* 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who once worked in retail has lost their job due to the rise in online shopping, or an administrative executive has been replaced by new software.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?
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.
Meanwhile, the single mother who never even tried to get a job to support her daughter continues to draw welfare benefits.
Two major political movements are going to happen over the next ten years. One is a growing backlash against the out of control public sector. The second will be either a complete devolution into a European welfare state (what Obama wants), with the new underclass demanding bailouts, or the unemployed are going to revolt against the multi-generational welfare system when they realize they can work for decades and get no help when they are in a lurch. I hope on this second point it becomes the latter rather than the former.
While there's no question that a lot of people are suffering these days, I think it's worthwhile to step back and put a few things into perspective. I have long felt that one of the major factors behind the "declining middle class" in this country is the constantly changing definition of what exactly constitutes a "middle class" standard of living.
Some items in this article, for example, leave me scratching my head and wondering if there's more to this story than meets the eye. I never thought of Manhattan's Upper East Side as a place where middle class people can afford to live, though the woman's $1,000 monthly rent makes me wonder if there is some kind of rent control regulation in place on that apartment. $1,000/month in Manhattan is unheard-of for most people.
And she's sending her daughter to a private school! What the heck is that all about?
GE has recently announced that it is moving it’s appliance manufacturing back in to the US over the next 4 years at a cost of 1 billion dollars.
One more thing. She should get the hell out of Manhattan. She should move to Oklahoma or Texas.
She actually has a good skill set, sales, where experience is valued, and which is hard to outsource.
Ad sales are difficult right now because companies are cutting ad budgets. But there are places where the economy is still in decent shape.
Once we got an EPA, jobs were doomed.
Unless there is some dramatic recovery from this recession that no one is predicting, these issues will and should become the dominant issues is US politics in the very near future.
Be skeptical of any article that quotes Barbara Ehrenreigh