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America Crosses The Tipping Point: The Middle Class Is Now A Minority
Americans have long lived in a nation made up primarily of middle-class families, neither rich nor poor, but comfortable enough, notes NPR's Marilyn Geewax, but this year - for the first time in US history, that changed. A new analysis of government data shows that as of 2015, middle-income households have become the minority, extending a multi-decade decline that confirms the hollowing out of society as 49% of all Americans now live in a home that receives money from the government each month. Sadly, the trends that are destroying the middle class in America just continue to accelerate.
Back in 1971, about 2 out of 3 Americans lived in middle-income households. Since then, the middle has been steadily shrinking.
Today, just a shade under half of all households (about 49.9 percent) have middle incomes. Slightly more than half of Americans (about 50.1 percent) either live in a lower-class household (roughly 29 percent) or an upper-class household (about 21 percent).
As NPR explains, thanks to factory closings and other economic factors, the country now has 120.8 million adults living in middle-income households, the study found. That compares with the 121.3 million who are living in either upper- or lower-income households.
"The hollowing of the middle has proceeded steadily for the past four decades," Pew concluded.
And middle-income Americans not only have shrunk as a share of the population but have fallen further behind financially, with their median income down 4 percent compared with the year 2000, Pew said.
Since 1970, the U.S. economy has been growing, and we all have been getting wealthier. But people who have the biggest incomes have been pulling away from the pack in a trend that shows no sign of slowing... as middle-income jobs are still 900,000 short of pre-recession employment levels...
And if you’re a millennial, you’d be forgiven for being disillusioned with the American dream. As we recently noted, compared to young Americans in 1986, you’re three times as likely to think the American dream is dead and buried. As WaPo notes, "young workers today are significantly more pessimistic about the possibility of success in America than their counterparts were in 1986, according to a new Fusion 2016 Issues poll - a shift that appears to reflect lingering damage from the Great Recession and more than a decade of wage stagnation for typical workers.”
While there are numerous reasons for the collapse of the American Middle Class (most appear driven by political 'fairness' or monetary policy intended consequences), though we suspect politicians learned long ago that it's easier to just import non-Americanized voters to vote for you, than, as FutureMoneyTrends notes, to get naturalized citizens who still cherish the idea of America to vote for things like national healthcare systems, higher taxes on business owners, and the catering to every little tribal group that declares themselves a minority.
It is only a matter of time before the middle class is wiped out and America begins to resemble the poverty, violence and tyranny so often associated with the countries from which many illegal migrants originate.
It appears that time is drawing near as Charles Hugh-Smith recently noted, the mainstream is finally waking up to the future of the American Dream: downward mobility for all but the top 10% of households.
Downward mobility and social defeat lead to social depression. Here are the conditions that characterize social depression:
1. High expectations of endless rising prosperity have been instilled in generations of citizens as a birthright.
2. Part-time and unemployed people are marginalized, not just financially but socially.
3. Widening income/wealth disparity as those in the top 10% pull away from the shrinking middle class.
4. A systemic decline in social/economic mobility as it becomes increasingly difficult to move from dependence on the state (welfare) or one's parents to financial independence.
5. A widening disconnect between higher education and employment: a college/university degree no longer guarantees a stable, good-paying job.
6. A failure in the Status Quo institutions and mainstream media to recognize social recession as a reality.
7. A systemic failure of imagination within state and private-sector institutions on how to address social recession issues.
8. The abandonment of middle class aspirations by the generations ensnared by the social recession: young people no longer aspire to (or cannot afford) consumerist status symbols such as luxury autos or homeownership.
9. A generational abandonment of marriage, families and independent households as these are no longer affordable to those with part-time or unstable employment, i.e. what I have termed (following Jeremy Rifkin) the end of work.
10. A loss of hope in the young generations as a result of the above conditions.
If you don't think these apply, please check back in a year. We'll have a firmer grasp of social depression in December 2016.
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Welcome to the bottom tier.
My current projections are I'll be exiting the middle class on the downside within 2 years if current trends continue.
" Chaaaaaaaaaaaaaaange you can beleeeeve in! "
Everything is Awesome
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Your chart is likely closer to the truth. I am not sure a large number of "Middle Class" would really be considered part of the middle class. Most of them just have more debt than they poor (better access to credit and a better paying job).. If wages are adjusted to subtract debt servicing costs, and the cost of living (ie need a car, live in a more expensive neighbor to be closer to work). Are they really better off than the poor?
