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The term "middle class" may be the most popular two words in this year's presidential campaign. President Obama and Mitt Romney use it repeatedly in their campaign appearances including the acceptance speeches at their party's national convention. So do their wives and advisors. All are appealing to the middle class to get their vote, and it's easy to see why.

The middle class is the single biggest voting block in this country, but its size has been shrinking.

A recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that those in the "middle-income tier [of income]" account for 61 percent of adults in the U.S. in 1971 but only 51 percent today, and their share of the American income economic pie declined from 62 percent a decade ago to 45 percent today.

The decline of the middle is the focus of a new book by Donald Barlett and James Steele, "The Betrayal of the American Dream," which found that policymakers in in both political parties and business leaders

Editor's note: This column originally appeared on Business Insider

Consumers around the world rejoice:

Free-market capitalism is working the way it's supposed to.

For the past five years, one company, Apple (AAPL), has been making positively colossal profits on smartphones and tablets, while pretty much every other company in the industry struggles or goes bust.

That's not the way it's supposed to work.

The way it's supposed to work is that tough competition keeps outsize profits in check: Competitors drool at the amount of money the market leader is making, invest heavily to catch up, and then sell the resulting products for lower prices than the leader. And, in so doing, they siphon off some profits and keep the market leader's growth (and consumer prices) in check.

For the last five years, however, Apple has done something that heretofore has been extraordinarily hard to do in the hardware industry: Built a near-monopoly on industry profits in smartphones and tablets.

Apple has done

Next Wednesday, Apple (AAPL) is slated to unveil the iPhone 5 -- the latest in a series of magical devices that have captured the world's imagination. Given its incredible success with consumers and phenomenal stock price gains, Apple has come to symbolize the best of American ingenuity, technology and innovation.

But Apple actually represents the worst of American business, according to award-winning journalists Donald Barlett and James Steele.

In their latest book, The Betrayal of the American Dream, Barlett and Steele cite Apple as a prime example of an American outsourcer.

Apple products are still conceived and designed in the U.S. but the company "very quickly" made the decision to manufacture its goods in other countries, Steele observes. "That manufacturing base, the heart of so much American middle class is very quickly yanked out."

In the 1990s, Apple products were produced at plants in Elk Grove, Calif. and Fountain, Colo. In the Colorado Springs area, Bartlett and Steele

The U.S. economy added 96,000 jobs in August, far below the consensus of 130,000 and miles off the "whisper" number of 200,000. In addition, July's tally was revised down to 141,000 from 163,000.

The unemployment rate unexpectedly fell to 8.1% from 8.3% and the "real" unemployment rate (U6) fell to 14.7% from 15%, figures the White House will likely highlight as signs the president's policies are working.

But the unemployment rate came down for the "wrong" reason -- a sharp drop in the size of the labor force. The labor participation rate fell to 65.3%, its lowest level since September 1981.

Let's take a look at today's report from three different angles: political, economic and market.

After the Dems Party, a Jobs 'Hangover'

Friday's jobs report will give fodder to both sides of the political debate. As noted above, the White House is likely to tout the decline in the unemployment rate and the fact that August is the 30th month of consecutive private sector job gains.

"While there is

There was a reason that former President Bill Clinton spoke last night at the Democratic Convention instead of introducing President Obama tonight, Yahoo! News political columnist Jeff Greenfield says.

Clinton's speaking skills are so prodigious that he might have upstaged the president.

And in his 50-minute speech last night, Clinton certainly reminded the country why he was elected President twice in the 1990s.

Embellishing heavily on his prepared remarks, Clinton made the speech the Democrats have been waiting for someone to make, Greenfield says -- a speech that the Democrats needed to make.

Clinton went into deep detail on many policy issues, rebutting most of the Republican attacks against Obama as he went. But unlike many policy wonks, he did so in a way that remained accessible to ordinary Americans.

He poked at Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan without hauling off and trashing them, the way some other Democratic speakers have. In one of the biggest applause lines, Clinton

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Almost three years after Europe started to experience a credit crisis that threatened to unravel its monetary union, the European Central Bank today announced a program that has the potential to turn things around. Its president, Mario Draghi, said the central bank would begin an open-ended sovereign bond purchasing program to help those countries still in crisis, like Spain and Italy.

Jacob Kirkegaard of the Peterson Institute for International Economics says the plan is not a band-aid and "really does have the potential to be a game changer."

Here's how it will work: The ECB will buy unlimited government bonds so long as that euro zone government complies with an economic reform program approved by the euro zone leaders. The ECB, in turn, will offset those purchases by taking an equal amount of money out of circulation, keeping its mandate to maintain stable prices.

The ECB announced the program after the European Union said euro zone GDP fell

U.S. employers laid off 32,239 workers last month, the fewest number of job cuts since December 2010, according to a new report by outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Job cuts have now declined for three consecutive months, but it may be too soon to declare a trend in the labor market, says John Challenger, CEO of Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

"Often layoffs slow down during the summer," Challenger says in an interview with The Daily Ticker. "We did see heavy layoffs in Europe last month...it may be a hint that some conditions could wash ashore. But this is good news no matter how you cut."

Challenger says the three-month decline could either be evidence of an improving job market or a slowdown in activity. The majority of job cuts come in the last quarter of the year, he notes, and the "light" number of layoffs show that CEOs are "standing pat" about hiring until after the outcome of the presidential election. Employers have announced more than 353,000 job cuts since the

From now until Nov. 6, voters will be hearing a lot about the economy. President Barack Obama will be defending his economic record over the last four years. Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney will be touting his proposals to revive the economy. But how much control do presidents really have over the economy? A president's economic record could be tarnished the moment he (or she) moves into the White House and one's economic legacy could be a factor of well…luck.

"People radically overstate how much credit any president deserves for the overall economy…and how much blame they get for things [that] go wrong," says Barry Ritholtz, author of "The Big Picture" blog, in an interview with The Daily Ticker's Aaron Task.

According to Ritholtz, a president's economic record largely depends on what the economic climate was when the president started governing. Former presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton — each heralded for leading a strong economy during their respective terms —