The middle class in the United States today is no longer the majority it once was. Described as the backbone of the national economy for years, the middle class is being wiped out in today’s economy climate, and millions of Americans are financially struggling, says a new report from the Pew Research Center.
After four decades of serving as the country’s economic majority, the middle class is tumbling and whose numbers are now matched by those in economic levels below and above it, according to the report entitled “The American Middle Class Is Losing Ground.”
Middle class Americans officially account for less than half (49.9 percent) of the nation’s population. This is down from 61 percent in 1971. According to Pew, 120.8 million adult Americans resided in middle class households in 2015, which is less than the combined number of poorer (70.3 million) and richer (51 million) Americans.
How does Pew define middle class? Americans living in households earning between $41,900 and $125,000 for a three-person home.
“[The] state of the American middle class is at the heart of the economic platforms of many presidential candidates ahead of the 2016 election,” Pew researchers Rakesh Kochhar and Richard Fry wrote in their report. “A flurry of new research points to the potential of a larger middle class to provide the economic boost sought by many advanced economies.”
What was once viewed as an American badge of honor for millions of people, it’s now viewed as something rarer than common sense in Washington.
What Mr. Moran conveniently ommits is the little fact that the first significant declines in the middle class began occurring during the Reagan/Bush sr. years in the 80’s. While Democrat administrations tend to be when middle class declines subside.
The last two Presidential terms would have bombed no matter who was in Office, after what Bush jr. did to our economy.
Again, any argument about Obama being responsible by now no matter what is rendered moot by the plain inescapable fact that Bush jr.’s conservative administration clearly enabled the nightmarish fallout of ’08’. And not only was there no realistic time frame for a Democrat controlled Congress to so tank the economy between ’06’ and ’08’, obviously s Democratic majority eas voted in due to most Americans not liking what they were seeing as early as late ’05’.