Do we need any more evidence before we will finally admit that the middle class in America is being systematically destroyed? As you will see below, when you add together all of the wealth of the poorest 152 million Americans, it still falls short of the combined net worth of the 20 wealthiest Americans. This is a list that includes Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg.
To many, the core of the problem is that people like Gates and Buffett are making too much money. But I disagree. There is nothing wrong with working hard, building a company and making lots of money. The real problem is the fact that the bottom half of the country is steadily getting poorer. Once upon a time, this nation had the healthiest and most vibrant middle class in the history of the world, but now that middle class is dying. If we don’t do something about this, soon we may not have much of a middle class left.
When I was growing up in the 1980s, it seemed like virtually everyone was middle class. I didn’t know of any family that had a father that was unemployed, everyone seemed to have a house and a couple of cars, and no kid that I went to school with could have been described as “impoverished”. Yes, life was definitely not perfect, but it seemed to me that pretty much everyone was able to maintain a decent standard of living.
Sadly, things have dramatically changed since then. Yes, the wealthy have gotten wealthier, but at the same time the ranks of the impoverished have absolutely exploded. At this point, 20 extremely wealthy individuals have more money than the poorest 152 million Americans combined…
The richest 20 Americans, with a combined net worth of $732billion, are as wealthy as half of the U.S. population, according to a new study.
Findings showed that the country’s 20 wealthiest people, which includes Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, now own more wealth than the bottom half of the population combined or 152 million people.
The study by the Institute for Policy Studies also found that America’s wealthiest 400, with a combined net worth of $2.34 trillion, own more wealth than that of a staggering 194 million people – the bottom 61 per cent of the country combined.
At one time, nobody would have debated that the U.S. had the healthiest middle class on the entire planet. But now we have actually fallen behind a whole bunch of other nations. According to CNN, the United States now only ranks 19th when it comes to median wealth per adult…
Americans’ median wealth is a mere $44,900 per adult — half have more, half have less. That’s only good enough for 19th place, below Japan, Canada, Australia and much of Western Europe.
“Americans tend to think of their middle class as being the richest in the world, but it turns out, in terms of wealth, they rank fairly low among major industrialized countries,” said Edward Wolff, a New York University economics professor who studies net worth.
$44,900 per adult may sound okay, but when you look deeper into the numbers things become quite disturbing. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, household wealth for the poorest 40 percent of all Americans dropped significantly between 2000 and 2011. For the bottom 20 percent, median household wealth dropped from negative 905 dollars in 2000 to negative 6,029 dollars in 2011. For the next 20 percent, median household wealth dropped from 14,309 dollars in 2000 to 7,263 dollars in 2011. In other words, the poor have been getting poorer…
So what is the solution?
Well, the truth is that you can’t have a thriving middle class without lots of middle class jobs. And unfortunately for us, our economy has been bleeding middle class jobs for a very long time.
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As I pointed out just recently, if the U.S. government was actually using honest numbers, the unemployment rate in this nation would be more than 22 percent.
But even if you have a job, that does not mean that you are part of the middle class. As the quality of our jobs has deteriorated, the ranks of the “working poor” have absolutely exploded. In recent years, we have seen part-time and temp jobs become a much larger part of our economy, and as a result more Americans than ever are really struggling to make ends meet.
In an article that I published near the end of October, I included brand new income numbers that were just released by the Social Security Administration. To me, these numbers are absolutely staggering…
- 38 percent of all American workers made less than $20,000 last year.
- 51 percent of all American workers made less than $30,000 last year.
- 62 percent of all American workers made less than $40,000 last year.
- 71 percent of all American workers made less than $50,000 last year.
If you are extremely frugal, you might be able to support a middle class family of five on $50,000 a year. But as you can see, 71 percent of all American workers make less than that.
Even if you have a mother and a father that are both working, that is often not enough to make ends meet. Many Americans are working as hard as they possibly can, only to find that they still come up short at the end of the month.
And with each passing year, the middle class continues to get smaller. It is almost as if we are playing a really bizarre game of economic musical chairs. With each round, more chairs get removed from the circle, and all the rest of us just hope and pray that we will get to remain part of the middle class for a little while longer.
What we are doing as a nation is simply not working. We are now seeing the consequences of shipping good paying jobs out of the country for decades, and yet our leaders continue on with business as usual.
Just look at what Barack Obama is doing. He is working hard to promote “the Trans-Pacific Partnership“. This insidious treaty will result in millions more good paying American jobs being lost overseas, but he doesn’t seem to care.
No matter whether it is a Democrat or a Republican in the White House, the game remains the same and the middle class continues to suffer.
When will we ever learn?
Image Credit: Melissa Dykes
Michael Snyder is a writer, speaker and activist who writes and edits his own blogs The American Dream and Economic Collapse Blog. Follow him on Twitter here.
low pay survival wage enslavement for gain by the greedy elite is freedom and democracy?
If you consent to it, sure. Why not?