My guess is that only about 20% or less of americans have the same wage/living standards as the middle class of the early 1970s. In prior to the late 1970s most middle class families were supported by a single income and had more disposable income.
mission accpomplished: The fudgepacker done hosed the middle class good... and probably many of them sheeple voted twice for the divisive despicable illegal indonesian kenyan alien muslim pathologic lying sociopath.... the turd needs to have its skin sandpapered off, buried in salt and then thrown out in the middle of a syrian desert with a can of Pennzoil for destroying America and the good it used to stand for.
America fell for it. Evil is seductive. It doesnt come at you with horns or Darth Vader garb or breathing fire. Barack Insane Obama is evil. The supposed good intentions, the hope and reasonable benevolence of his shtick are the tell that disneyfied media soaked americans miss.
I wonder how many of these now Borke Donkeys voted for Sotero?
"The supposed good intentions "
The wealth of the middle class is being re-distributed -'spread around'.
Police asset forfeiture hold-ups, municipal emminent domain real estate thefts, affirmative action educational and work-place opportunity disenfranchisments, nirp/zirp financial oppression, etc..
.GOV bureaucrats even resort to outright fabrications to steal from legitimate businesses:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-consumer-bureau-cover-up-1449707193
"Congressman David Scott recently lambasted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for its “deceitful” auto-loan regulation based on “shamefully flawed” information. Now it looks like the Georgia Democrat was being kind.
The Republican staff of the House Financial Services Committee has released a trove of documents showing that bureau officials knew their information was flawed and even deliberated on ways to prevent people outside the bureau from learning how flawed it was.
The bureau has been guessing the race and ethnicity of car-loan borrowers based on their last names and addresses—and then suing banks whenever it looks like the people the government guesses are white seem to be getting a better deal than the people it guesses are minorities. This largely fact-free prosecutorial method is the reason a bipartisan House supermajority recently voted to roll back the bureau’s auto-loan rules.
. . .
A draft version of the memo also noted that if the bureau never publicly released the details of how it was guessing the race of borrowers, “our internal methodological deliberations will not be discoverable.” In other words, the law-abiding taxpayers getting sued by the bureau would not be able to learn how bogus its discrimination claims were. A draft memo also noted that a “methods announcement” would “endanger” the work of the bureau in part “by providing fodder to defendants to show how our methods are inferior to other proprietary proxies.”
Unable to sustain its non-transparency policy, the bureau eventually released some information on its guessing methodology, and outsiders have been poking holes in it ever since. The Wall Street Journal recently recreated the algorithm used by the bureau to do its guesswork and tested it with some well-known politicos. The algorithm didn’t know what to make of such last names as “Kasich” and “ Obama.”
That didn’t stop the bureau from branding car dealers as racists. A November 19, 2014 memorandum from bureau staff to Mr. Cordray requested authorization for a case against Honda’s American finance company and other defendants.
Mr. Cordray approved the request even though the memo explained what happened when a lender applied the bureau’s methodology to a set of mortgage borrowers whose race and ethnicity were already known. It turned out that “only 54% of the applicants identified by the proxy methodology as African-American were actually African-American,” according to the memo. Good enough for government work? Remember, this fraud was used not only to smear the reputations of law-abiding businesses but also to seek hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements.
The bureau, which had been stonewalling information requests from the House, initially reacted to this document disclosure by saying it wasn’t able to verify their authenticity. A week later the bureau was still giving us the same story, without producing any evidence to suggest the documents aren’t legitimate. The bureau is doing further damage to its credibility—if it had any left.
What we can’t figure out is why, after the yeoman work of Jeb Hensarling’s House Financial Services Committee in exposing this outrage—and an overwhelming bipartisan vote on the House floor—Senators still don’t seem in any hurry to act. Banking Committee legislators on either side of the aisle aren’t making this a priority.
This illegal guessing game of name-that-race underscores how much antidiscrimination law has become a political shakedown, and how the consumer bureau is a lawless body that needs to be reined in if it can’t be eliminated. "
The problem started before O---mainly because of WClinton---but O made it worse. Bush's outlandish spending on unprovoked wars and establishment of a Hitlerite foreigh police stopped domestic spending on infrastructure need to aid the domestic economy. HClinton will really put US in the toilet and push the handle.
with a bow-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXhZyAOuyhE
Clearly, I'm going to have to apply for some Faaarrreee! shit and get this thing accelerated!
