Pew Research Center Study shows shrinking middle class almost everywhere in America.
Economic inequality matters.
The great shrinking of the middle class that has captured the attention of the nation is not only playing out in troubled regions like the Rust Belt, Appalachia and the Deep South, but in just about every metropolitan area in America, according to a major new analysis by the Pew Research Center.
Pew reported in December that a clear majority of American adults no longer live in the middle class, a demographic reality shaped by decades of widening inequality, declining industry and the erosion of financial stability and family-wage jobs. But while much of the attention has focused on communities hardest hit by economic declines, the new Pew data, based on metro-level income data since 2000, show that middle-class stagnation is a far broader phenomenon.
The share of adults living in middle-income households has also dwindled in Washington, New York, San Francisco, Atlanta and Denver. It's fallen in smaller Midwestern metros where the middle class has long made up an overwhelming majority of the population. It's withering in coastal tech hubs, in military towns, in college communities, in Sun Belt cities.
The decline of the American middle class is "a pervasive local phenomenon," according to Pew, which analyzed census and American Community Survey data in 229 metros across the country, encompassing about three-quarters of the U.S. population. In 203 of those metros, the share of adults in middle-income households fell from 2000 to 2014.
WaPo: The middle class is shrinking just about everywhere in America (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/05/11/the-middle-class-...)
Here is a link to the study titled Pew: America’s Shrinking Middle Class: A Close Look at Changes Within Metropolitan Areas, and a quote from it:
The American middle class is losing ground in metropolitan areas across the country, affecting communities from Boston to Seattle and from Dallas to Milwaukee. From 2000 to 2014 the share of adults living in middle-income households fell in 203 of the 229 U.S. metropolitan areas examined in a new Pew Research Center analysis of government data.
snip
The shrinking of the middle class at the national level, to the point where it may no longer be the economic majority in the U.S., was documented in an earlier analysis by the Pew Research Center. The changes at the metropolitan level, the subject of this in-depth look at the American middle class, demonstrate that the national trend is the result of widespread declines in localities all around the country.
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/05/11/americas-shrinking-middle-clas...
The inequality grows through Democratic and Republican administrations. Sometimes less under the Dems, but we have had a slow destruction of the middle class.
Today, we live in the richest country in the history of the world, but that reality means little because much of that wealth is controlled by a tiny handful of individuals.
The issue of wealth and income inequality is the great moral issue of our time, it is the great economic issue of our time, and it is the great political issue of our time.
America now has more wealth and income inequality than any major developed country on earth, and the gap between the very rich and everyone else is wider than at any time since the 1920s.
The reality is that since the mid-1980s there has been an enormous transfer of wealth from the middle class and the poor to the wealthiest people in this country. That is the Robin Hood principle in reverse. That is unacceptable and that has got to change.
https://berniesanders.com/issues/income-and-wealth-inequality/Income
Comments
WaPo bias
Isn't it interesting that the Washington Post reports the disappearing middle class and neglects the income inequality piece of the puzzle? Bezos isn't interested in that message. In fact it is sad how the Post has degraded (from wiki):
Amazon makes walmart look like a socially aware organization.
“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
Excellent points. Thanks.
The shrinking middle class is a feature, not a bug.
How else can the corporations keep their wages stifled, a sufficient population willing to vie for starvation wage jobs, and a further depression of labor organizations. What I find somewhat baffling is the ability of supposed "liberal" politicians to go along with this rot.
The middle class
has suffered from the Race to the Bottom.
Life is strong. I'm weak, but Life is strong.
Yes. It started with runaway shops to
the South. JFK campaigned against them. Then overseas.
The middle class is the road
The race to the bottom has been run on
Now all that is left of the middle class is a patched up trail of pot holes.
Orwell was an optimist
Nice to see you here again TomP.
And, yes, capitalism is currently in its declining phase. Maybe there are two or three decades left in the current system. We should begin to think of what will come next.
"the Democratic Party is not 'left'." -- Sabrina Salvati
Thanks.
It is interesting. The rates of profit are declining. Bubbles and bust.
I think that is one of the things you do best: thinking of what should come and how we get there.
Very glad you are here.
The Clinton Foundation
has done it's part to keep low wage slave labor alive and well globally. Their donors need to be assured that there profits will not suffer in places like Haiti, where workers provide cheap garments to be sold at places like Wal Mart. Wal Mart's employees are the next step in the chain of poverty. The middle class may be shrinking but poverty level subsistence is increasing. When you slip out of the middle class where do you end up?
jobless, homeless, sick, despaired, fatalistic and dead /nt
Class War
When Buffet says it's a class war - and his side is winning - why not take him at his word? Obama is one of a fairly long line of presidents helping to shift wealth from the majority to the greedy small minority.
When Clinton signed NAFTA he was signing a pact that set into motion the events that are leading Mexico to become the automobile manufacturer of North America.
Senator Sanders is the only candidate who advocates a small, but progressive, tax on stock and bond purchases(Clinton only favors a tax on high speed trades.). This is nothing; it doesn't get to the root of the problem and doesn't begin to reverse the decline of the majority of Americans standard of living.
The financial industry, the richest sector, basically produces nothing of value and is a parasite on the country and world. We should not be talking of a 0.5% tax but a shutting down of most of this industry.
"The justness of individual land right is not justifiable to those to whom the land by right of first claim collectively belonged"
Here’s the Washington Post optimistic, technocratic world view:
Six maps that will make you rethink the world
Orthodox globalization-advocating, Washington-consensus free-trader futurism, whereby among other things Canada, the U.S., and Mexico are all merging to become one single, wonderful economy.
The writer derides both Sanders and Trump.
With apples so cheap . . .
Using an image from the Great Depression, the title lampoons the government’s economic experts who insist that with oil so cheap, consumers have more money in their pockets so why aren’t they spending? Why isn’t “consumer confidence” soaring?
Those dollars saved at the gas pump
aren't keeping up with dramatic increases in the cost of housing, especially rent for all those dispossessed.of their houses in the Great Mortgage Fraud and subsequent bail-out of the Bankers who perpetrated the fraud.
Edited to correct a typing error. I *hate*touch screens.
Only connect. - E.M. Forster
Health insurance and medical care
The insurance is much more expensive and the out-of-pocket expenses can cost as much or more on top of that.
Income and wealth inequality
is the top internal threat to the United States. Begin leveling the playing field to something resembling America of the 1950s-70s and a lot of the other problems start to take care of themselves.
Thanks, TomP, for your work in increasing awareness.
"The real power is in the hands of small groups of people and I don't think they have titles. -- Bob Dylan"
In the case of Vox, Ezra Klein and Dylan Matthews . . .
it's important to note that they weren't pushed out because of their ideology. He and the Wonkbloggers came to Bezos and asked for $10 million to expand their venture, Bezos declined, they walked.
As has been clear this election cycle, Vox is somewhere between liberal and neo-liberal, and they haven't been particularly friendly to Sanders' candidacy.
As was noted in late April: "Vox’s Puff Piece on Goldman Sachs Doesn’t Reveal Goldman Sponsors Vox"
http://fair.org/home/voxs-puff-piece-on-goldman-sachs-doesnt-reveal-gold...
Vox is very much part of the mainstream DC media eco-system.