The Middle Class in America Is Radically Shrinking. Here Are the Stats to Prove it

why won't this site let me vote for reader comments?

the trools are deep here. when we "occupy" change things, we'll see whos out of work then.

With all due respects, none of your statistics prove that the middle class is shrinking. They mainly appear to relate to the fact that we recently went through a severe but temporarily financial crisis, and are currently suffering through a hyper-liberal and economically illiterate administration.

(They also relate to the fact that we have a far higher standard of living today, borrow and spend far more than we need to, and don't save as much as we should.)

The truth is that median incomes have doubled since the 50's (the golden era of the manufacturing middle class), and have also risen significantly since the early 80's. More people are doing services jobs, but those jobs include all white-collar jobs, including doctors, lawyers, etc. Service professions overall tend to be higher-paying, not to mention safer, cleaner, and healthier.

Free trade has been generally beneficial -- unemployment dropped sharply in the 90's after NAFTA was signed, and the WTO was expanded. Some overpaid union workers have experienced losses since the expansion of trade, but what is the alternative? A new protectionism that recreates the global depression and global conflict of the 1930's and 1940's? What's amazing is that free trade has managed to lift billions around the world out of poverty without harming our overall standard of living. It is also creating huge markets in India and China for our goods. (Apple products are already very popular in China, and GM did most of their sales in China over the last few years.)

While I agree much opportunity is being "offshored", many of the things that are listed in the bottom of the article are personal financial decisions or a direct result of those decisions. Some of them are based on decisions that were made by those who were voted in by a sick society with screwed up priorities.

For instance: 83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.

I've seen statistics like this used as though it's an injustice but the bottom line is that everybody in the US is afforded the opportunity to invest. The vast majority of people don't want to learn anything about it. They don't want to bother to scrape up the bare minimum to open a brokerage account. They don't want to maintain it. People who don't have a savings account sure as hell aren't going to bother with a brokerage account.

And, the people that could easily invest great sums of money are living well beyond their means. They've been getting into ARM loans and buying cars for 70k and 80k. Foreclosures and bankruptcy happen because people are absolutely asinine with their money. It's an epidemic of financial retardation.

I'm not saying that there aren't problems with the system but it stems from society. People vote based on what is important to them or because they don't educate themselves. But, political complacency is waning. People are waking up and becoming active and they're going to the source - Washington. The problem isn't with Capitalism. It's with politicians (who we voted in) who are in the pockets of big companies.

Where did these statistics come from?? It wasn't reported in the article at all?

I think we need to work to raise the limits on monopoly's in this country as it was is talked about in the constitution that this kind of control was not supposed to be happening we are loosing control of our own country by not enforcing it allowing the money world to take it over this was not suppose to be we need to learn to KEEP IT SIMPLE and NOT ALLOW this to take over by blocking way for the rich and powerful to take over and give the control back to the people this is our CONSTITUTION not the RICH gaining power by being rich stop serving and do it not generalize it do it and the same to the politician stop em
now by putting our foot down and watch out because we know what happened when the South put their foot down by saying we need not go to war but allow a better way of solving problems in a more natural way happening this idea is nice but to slow now for sure GOD HELP US we are starving. I talk to people whom I know have money and they think everything is just fine but you go fight a war for me and I will keep my son out of it so he don't get a busted finger nail so you lower breads can suffer for us .
Johnny t
jleland

IMHO it's really simple:

A) Taxes
B) Regulations
C) Globalization

1) Taxes: The solution thus far has been to create tax loopholes so large that even Warren Buffet complains that his secretary pays more taxes than he. If he's honest enough to admit this, I don't need platitudes about uber rich "job creators". We need to SIMPLIFY the tax code.

