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 as49% 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.”
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