Damnit, I’ll triple post if I want to.
I didn’t attempt to make any point with my first post here. If I have any, it’s that it’s complicated. And where “America” is may be different from where any sub-segment is. I tend to stick to easily measurable statistics, but there’s plenty of squishy stuff out there too, like how the country is perceived. How people feel. Etc.
The answer depends heavily on where you are on the gameboard. As others here have noted, the rich have been getting richer as the middle class has shrunk.
In 2016, I was amazed at the way Trump supporters accepted his ridiculous claims that the stock market indices and unemployment rates were staggeringly higher than being reported. Then I realized that for people living in depressed areas, unemployment was higher than the national average. And if you’re broke, you probably don’t pay much attention to the stock markets.
A person who thinks he’s in decline thinks we’re in decline, however the rest of the country is doing.
I mean of course, Trump’s claims that the stock markets were lower (and the unemployment rates higher) than reported.
Obviously there are different ways to measure the middle class, all somewhat arbitrary, but by the Pew method (2/3x to 2x the median income, adjusted for household size by dividing by the square root of residents, adjusted for local cost of living), this phenomenon is slightly more due to rising out the top end of the middle class rather than people falling out the bottom.
IMHO one big reason for the decline was that with Reagan the idea that not paying properly for wars or buildups of the military and other programs became more of a Republican feature rather than a bug, with no increase in taxes to do all that, it was and remains a big component of the decline, a continuing move mostly favored by republican presidents and congresses.
I still remember how the health policy we had, and continues in most placess does discourage companies and individuals from placing manufacturing jobs in the USA.
IIRC awhile ago I was reading about conversations among a group of animators that had their crew located in different countries (it is nowadays a global thing, but less so is you are working mostly for the Mouse), when a comment was made about how the members in the USA had a hard time with healthcare costs, the reply from others in the group came similar to this: “Move to a more civilized country”.
Right. Which is why China’s growth in manufacturing is so meteoric. They are the epitome of civilization.
Interesting.
I wonder whether there’s a correlation between location (red vs. blue state) and the likelihood that the average middle class person rises to become upper-middle-class/rich, or falls into poverty.
With all the data (drug problems, falling life expectancy, etc.) and anecdotes we’ve heard about crises in the red states, it might be a case of middle-class families in the city having more access to upward mobility than their rural counterparts.
That would explain the rise in economic populism in the red states before and after Trump’s appearance on the scene.
I don’t have anything I can immediately point you to that illuminates this. This Pew study focuses on metro areas, so not rural areas, but I certainly mentally bin many of them as being more rural (e.g. Midland, TX). Note this only covers through 2014:
There are certainly some regional differences but I don’t know how well they map to either political leanings or changes in political leanings.
Yes, we were absolutely in decline. The evidence:
This was before Trump, and it is now accelerating. In fact the pandemic has concentrated wealth even more in the hands of wealthy tech shareholders and taken it out of what is a fast-evaporating middle class.
Someone else becoming better off faster than the rest of us says nothing about the rest of us being in decline.
No, but wealth concentrating as the general population as a whole sees its wealth and wealth-making opportunities decline absolutely does say a LOT about our decline. Keep in mind that we’re not just talking about mostly poor people becoming poor and already poor becoming poorer; we’ve observed middle class jobs disappearing and people who lose these jobs can’t just retrain; they accept jobs for which they are overqualified, and which pay much less. That was before Trump. Since Trump we’re watching people who had middle class or working class incomes and lifestyles end up in food lines. Moreover, the ability of governments to offer a safety net or some sort of leg up – even if they have the will – is disappearing. In short, the American economic model is collapsing before our eyes. Whether you realize that or not doesn’t matter. To deny this collapse matters about as much as denying gravity. You can deny it all you want, but it still exists, and people are going to hit the ground very hard.
Except the the period the OP asks about ended with real median income the highest it had ever been, and median wealth on the upswing. Since your posts starts out incorrect, your conclusions are suspect.
And again, inequality doesn’t mean people are worse off. A society can become more equal with most people worse off, or less equal with more people better off.
Swing and a miss as usual, their members did not work in China AFAIR.
The purchasing power for most Americans is the same as it was in the 1970s, irrespective of “income.” So no, my post didn’t start out incorrect; your post starts out with falsity.
I think the point at which our decline started was 9/11. In addition to throwing money at the rich with tax cuts, which wasn’t unrecoverable itself, we squandered more trillions of dollars, thousands or hundreds of thousands of lives depending on your point of view, and our international political capital.
Still, we could have come out of this even better than before had we, under Obama, kept steady as a society while also wholly embracing at least an expansive version of Obamacare. Instead, what we got was obstruction and white supremacy.
So there has been this Trumpian undercurrent of decay in America since 2008 at the very least, and we never righted the country back toward the right direction since we swerved after 9/11. Increases in health care availability, and gay and trans rights do not make up for dysfunctional politics, virulent racism, and (mostly) one-sided political tribalism and violence.
The election of $45 did accelerate the decline, both in terms of throwing money at the rich and increasing the debt like there’s no tomorrow, and in terms of being able to implement the far-right agenda.
On the other hand, I don’t think we’re in an absolute decline in terms of the environment. A natural move toward renewables almost makes up for a reckless disregard for climate science. But simply staying put is not good enough.
Real income. Not “income”. So adjusted, i.e. “value expressed in dollars adjusted for purchasing power,” in this case with CPI-U-RS.
If you have a point, make it.
The median household had the highest real income ever at the end of the period the OP is asking about. That’s adjusted for changes in purchasing lower. So not nominal income (although that obviously was the highest ever as well, just by definition.)
And increasing real income of the median household is inconsistent with the claim of wealth-making opportunities declining. Trump was certainly pushing that narrative back then, but I didn’t realize people here were on board with it.