explained in his recent paper on “Bushenomics,” the Bush administration has overseen a period in which the overall U.S. economy grew by 18 percent, highly driven by a 19 percent increase in the hourly productivity of workers, while the average income for America’s middle class families has actually declined by 2 percent.

Meanwhile, this administration didn’t exactly support the increase in the minimum wage, has opposed the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit and increasing the opportunities for workers to unionize, chiefly by coming out against the Employee Free Choice Act, all while implementing very regressive tax cuts that have allotted 30 percent of the cuts to the top one percent earners in the nation.

It seems like the some members of the media and law makers are at least beginning to get a sense of the severity of the situation that many middle-income Americans, let alone lower-income Americans, have been experiencing for quite some time. Numbers don’t lie, and recent economic data across the board have highlighted everything from the weakening labor market and stagnant wages, to lackluster GDP growth, to sharp increases in the cost of necessities, to lower consumer spending, which is very important to note given that the current business cycle has largely been driven by consumer spending. Read more

Our guest blogger is James Kvaal, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

After eight years of economic mistakes, unemployment and inflation are both rising and American families are hurting. By one measure – the “Misery Index” made famous by Jimmy Carter – the economy is in its worst shape since mid-1991.

The Misery Index is simply the combination of the unemployment rate and the inflation rate. It reached 11.3 percent in July. While still well below its heights in the 1970s and early 1980s, the Misery Index is now at its highest level since the first George Bush was president according to data from www.miseryindex.us.

The Misery Index was designed by Carter advisor Arthur Okun, who noted that inflation and unemployment figures often point in opposite directions and therefore neither gives a broad picture of the economy. The index climbs during periods of stagflation, which combine stagnant economic growth, high unemployment, and high inflation.

Stagflation puts Fed policymakers in a box. Cutting interest rates to spark the economy could make inflation even worse, while raising rates to fight inflation could worsen the downturn. Meanwhile, families are feeling the bite of hard times.