Anyone who is surprised by the recent Pew Research Center report that the American middle class is “losing ground” hasn’t been paying attention.
Even Helen Keller could have seen this coming. According to the report, the rich keep getting obscenely richer. You don’t say! Another shocker: more than a quarter of adult Americans 65 or older improved their bottom lines (26.7 percent), while many of the rest of us have been bleeding out financially.
Ah, yes, the postwar “me-me-me generation” of baby boomers; the generation that was in charge in the ‘90s. Some of their notable achievements:
- Supporting job-busting “trade” agreements (NAFTA, CAFTA, GATT, et al.), which laid the groundwork for the even more suicidal TPP
- They converted the personal-sounding term “personnel” into the more disposable-sounding “human resources”…morphed “hiring” into “onboarding” … and turned “firing” into the sterile “offboarding” or murderous “terminating”
- And now, many won’t retire, even when they are comfortable financially, making an already tight labor market even less accessible to the rest of us
Me-me-me to the end.
The study also showed that from 1970-2015, adult blacks saw a larger increase in income than any other racial or ethnic group (up 11.2 percent), and blacks were also the only group not to experience a decline in their lower-income share. See? Sometimes black lives do matter!
Married people with or without children at home also fared much better than single people. That makes sense, since it now takes two salaries to equal half of what one salary was worth 10 years ago.
Pew defines middle class Americans as adults whose annual income is double to two-thirds of the national median wage. In 1971, 61 percent of adult Americans enjoyed middle class status; that rate has plunged to only 50 percent now. The number of high income American adults spiked from 14 percent to 21 percent, and the number of low income households also increased (from 25 percent to 29 percent).
All in all, the study further validates Ross Perot’s “giant sucking sound” prediction. In 1992, he warned that America’s labor market would be destroyed if NAFTA passed; how right he was. The report charts the decline of our middle class beginning in the early ‘90s and accelerating considerably in the ‘00s.
By then, NAFTA was really kicking into gear and virtually all of our manufacturing jobs were exported overseas. I just hope that Chinese factory workers can take a break from making our iPhones every once in a while to make enough respirators for the citizens of Beijing. Sure, let’s cry for the polar bears while our captains of industry suffocate the poor Chinese people with low-cost, unregulated manufacturing and limited breathable air.
With our manufacturing gone, our labor market now consists primarily of very high- or very low-skilled occupations.
But, wait, there’s more!
In recent years, our crooked Congressional “representatives” continued to beat the walking dead middle class by boosting the number of tech “guest” work visas granted to their corporate sponsors. U.S. workers in high-skilled positions are now routinely replaced by foreign “guests” who are paid much less.
Congress also has allowed an endless parade of illegal aliens to cross our open boarder and they are now calling for us to import Syrian refugees to fill the low-skilled jobs that Americans supposed won’t do. It’s clear that the psychopaths running our government are fast-tracking us to Third World status. And…we’re…letting…them. Why?
Each holiday season, retailers bemoan the fact that people aren’t spending as much as they used to. Well, if we don’t have jobs, or the jobs we have pay less they used to, or we are “gig” employees who don’t know if or when we’ll see another paycheck, then the odds are pretty good that we’re not going to have a lot of Benjamins…or bitcoins…or any type of digital currency…to slide across your registers or online shopping carts.
In my last post, I described how today’s U.S. worker is trapped in an environment of economic cannibalism; the Pew study proves it.
Pew. Something sure does stink around here.