2) Regulations: After the Great Depression we put regulations in place to separate investment banking risks from commercial banking (your mortgage, student loans, etc.). In those post-WWII years we prospered massively. President Reagan didn't do as much to loosen these standards as President Clinton and the Bush presidents, and yet many Americans LOVED Reagan (despite the tax hikes & regulations!). We lived for decades this way, each generation doing better than their parents, so clearly regulations alone are not economic killers. Yet that didn't stop Sen. Phil Gramm and friends in the 1990s starting with energy market deregulation, after which we got the Enron debacle (execs BLAMED the deregulatory link). Not to be derailed from the belief that regulation --- those useless things we might compare to lines painted on the road and traffic signals --- we went on to modernize (deregulate) the FINANCIAL INDUSTRY. Years later we have the "Occupy Wall St" movement protesting the inevitable: Human nature is greedy; kids in candy stores with unlimited funds will spend them whether they can actually eat that much candy or not. We like to think as grown-ups we are too smart for that type of miscalculation but we're not. The economic crisis was perpetuated by a lot of brilliant people in high places doing boneheaded (greed-motivated) things in the market. Erecting road signs and hiring some traffic cops is not going to stop the flow of traffic (free trade/commerce) it's going to keep it from being a bumper car anarchy. Get it?

3. Globalization: Globalized trade is all good until you begin to see the parallel between things like single-celled Amoebas and polygamous marriage. While it works, it works very, very well. When every international economy is literally codependent upon one another it becomes a 3-leg sack race. The solution is not to limit trade to but to limit the idea that CONSOLIDATION (market concentration) is legitimate free trade. Free trade should mean "more cells in the economic body". Instead globalization has made it more and more difficult to be a small contributor. This is a problem because it is small business that creates the most jobs and most competition. If you are pro free market than you should be for more SMALL BUSINESS and fewer international giants. Yes, you can have "too big to fail". International economies of obese couch potatoes who crush everyone under their weight do not yield prosperous consumers (middle class). To believe in limited government is also to believe in limited international corporate dominance. Concentrating just a few massive players in each industry is a recipe for rising prices because there are too few viable competitors to hold prices down. If you want your own standard of living and that of your children to go up, support discrete economies that are not so heavily invested in some other nation that when one goes belly up they all fall like dominoes (like Iceland, Greece, etc.). We are still teetering precariously after the "Great Recession" precisely because the chain of dominoes stretches all the way around the world. American style deregulated and fractional reserve banking was not so heavily embraced in Canada and Brazil and they are virtually unscathed by comparison.

Get the DVD "Inside Job". It will turn the lights on if it's not already obvious. Meanwhile, turn OFF the TV and radio propagandists who are pushing the line that still more deregulation will jump-start the economy: It's a complete lie. Our world economies were imperiled precisely because we erased the lines on the roads of commerce and ripped out all the traffic lights.

Who is at fault: What about everyone paying their fair share of taxes. Eliminating loopholes, getting rich of Bush tax cades and providing incentives to small corporation, getting rid of a no action congress in behalf of those in need and middle class by suporting the Obama job plan which the majority of citizens support. Ending the Iraq and Afghanistan war, cutting incentives to oil companies and regulating speculation on gas prices which actually have increase without any major reason for the price increases. Regulating Wall street and taxing hedge funds managers and stock owners at s bigger rate than th a 15% capital tax rate. Why cann't congress approve tax cuts on SS which would put 15hundred $ in the pocket of consumers, and corporations. Invest in the infrastructure of the country and provide funfds to the states so that teachers, firemen snd other government emplorees get the pink clipps. The Bush tax cuts did not provide sf of today jobs, why keep them. Tax the rich as some articles recently pointed that the larger the inequalities on wealth distribution leads to economic decline. Those over 15million unemployed better get more sction in expresing their frustration because a congress with a 13% approval rate clearly demostrate that their interest are not the same as the 87% of those polled.

The article says, "Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, but now that is changing at a blinding pace."
What he fails to mention is when that "once upon a time" was. As in, the 1960's, before Johnson's Great Society kicked in with welfare and before most of the federal agencies were created which greatly multiplied the percentage of population employed by the government( which the rest of the shrinking private sector is supposed to support). Time for some downsizing in the government to match what's happened in the rest of the economy!

Problem # 1 from above: In the United States, the average federal worker now earns 60% MORE than the average worker in the private sector.

More reasons to cut more fat out of the federal budget! Who wants to work for the Federal Government? Is the Post Office or DMV hiring??? no thanks