I thought the same thing, but as I've discovered trying to help my brother get any benefits he can, the free shit is not for us and if you have a work history and have paid taxes in the past 5 years, you won't qualify for anything. The system is rigged for and by people to ensure only those that are completely committed to the idea poverty get free shit.
So much for recovering some of my tax dollars.
True story. Wife works at a health center in a rough section of Boston. A black employee that worked for the place for 20 years had a legitimate disease that was robbing him of his sight. They spent a year trying to get him qualified for disability benefits. Apparently the neighborhood community organizers only know how to file bogus disability benefit claims but don't know how to file legitimate ones. If you had a steady job, the free shit army has complete disdain for you.
Welcome to the reality of Socialism. As government power is increased through regulation, the reality is that the power that is given to government for the sake of "protecting the middle class" is instead used to pacify and oppress the middle class. The bigger the government, the more the majority is oppressed by the minority.
Forward USSA
" We minoritized some folks. "
"IF you like your Middle Class you can keep your Middle Class."
If you like your recovery...
The graphs should break out the private-sector middle class from the public-sector middle class. As government has grown I suspect that the number of middle-class public employees has grown over those same years. My opinion is that the private-sector middle class is the group that has been "hollowed out" to nourish the public employees and the rich who suck on the government teat.
You are correct. My gubmint friends are actually doing quite well. Barry gave them 4-6% wage hikes each year since he got in office. One even bought a Hummer recently!
...and can't be fired. Pretty sweet spot for them.
and they can retire at 60.
Shit, 60 is old for a government retiree. Try early to mid 50's.
If they work in a peace officer capacity or jail guard in states like NY, try mid 40s on a 50% pension (2% pension for each year of service) unless they can get a tax free 75% disability pension.
It's become like China where many of the best and brightest fight to get a gubmint job instead of going into business in the private sector. They say it's like gold to work for the PRC gubmint there since you become unimaginably rich [with Loot] and seldom even have to work!
The Nobel Peace Prize winner has a stellar Legacy -- Busting the [formerly] strongest middle class in the world.
Exactly true. Anyone who think this isn't part of The Plan is either not paying attention or a useful idiot. The more people who are dependent clients (or just plain damaged goods), the more power Goverment has. Government is needed least by people who are free, prosperous and capable of independent thought.
Its the Corporate State.
Hmmmm, interesting. What happened in August of 1971? There lies your answer you NPR tools.
The time period around 1970 also saw the advent of quality Japanese electronics. Not many years later Japanese cars became more than tin heaps of junk, while American car manufacturers built cars of ever lower quality. Closing the gold window was more a symptom than a cause of America's beginning its downhill slide. It also didn't help that, by 1970, America had been in the grips of progressivist public (mis)education for several generations. What started with just a few snowflakes has developed into a huge snowball rolling downhill. Hitting a tree is inevitable, the question is when.
Note from the Fed: Mission Accomplished!
Ha I had to Google median income. 51k. So they define middle as 34 to 102. Try that on in the NE or left coast. Real middle is more like 70 to 200 in those areas.
In Massachusetts anything under $100k puts you in a town filled with hispanics. Fucking Lowell has a median price above $200k for a home and it looks like you were flown straight to any number of third world countries.
Go to the DMV sometime and play count the white people. If you count higher than six, go buy a lottery ticket because you witnessed a miracle.
I would say middle class eastern Massachusetts is $150k/yr min to about $275k/yr. That means you can live in a decent house which costs $450k in a decent town and drive cars that are less than 5 years old. A teacher married to a firefighter will be in that neighborhood. Middle aged, college educated couples too.
The three firefighters I know live in houses >$800k and look forward to a retirment package that would make you blush.
They "work" like 3 days a week as fire fighters, playing volleyball, having cookouts and going grocery shopping in their fire trucks. Then they form little side businesses with each other building decks, doing roofing, and house painting. Mostly cash under the table.
Good for em.
Anyone can buy a nice house in Detroit for $25,000.
51K annually and you live large.
51K in Detroit?
Even the Firefighters in Detroit are gettting no where near that.
FFS the departments in many districts are volunteer and the equipment looks like it was discarded by departments in neighboring suburbs...
As a matter of fact some old and very used equipment is donated from across the country. Our family salutes the Detroit firefighters! I wish we could do lots better for you.
Uh, it's called the great financialization and the Wall Street bankrupt IPO game.
A certain segment got richer than they ever had before, and the rest of us got inflated out of the middle class lifestyle.
