Submitted by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,
Once upon a time, middle class households took home 62 percent of all income in America. Today, that number has dropped to just 43 percent. This is just one of the absolutely astounding statistics that you will read about in this article. Over the years, the middle class in America has been in steady decline. Our incomes have been going down, our net worth has been going down, the quality of our jobs has been going down, and yet the cost of living just keeps going up. As a result of all of these factors, more Americans are living in poverty today than ever before, and dependence on the government has exploded to unprecedented levels.
But of course it doesn’t take a genius to figure any of this out. In fact, politicians of all stripes are saying the exact same thing during this election season…
Bernie Sanders says it is in the midst of “a 40-year decline.” Jeb Bush says it is “shrinking.” Ted Cruz says it is “headed in the wrong direction.” And Hillary Clinton says the “basic bargain” that hard work could move families into the middle class “has eroded.”
Sadly, when we send these politicians to Washington D.C. they just continue on with business as usual. No matter who resides in the White House and no matter who controls Congress, the game remains the same and the middle class just continues to suffer. The following are 22 cold, hard pieces of evidence that show that the middle class in America is dying…
#1 This week we learned that for the first time ever recorded, middle class Americans make up a minority of the population. But back in 1971, 61 percent of all Americans lived in middle class households.
#2 According to the Pew Research Center, the median income of middle class households declined by 4 percent from 2000 to 2014.
#3 The Pew Research Center has also found that median wealth for middle class households dropped by an astounding 28 percent between 2001 and 2013.
#4 In 1970, the middle class took home approximately 62 percent of all income. Today, that number has plummeted to just 43 percent.
#5 There are still 900,000 fewer middle class jobs in America than there were when the last recession began, but our population has gotten significantly larger since that time.
#6 According to the Social Security Administration, 51 percent of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year.
#7 For the poorest 20 percent of all Americans, median household wealth declined from negative 905 dollars in 2000 to negative 6,029 dollars in 2011.
#8 A recent nationwide survey discovered that 48 percent of all U.S. adults under the age of 30 believe that “the American Dream is dead”.
#9 At this point, the U.S. only ranks 19th in the world when it comes to median wealth per adult.
#10 Traditionally, entrepreneurship has been one of the engines that has fueled the growth of the middle class in the United States, but today the level of entrepreneurship in this country is sitting at an all-time low.
#11 If you can believe it, the 20 wealthiest people in this country now have more money than the poorest 152 million Americans combined.
#12 The top 0.1 percent of all American families have about as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent of all American families combined.
#13 If you have no debt and you also have ten dollars in your pocket, that gives you a greater net worth than about 25 percent of all Americans.
#14 The number of Americans that are living in concentrated areas of high poverty has doubled since the year 2000.
#15 An astounding 48.8 percent of all 25-year-old Americans still live at home with their parents.
#16 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 49 percent of all Americans now live in a home that receives money from the government each month, and nearly 47 million Americans are living in poverty right now.
#17 In 2007, about one out of every eight children in America was on food stamps. Today, that number is one out of every five.
#18 According to Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer, the authors of a new book entitled “$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America“, there are 1.5 million “ultrapoor” households in the United States that live on less than two dollars a day. That number has doubled since 1996.
#19 46 million Americans use food banks each year, and lines start forming at some U.S. food banks as early as 6:30 in the morning because people want to get something before the food supplies run out.
#20 The number of homeless children in the U.S. has increased by 60 percent over the past six years.
#21 According to Poverty USA, 1.6 million American children slept in a homeless shelter or some other form of emergency housing last year.
#22 The median net worth of families in the United States was $137, 955 in 2007. Today, it is just $82,756.
That last number really stunned me.
According to Pew Research, the median net worth of U.S. families has fallen by more than $55,000 since 2007.
That sure doesn’t sound like an “economic recovery” to me.
I think that everyone can agree that we have a major problem on our hands.
So what is the solution?
Well, in order to have a healthy middle class, we need to have an economy that produces lots of middle class jobs and lots of thriving small businesses. But in America today, our small businesses are being strangled out of existence by mountains of red tape and excessive taxation, and millions of middle class jobs have been shipped out of the country to other nations where it is legal to pay slave labor wages.
