Snyder writes: "We just got more evidence that
the middle class in America is dying. According to brand new numbers that were
just released by the Social Security Administration, 51 percent of all workers
in the United States make less than $30,000 a year. Let that number sink in for
a moment."
Food service worker Reginald Lewis Sr. speaks at a rally for striking service workers in Washington, D.C. (photo: Good Jobs Nation)
Goodbye Middle Class: 51 Percent of All American
Workers Make Less Than 30,000 Dollars a Year
By
Michael Snyder, Washington's Blog
24 October 15
We just got more evidence that the middle class in
America is dying. According to brand new numbers that were just released
by the Social Security Administration, 51 percent of all workers in the United
States make less than $30,000 a year. Let that number sink in for a
moment. You can’t support a middle class family in America today on just
$2,500 a month – especially after taxes are taken out. And yet more than
half of all workers in this country make less than that each month. In
order to have a thriving middle class, you have got to have an economy that
produces lots of middle class jobs, and that simply is not happening in America
today.
You can find the report that the Social Security
Administration just released right here. The
following are some of the numbers that really stood out for me…
-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.
That first number is truly staggering. The
federal poverty level for a family of five is $28,410, and yet
almost 40 percent of all American workers do not even bring in $20,000 a year.
If you worked a full-time job at $10 an hour all year
long with two weeks off, you would make approximately $20,000. This
should tell you something about the quality of the jobs that our economy is
producing at this point.
And of course the numbers above are only for those
that are actually working. As I discussed just recently,
there are 7.9 million working age Americans that are “officially unemployed”
right now and another 94.7 million working age Americans that are considered to
be “not in the labor force”. When you add those two numbers together, you
get a grand total of 102.6 million working age Americans that do not have a job
right now.
So many people that I know are barely scraping by
right now. Many families have to fight tooth and nail just to make it
from month to month, and there are lots of Americans that find themselves
sinking deeper and deeper into debt.
If you can believe it, about a quarter of the country
actually has a negative net worth right now.
What that means is that 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 the entire country. The following comes from a recent
piece by Simon Black…
Credit Suisse estimates that 25% of Americans are in
this situation of having a negative net-worth.
“If you’ve no debts and have $10 in your pocket you
have more wealth than 25% of Americans. More than 25% of Americans have
collectively that is.”
The thing is– not only did the government create the
incentives, but they set the standard.
With a net worth of negative $60 trillion, US citizens
are just following dutifully in the government’s footsteps.
As a nation we are flat broke and most of us are
living paycheck to paycheck. It has been estimated that it takes
approximately $50,000 a year to support a middle class lifestyle for a family
of four in the U.S. today, and so the fact that 71 percent of all workers make
less than that amount shows how difficult it is for families that try to get by
with just a single breadwinner.
Needless to say, a tremendous squeeze has been put on the middle
class. In many families, both the husband and the wife are
working as hard as they can, but it is still not enough. With each
passing day, more Americans are losing their spots in the middle class and this
has pushed government dependence to an all-time high. 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.
Sadly, the trends that are destroying the middle class
in America just continue to accelerate.
With a huge assist from the Republican leadership in
Congress, Barack Obama recently completed negotiations on the Trans-Pacific
Partnership. Also known as Obamatrade, this
insidious new treaty is going to cover nations that collectively
account for 40 percent of global GDP. Just like NAFTA, this treaty will
result in the loss of thousands of businesses and millions of good paying
American jobs. Let us hope and pray that Congress somehow votes it down.
Another thing that is working against the middle class
is the fact that technology is increasingly taking over our jobs. With
each passing year, it becomes cheaper and more efficient to have computers,
robots and machines do things that humans once did.
Eventually, there will be very few things that humans
will be able to do more cheaply and more efficiently than computers, robots and
machines. How will most of us make a living when that
happens?…
The robopocalypse for workers
may be inevitable. In this vision of the future, super-smart machines will best
humans in pretty much every task. A few
of us will own the machines, a few will work a bit… while the rest will
live off a government-provided income… the most common job in most U.S.
states probably will no longer be truck driver.
For decades, we have been training our young people to
have the goal of “getting a job” once they get out into the real world.
But in America today there are not nearly enough good jobs to go around, and
this crisis is only going to accelerate as we move into the future.
I do not believe that it is wise to pin your future on
a corporation that could replace you with a foreign worker or a machine the
moment that it becomes expedient to do so. We need to start thinking
differently, because the paradigms that worked in the past are fundamentally
breaking down.
So what advice would you give to a young adult today
that is looking toward the future?
C 2015 Reader Supported News
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to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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