In 1985 middle class meant two full size cars, at least one from a German company, a four bedroom house in a great neighborhood, a country club membership, Disney World type vacations every year, and free time for hobbies. All attainable with an easy to get job. It was easier to find a $50k a year job in 1985 than it is today.
Today you are lucky to be able to afford a home in a half ghetto town and drive a new Honda Civic. Forget about vacation and your free time is taking your kid to Best Buy for an hour. If you still have a country club, the only members are people you'll never see at the company you work at.
Middle Class today is what lower class used to be.
And accellerate it will. I see it every day. Obamacare was the death nell for many families. Other factors like stagnant wages and constant regulations (that jack up prices for everything) also play a huge role.
Obamacare is going to reach a death cross sooner rather than later which is why the Dems are really trying to "postpone" the Cadillac tax now. The cost of a plan with high deductables is rising and although the tax penalty is rising it will soon be more economical to not sign up, pay the tax, and just pay out of pocket which would be the same as if you had a high deductable. When you add the Cadillac tax on top, it is a no brainer to not have insurance.
Raises hand. Not in the Middle Class anymore.
Girl from China has full time with benefits, I've got 29 hours per week no bennies.
the dream, middle class.
.
the entire context always
blows my mind.
Hey King O said he was going to fundamentally change the United States.
People voted for him.
Twice.
One man cannot do this. Legally speaking he needs the Senate and the Reps to agree. But more importantly, as soon as they get into the WH, there are advisors, agencies, etc telling them what to do. According to Bush I, Bush II was mislead into the Iraq War. Powell too, he quit politics altogether after he realised he had been deceived by advisors.
I believe O had good intentions but they just don't have enough power. It's all very well to command the biggest and most expensive forces, but that doesn't change or improve anything for the American people.
Eliminating the middle class means that the system can do undisturbed what they want. The poor are too busy keeping head abopove water, the rich just occupy their time with getting richer. The middle class is a nuisance, they just make suggestions for change, and change is not what Washington wants.
I believe O had good intentions but they just don't have enough power
My God, you are sooooo naive.
O's intention was to be a whore for wall street.
Winning... One EBT card at a time.
Was in checkout line at a small convenience store, 5 people ahead. 4 used EBT and 1 Debit and 1 (myself) cash.
I notice this middle class destruction artcle is on the MSN web site but NOT on Yahoo or HuffPo. Not even mentioned on NPR.
That's odd.
*crosses fingers hoping we can make it through a whole thread without the usual spammers shitting on the conversation*
We are National Socialists. National Socialism depends on a race war to survive. With the Nazi's it was the Jews. With Obama bin Laden and the Progressives it is the White Race. They have had it easy to date because most white people do not realize they are in a war.
Many are in fact realizing it now.
Another aspect of National Socialism is the fact that it also produces a Counter-Revolution (See the works of Arno J. Mayer; Revolution and Counter Revolution).
This counter revolution is just beginning and will take on the violence of those in the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution. Do not pity any of those who have gamed the system, or gotten rich from being in the right crony crowd nor any of the permanent welfare class because they have no qualms about the destruction of Capitalism and our Republican form of Government.
Sorry, but that chart actually shows Americans getting wealthier as the upper class is growing the fastest.
On top of markets being rigged we have too much of that Chinese Citiizen's Score model functioning in the US, it's like a digital caste system where the algorithms, say "access denied".
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2015/10/citizen-score-in-china-huge-warning-for.html
So when you are "scored" into invisible corners where you can't get out, with no jobs, this is what we get.
Under the Obamanation 99% of the population is below average.
Nothing funnier than a rich man with a problem money can't solve...
Millenials wouldn't know the American Dream if it hit them in the face. They think that if you make it through college, the hard part is done.
I recall an op-ed here in Miami last year, when a Cuban immigrant wrote that she'd been here for 8 months, and not found meaningful work. "The American Dream is dead!" she said. 8 months . . . . It also reminds me of the 25 year old college grad at Occupy Wall Street who declared the same thing. 25, and with a college degree. He's not found work of his choosing, and the dream is dead. . . .
The problem is that we've raised the richest generation in the history of the world. And, their riches have had nothing whatsoever to do with their own efforts. No wonder they think the Dream is dead. They were born in heaven.
... and what's strange is how some of these Asians land on the beach with almost no money speaking almost no english ... an din 10 years own their own business and have a nice place to live. Ex: The Vietnamese guy down the street came here 16 years ago barely speaking the language and flat broke.