Until we start doing things differently, we are going to continue to get the same results that we have been getting, and the middle class will just keep getting smaller and smaller and smaller.
The middle class is now a minority in this country. How much worse do things have to get before we say that enough is enough? Are we just going to stand on the sidelines and watch the middle class disappear entirely?
At one time, the United States had the most vibrant middle class the world had ever seen. We were the envy of the rest of the planet, and people all over the world wanted to come here and live out “the American Dream”.
Unfortunately, “the American Dream” is now dying, and most Americans don’t seem to care.
What in the world is it going to take for people to finally wake up and start taking action?
If you want to change this you have to change “Free Trade”.
Nothing will change till that does.
But there is neither awareness of the need nor a political will to do this.
So we will keep going the way we are.
Over the next (maybe) 15 or so years it will become irrelevant anyway as robotic workers replace human ones in the majority of jobs that support a middle class.
As Dylan (a noted prophet and philosopher from the ’60’s) once observed “The times, they are a changin’ ……….”.
They call it the American Dream because it’s best experienced when you are asleep.
I was born in the ‘thirties, suffered through WWII, and grew to maturity in the ‘fifties – when America owned the World and the Cold War created tens of thousands of jobs in both Russia and the United States.
The Cold War was genius – cooked up on that US battleship in Yalta by Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill. These three leaders watched the world come out of the Great Depression of the ‘Thirties and move into full-time employment in 1942, as America and The United Kingdom mobilized to fight Japan, Germany and Italy (everyone forgets that Italy fought against America in WWII!)
Everybody was employed all over the World in 1945 as the War ended. But the wisdom of Yalta generated squabbles between the USSR and the Western Allies; lines were set up, conditions made, and for 40 years the World had “peace”. Billions and billions of dollars-worth of tanks, ships, submarines, airplanes and other war material were built and never used in anger. Sixteen million American GI’s came home and took good jobs in Cold War factories. They bought a house for $30,000, got an 8% raise every year, and when that house was paid off in 30 years, the mortgage payment was peanuts because of all those raises. Two cars in every garage, most kids went to college, boys went into the military for 2 years and learned to become men. It was a wonderful time and nobody got killed on either side!
Would that we could get back to that time!
The people demand that corporations pay their “fair share” and what is the result?
Higher corporate taxes and more business regulations. This is a world market and if a corporation is to survive it must adapt, so they do. No more good paying jobs after the demand for more taxes on the other guy to pay for your free shit?
People are stupid enough to believe that by simply demanding government force business to pay a “living wage” problem solved.
Why not reduce corporate taxes to 15%, we’ve learned that Mexico and China can’t produce as well as Americans, shipping and logistics add to the problem. Tax corporations at a flat rate, jobs come back, people get jobs, pay taxes, get off the Tit, America starts producing rather than consuming.
Who the hell am I trying to kid? We are so fucking screwed.
“It’s not just low-income Americans who struggle to pay their rent every month, or find an affordable place to live when they move. New research from Harvard says that even renters with annual incomes of $45,000 face unaffordable rents in many cities, with potentially far-reaching effects.
“It’s moving up the income ladder,” said Chris Herbert, Managing Director of the Joint Center For Housing Studies at Harvard. The group found that roughly half of families who earn between $30,000 and just under $45,000 a year and rent spend more than 30 percent of what they make on rent.”
America is infected with cunning leaches at the top and Useful Idiots at the bottom of the economy that are now sucking the life out of the Middle Class. The Elite are trying to head off a “French” Revolution by reducing the nonElite population with GMOs, vaccines, wars, FEMA Fallout Suicide Shelters, their Natural Disaster nonPreparedness nonWarning misInformation System, Chemtrails that will cause an Ice Age that will kill billions, etc. Either we revolt and bring them down or they will crush the life out of us.
The remnant of the middle class will be mostly Government wage recipients.
