Goodbye Middle Class: 51 Percent Of All American
Workers Make Less Than 30,000 Dollars A Year
By Michael Snyder
October 22, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "End
Of The American Dream" - 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?
Please feel free to join the discussion by posting
a comment below…
Copyright © 2015
End Of The American Dream
