Posted on 11/15/2010 7:10:08 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Anne, 45, has always considered herself middle-class: As a single mom earning $65,000 a year in ad sales, she was able to rent a one-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side for $1,000 a month and send her daughter, now 12, to private school. “I was able to make it,” she says. “Even go on vacation sometimes.”
In the span of 15 months, she has come to define herself as poor — even if the government won’t, denying her multiple applications for welfare and food stamps because, she says, she once made “too much money.”
Upon losing her job in June 2009 — her company was going under — “I was plunged into immediate poverty,” she says. “It was a surprise attack.”
Anne has borrowed money from her sister and her retired parents — who are struggling themselves — to pay the rent; she applied for a Section 8 and was able to slash it in half, to $500 a month. She depleted her 401(k). She had no savings, was living paycheck-to-paycheck. But she still felt economically safe, given her location and her tax bracket and her white-collar job.
“Now, when I go to the grocery store, I have to decide what is absolutely essential for my child,” Anne says. “Sometimes, I’m eating whatever-in-a-can. A lot of the time, I’m literally walking around without a penny in my pocket.” She deliberates before taking her daughter on a day trip downtown, because a round-trip subway fare will cost $9. She negotiated a tuition break with her daughter’s school, and the ease of that leads her to believe she’s not the only parent who’s asked, which she does not find especially comforting.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
* The median income is the US is now $50,000 a year, 5% less than it was just 10 years ago. We are on average, getting poorer.
* Whether one is middle class on that salary depends on a host of factors — your education level, how many dependents you have, where you live, whether you’re still paying off college loans, whether your mortgage is underwater.
* There is a the long-term, exponentially increasing gap between rich and poor in America: from 1989-2007, the upper 1% of the population gained 56% of all income growth, while the bottom 90% gained just 16%.
* The highly educated upper class and the less-educated lower class are faring far better in the recession than the middle class, which has been crushed by off-shoring and technology.
* From 1979-2009, there was a nearly 12% drop in the four “middle-skill” occupations: sales, office/administrative workers, production workers, operators. Meanwhile, people in the top 20% of the economy earning $100,000 or more a year.
* The US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects a 14% increase in low-education service jobs between 2008-2018.
* The only major occupational category with greater projected growth is professional occupations, which are predicted to add 5.2 million jobs, or 17%. These sectors include medicine, law and middle- and upper-management.
* What is left, when this recession finally recedes, is a landscape where mid-skilled jobs are fallow, where someone who once worked in retail has lost their job due to the rise in online shopping, or an administrative executive has been replaced by new software.
* Without the training or the education for the formerly middle class worker to move up, the only direction is downward. So those by-now-familiar tales of former white-collar workers with master’s degrees competing for one part-time position as a floor manager at Home Depot — displacing a lower-skilled worker in the process — will ecome more common.
* Getting especially hurt: the 40- to 50-something who is too old to hire, to young to retire.
* What we will eventually see is CHRONIC UNDEREMPLOYMENT. This situation does not just describe people who want to work full-time but can only find part-time jobs, It also means white collar professionals in low paying jobs.
* There used to be a general idea that everyone thinks they’re middle class. However in the most recent survey by the University of Michigan, more Americans have begun to identify themselves as lower class.
'We" arent getting poorer. Non government employees are getting poorer. Those in govt jobs, particularly govt union jobs, are fat and happy.
All part of the Obama agenda.
Uh, maybe that's because they have to be employed to fit into this definition.? Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/class_dismissed_why_middle_income_rcd27q5kphT3ZnUCH7vh4L#ixzz15Mbo2GRW"
Any free traitors want to chime in?
Did she vote for HopeyChange and get too much?
The US economy is dying — not a fun thing to say and it’s not pretty, but it’s true.
bet she voted for hope and change!
How much is due to technology reducing the demand for human labor, period?
Thanks, public unions! /sarc
I support local supermarkets rather than Wally World and I'm really starting to wonder what type of damage NAFTA is causing.
65 Large = Middle class?????
She was in sales, huh?
Must have been a lousy sales(wo)man.
If you can really sell, a down economy doesn’t matter.
If she could really sell, she could sell herself into another job pretty quickly, and failing that, she could go into business for herself.
Oh, and get the hell out of New York.
My other pet peeve is the "self service" grocery lines. These are fine if you have two items. But when you are forced to use them because there are no cashiers? Ridiculous.
Which came first, internet selling lowered sales in retail stores so they couldn’t afford to staff at a higher level, or shoppers prefer internet because of low staffing at retail stores?
Or if they gave you a discount for checking yourself out.
The subject of the article should get out of NYC to live less expensively... The original poster may stay ;-)
I think the missing employees were let go because of the recession. However, many companies do not understand that while they are cutting payroll, in many cases, they are cutting profits as people refuse to shop in stores where there is no one to take their money.
I walked out on some groceries in a store that had one checkout line open. I have walked out on Home Depot because the only lines open were "self checkout" and there were long lines there. The business owners are fools to lose business this way. They are practically driving customer to the internet.
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