Bob Siddell
Interesting post, you are one of few who think they are hastening the coming mini ice age. How do you feel chemtrails will bring on the colder climate? By filtering out sunlight, I’m not sure it’s working very well as the country is very warm this week and they have been using aerosols since the early 1990’s? I don’t disagree with you, just wondering.
Greetings,
How to use Cognitive Dissonance to cause the head of Millennial Maoist to explode?
Answer:
As you know, I live in super liberal California that appears to be inhabited by a fair number of collectivists and SJW’s. These guys are convinced that the wealthy should be taxed at 99% of their income and that corporations should be forced to pay whatever living wage they, the SJW, demand.
My response is to tell them that charity begins at home and that THEY need to immediately start small businesses and pay THEIR workers this “living” wage. After all, any good SJW would want to be out front and leading by example, right?
Here is where the Cognitive Dissonance comes into play. These people are not idiots and know that it is easier to escape from Alcatraz than run a business here. They know that regulation is out of control. They know that taxes are off the charts. They know these things but can’t say a thing because it destroys their argument.
On a side note: This is why our main business in California is FANTASY. We’ve got fantasy unicorn companies that produce nothing and this is by design. After all, how much regulation do you need for a fantasy? Also, you do not need to worry about worker safety because there is nothing physical.
California dreaming on such a winter’s day.
Lust and greed contribute to all downfalls. This materialistic world we inhabit led by leaders that lack virtue, corporations that lack scruples and a sociopathic bureaucracy that promotes only itself. What are we to do? Say a prayer, because it will get very ugly!
The American Dream you are all lamenting the loss of was ALL built on the unsustainable practice of PRINTING OUR WAY TO PROSPERITY. Get it?
Everything from ever increasing welfare, Social Security, perpetual warfare, chemtrail programs and all the inane, asinine bullshit we lament daily on TBP has ONE root cause. Central banking anf their perpetual money machine.
You cannot even begin to contemplate fixing ANYTHING until you fix the ability of private, unelected, unauditable bankers to print our so called wealth out of thin air. Until then, all your efforts will be no better or effective than employing the fox to secure the hen house.
Once that happens you can grab a beer and a lounge chair and marvel at how quickly 99% of what ails us fixes itself.
I was born at the very end of the last Fourth Turning (WWII), grew up through the new First Turning, worked through the Second and Third Turning and retired at the start of the current Fourth Turning . Now, we are 2/3 of the way through the current Fourth Turning and we still have a depression and a war ahead of us before we see the light of a new First turning.
Things will move pretty fast from this point forward as the whole world is fast collapsing into poverty, revolution, religious wars and more and more poverty everywhere you look (right here in the USA as well if you just look for it!)
The only difference between the last 4th Turning and this one is that in this 4th Turning we have the awful power to completely destroy mankind and all we’ve built over the centuries and the civilizations that grew with it. Whether we use this dreadful power or not while in the throws of the next depression and war will determine whether we survive as a civilized specie or end up 50 years from now as as scattered groups of mutated semi-animals, living in pockets of lands still habitable and evolution will take it from there.
If we’re really, really lucky, sanity will out, nuclear energy will morph from nuclear bombs, religious bigotry and extremism will fade from style and coupled with new technology, we’ll carry on after a dangerous drag through the last of this 4th Turning into a new and brighter day.
Considering general human stupidity, egoism and greed, I’d give only a 1 in 4 chance of your great grandchildren living to a ripe old age.
Now I think I’ll have a toddy and think of more pleasant things.
MA
I live in open farmland and see chemtrails almost every day (I was a pilot for awhile and know contrails from chemtrails). I can see them on satellite photos too and some people have posted videos of them. Some is aluminum (proven by soil and air samples) that reflects sunlight energy back into space; some are coal dust (proven by air samples) that might absorb energy or cause rain; some are metals like barium (Dr’s told to cut using the metal for Xrays) that can be heated by HAARP and break up rain clouds. Until a Snowden spills TPTB’s beans or some private research figures it out, we are mushrooms. I believe they want 6 billion of the Goy dead and bringing on an Ice Age would do it.