Like his product or not, Gates actually took part in creating something which in theory at least is useful and beneficial, whereas Buffett is a hoarder, profiting from toxic detrimental crap like Coca-Cola, several insurance companies, and numerous others in which he had no part of creating; the business/financial equivalent of “He who dies with the most toys, wins.”.
Gates actually did not ‘create’ anything. The ideas, the programmers, the business sense was all already there in existence. The resources for making personal computers already existed too. Gates created none of it. He did not autonomously speak, “let there be twenty programmers of computers to make algorithms to scatter data on hard drives”, and then they mystically appeared. No, he did not. He could not. Gates did not even create himself.
WELL – – let us look at the problem this way – – these LOW INFORMATION CROWD who are always crying they don’t have enough moeny – – should get off their DEAD ARSES – – get an education – be it College or Trade School – get out and stomp the streets for a JOB . ///////////// Then they can also be part of the upper classe wage earners . //////////////////////////////////////////////////
SEMPER PARATUS
Archie Bunker for President!…hahahahahaha!….spoken like a true socio/psychopath under the delusion that the world really works this way….the really obscenely rich generational overlords that have created this ‘Work Ethic’ 12 hr day 365/24/7dystopian nightmare & born with a silver spoon in their mouth….have never ever gone down the dead end work load road you just described for suckers…what you just described is pure bs propaganda inflicted upon the ignorant masses …end of story….sounds like you’re absolutely not happy with your life at all…PS…You still can’t take it with you (lol)
ROFL Agreed. No matter how whiz bang fancy the toys, no one takes them along. LOL
This writer has his head firmly where the sun don’t shine inside a very tiny box….imo….”You cannot change things for the better… with the same level of consciousness that created it” -Albert Einstein…ie: “there’s nothing wrong with building a company & making lotsa $$$’…no matter that capatalism is just another fabricated ‘ism’ that like trained seals we all are constrained to live by…to the point that we’ve forgotten the eternally enigmatic “Golden Rule’ that applies to everyone…not just entrepreneurs that are happy cutting their bottom line by enslaving brown skinned people all over the planet….get yer head out of your a….!
the Matrix is alive & well inside this boxed simulacrum /ersatz construct of Babylonian $$$ Majik…proudly sponsored by USURY -Debt & Interest…& NO we don’t have to live this way….We’ve been Conned Sheeple
🙂 Thank you for presenting reference to The Golden Rule. Been working in it for about two years now, at the least. It may be longer. Seems a lifetime and may be.
Equanimity can liberate every one of us. We need to let resource be that. Resources only. They are what we all need, use. Everyone owns all, everyone owns nothing. There is no need of the idea of money, ergo no need of money. Unfortunately the cave dwellers refuse coming into the light out fear of blindness. They cannot see the cave blinds, too.
We need to yell at them, “come on out! The Light helps you see once you get used to it!” Not sure many would come out. At least we would do our part by telling them about the Light. Beyond that we can only continue living in it ourselves, hoping more come along.
In peace I love all. Thank you again for pointing to the Golden Rule. 🙂
…Lest we forget Plato’s Cave & the Grand Illusion Matrix that has us building our own prison…& glad you understand that equanimity is an egalitarian state of mind in harmony with nature itself …& I fully agree with your world view as being the same as mine…took a lot of work to get here…but it’s worth it to reconnect with your own eternal infinite consciousness ….by realizing you’re having a relatively temporary Earth experience….Cheers
Why doesn’t this post have 50 ^ arrows? Know that for the rest of the masses to wake up they need the tone of urgency to do so. I’d like to add that if unmitigated wealth were true why wouldn’t they be building space stations for themselves or vertical take-off flying cars to travel places globally.
The latest theories postulated are that these ‘ungodly’ wealthy are possibly just wealthy by digits and not actual phyiscal wealth. Meaning if they want to purchase something they have to go through the same slave banking methods everyone else does.
By constricting the wealth to just a couple of waltons/suckerbergs you’ve basically retarded a nations ability to innovate. This is all just acknowledgement that we are living in a modern day feudal system where the denizens commute around the kingdom making modest purchases eeking out their existence with innovation trickling down in the form of a better phone or television.
We could be so much more but it will take the middle class to demand these .0001% contribute back to American society or just be removed from it.
“Pride can destroy everything even the most important person in your life, learn to say sorry and learn to forgive.”
“Acquire knowledge, it enables its professor to distinguish right from wrong; it lights the way to heaven. It is our friend in the desert, our company in solitude and companion when friendless. It guides us to happiness, it sustains us in misery, it is an ornament amongst friends and an armour against enemies.”
”The best exercise for the human heart is reaching down to lift someone else up.”
(John 5:25) “Very truly I tell you, a time is coming and has now come when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live.”
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” ‘The dead’ are those who live only for the carnal self. They are those who refuse to recognize anything except that which they can see and feel. They believe in nothing except that which the eyes can behold. They are dead in the self.
These shall hear the Divine Law; and, if they listen and accept and do, then shall they live.
Those are dead who deny that man has a Soul; for they recognize only the man of flesh. They are the worshippers of “the beast;” for to them there is nothing except that which the senses of the flesh can know and understand.”