Now he's a dentist doing quite well and speaks excellent english although with an accent.
Lots of it has to do with something Americans forgot:
Work Ethic.
You hit it.
And another thing, “foreigners” will do without consumer goods. And stack the family in the house.
Old-stock Americans seem to hate each other and pop pills for tolerance.
Shrugging shoulders.
An apologist for the Corporate (fascist) State.
Americans have been voting for middle class destruction more and more for years now......The gimme voter, is not interested in his fellow countrymans welfare, he is only interested in his own welfare check from the government.....And just like the misery and increasing poverty, and lawlesness you see in countries that voted for a marxist gimme politician, you see the same effects occurring in America.......
You have to be careful......If you wish for a banana republic, you may get it.......
More bread and circuses!
Anyone can buy the dip, the question is who will have cash left after the cards fall? A surprisingly small number, less than 10%.
Nothing to see here, just capitalism at work. You all like to blame the government, if only we had a different president, yeah right. Nobody forced the companies to outsource jobs, automate jobs, or hire illegal aliens, they wanted to. Nobody forced Countrywide to make bad loans or Moody's to fudge the ratings or the banks to put deposits into derivatives. Nobody forced companies to do buybacks and M&A instead of hiring and growth. At the end of the day, corporations would like nothing better than to buy up their competition, jack up their prices, lower their wages, and force the employee to shop at the company store. Corporations exist to maximize short term profit to the shareholders, that's it. They care nothing of your quaint ideas about "the middle class."
"Nobody forced the companies to outsource jobs, automate jobs, or hire illegal aliens, they wanted to...."
The banksters and corporations bought the Democratic party to allow or encourage such things.
And the progressive "opposition" went right along with the program as did conservatives and Republicans.
No news here deekras (dears). We all know that USA is on the way down and has been since the early 90s if not earlier. My husband and I both thought so after our first two years there. And each year after that we saw more and more decline, unstoppable, until we decided to wake up and leave.
BTW, India is full of former USA residents, Indian-Americanos, and others who thought the same thing that we did - that is to GET THE HELL OUT while it was still possible. There is a big u-turn of Indians in USA who see to go back to India, more than ever before seen in history.
Yes, living standards in USA are falling for most and this will not end regardless of who is president, either Comrade Sanders or Fuehrer Trump. (And honestly, that is the choice that Americanos will have to make next year I believe.)
There is no middle class. When a household income of $20k a year (before taxes) is considered middle class all of these graphs and stats should be ignored. A family of 4 in Chicago needs $8k-10K (after tax) to be able to pay its mortgage every month, health insurance, one old and one new car, min of 2 weeks vacation a year. This is middle class. According to the NBLS $26k for a family in Chicago area is considered middle class...
https://enronnext101.wordpress.com/
Three Truths
r
And Europe has even not woken up to see the one to one problem.
I have always contended the further you are away from struggle, the less you grasp what it takes to succeed.
Take my grandparents (I am 65). They came to this country for opportunity as Germany offered none. They spoke no English but worked hard and bore three children, only to have to endure a depression while raising them. Then they had to send their only son (my father) to the Pacific to fight a war. He struggled to survive and came back to build a middle class family understanding how hard you need to work to get there.
My generation (the boomers) had it pretty much handed to us. We then handed too much of it to our kids without struggle and now our grandkids think it's beneath them to have to work at Mc Donalds. The bankers were there to subsidize our gifting with cheap money. We gladly took it and enslaved ourselves and our future generations with debt in exchange for the gift of a struggle free life.
We are three generations away from REAL struggle. No wonder my grandkids think it's a tough life when you have no WiFi.
That's all about to change. Major reset coming. We're all about to relearn what 90% of the world never forgot, struggling to survive.
< Your income / wealth is determined MOSTLY by the choices you make in life.
< Someone else decides your ecomonic fate - the choices you make really DON'T MATTER all that much.
Most problems are caused by government trying to control every part of the economy - really every part of our lives.
Name 10 things that the government has no control over?
How about 5?
Hard to do isn't it? That should be a clue or a hint about how much freedom we really have.
The solutions offered by government to solve the problems created by government will always be - we need more government control.
Sad but I bet if you ask - 75% of the American people they would say the government should DO SOMETHING about every problem you can name.
Should the government do something to solve the ______________ problem? 75% yes, 20% no, 5% I don't know