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Unfortunately, they do.

https://www.gobankingrates.com...

A 3rd of this country's welfare recipients are in California.

That's a nice little unsupported bogus made up statistic you have there. California does spend the most on welfare overall but since they are the state with the largest population (and a high cost of living) that's hardly shocking. Per capita they are high but not wildly out of the norm - with around 4% of the population receiving some sort of assistance. California is among the least federally dependent states in the US.

It has been losing population for the last 20 years

You must be talking about a different California than the one on the west coast of the US. Population growth there has been steadily growing with no sign of that changing any time soon.

living as nomads in a mobile home

You don't mean mobile home; you mean RV .

Translation: Dow Jones matters to you not the majority of Americans.

Did you bother to read your own link: one in three have zero in retirement savings. Let's look at the infographic since your math skills are deficient.

http://cdn.gobankingrates.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/main_overall.jpg

One-third (1/3 or one in three) have zero retirement savings. Two-thirds (2/3 or two in three) have retirement savings that ranges from between $1 to $300K+. Translation: a majority of Americans have retirement savings and those retirement savings are likely invested in the stock market.

You're probably well educated in an in demand field.

When I was a 18-year-old construction worker, I bought 10 shares of General Dynamics for $200 ($20 per share) after reading an article in The Wall Street Journal in the early 1990's. Two years later I made $80 in dividends ($10 per quarter) and $600 in profits when I sold the stock at $800 ($80 per share). I used that money to go to community college and get an A.A. degree in General Education. (BTW, I never went to high school.) A decade later I would go back to community college to get an A.S. degree in computer programming with a 4.0 GPA on a $3,000 tax credit that George W. signed into law after 9/11. Today I'm a virtual ditch digger making $50K per year in Silicon Valley.

It's not surprising why you would be out of touch with reality.

Says the person who can't do fractions.

I am also well educated in an in demand field but I actually keep in touch with reality.

My late father who graduated from the sixth grade and joined the Army in the 1950's could do math better than you. He routinely ran circles around college educated architects when in found mistakes in the blueprints and often astonished them by pulling out the pencil to do the calculations to prove that a wall was out of spec by 1/8th of an inch. In construction, small errors often become expensive errors.

FDIC and NCUA are both Federally-backed insurances and equally safe.

https://www.gobankingrates.com...

Yet various surveys and reports consistently show that more than half of Americans have less then $1000 saved to cover unexpected expenses, let alone leave their job for several months. You are fortunate. Most are not.

Yet various surveys and reports(PDF) consistently show that more than half of Americans have less than $1000 saved to cover unexpected expenses, let alone quitting their job for a few months. You are fortunate. Most are not.

Also a factor but..

http://www.gobankingrates.com/...
But it wasnâ(TM)t until the International Labor Organization held its first conference in Oct. 1919 that âoeHours of Workâ convention established an 8- or 9-hour work day, which constituted a max of 48 hours worked per week.

Just as the work week seemed to settle, the Great Depression hit. In an effort to avoid layoffs, President Herbert Hoover proposed a bill that would reduce the work week to 30 hours. It passed in Senate; however, it didnâ(TM)t make it through the House.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt entered office, he tried to push again for shorter hours, but they were overruled by the U.S. Supreme Court. Instead, the Walsh-Healy Public Contracts Act of 1936 passed, which required the federal government to pay its contractors overtime wages after eight hours of work in a day. And then the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 passed, which established the five-day, 40-hour work week for everyone, a standard we observe today.

a little more here

http://www.bloombergview.com/a...

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Without the great depression we'd have had longer work weeks all along. The exempt status used to be much more limited as well. Very few employees qualified for exempt status. Specific laws were passed to sell computer programmers and engineers down the river and make them exempt even tho they were not management.

Whatever your opinion is about the video, his salary is irrelevant.

Then why did the congressman make it relevant by complaining that he was "struggling?" Here's an idea, I propose that congress take a 7% pay cut and work two more days a year to reflect the reality that average working Americans are really facing i.e. working longer for less. Not to mention the fact that American's net worth is down by 23%

BTW, is that the best we can do in selecting our leaders - by finding dross off from reality TV?