The Vanishing Middle Class

The American myth is that anyone who works hard can become rich. That has never been true. But it is true, or at least used to be true, that this country can offer the opportunity to many to move up from poverty or a working-class existence to a comfortable middle-class position in society -- and that upward mobility to the middle-class has always been the real strength of the United States.

And the idea has been that once a family has moved into the middle-class the children will build on that and do even better than the parents did. That is the dream of every parent -- that their children will have an easier and more successful life than they did. Well, I have some bad news -- and some even worse news.

The bad news is that a substantial chunk of the middle-class is no longer middle class. For the purpose of this discussion, the middle-class is defined as those people with an income that falls between the 30th and 70th percentile of income distribution in this country. For a family of four that would be an income between $32,900 and $64,000 (in 2010 dollars).

A new report of a survey done by the Pew Charitable Trust says that, "A middle-class upbringing does not guarantee the same status over the course of a lifetime." The study focused on middle-class people that were teenagers in 1979 (and were between 39 and 44 years-old in 2004-2006). The survey had a rather shocking outcome. It found that about a third of those people are no longer in the middle-class -- they have dropped below the 30th percentile of income.

And now for the worse news. That is what happened between 1979 and 2006 -- before the Bush recession hit America. Since then there has been a mass unemployment of American workers. About 16.6 million Americans are unemployed and another 8.7 million can find only part-time work, and many of those were people who were in the middle-class -- but they no longer are. And with the price of everything except labor going up, even many of those with jobs find themselves trying to desperately cling to their middle-class existence.

The Republican "trickle-down" economics was already causing families and individuals to drop out of the middle-class through stagnant wages, job outsourcing, and the rising costs of education, medical care & nearly everything else -- while the record incomes of the richest Americans push up the median percentile income. Then when this deeply-flawed economic system caused the continuing recession (costing millions of jobs), millions more were tossed out of the middle-class.

The Republican economic system has been a killer for the middle-class, and that class is now rapidly disappearing in the United States. With every passing day this country is looking more like a third-world country, where there are only two classes -- the rich and the poor (whether working or not).

It is time to make the cartoon above true. It is time to fight back. The rich will call it class warfare. I call it self-defense.