New Pew Poll Shows Middle Class Disappearing

A new poll by Pew shows thatthe middle class is declining faster and farther than previously thought (it’s kind of like global warning in that respect). A majority of Americans no longer are part of the middle class.

The decline is pervasive throughout America.

You want to understand the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders? This is it, your explanation. The middle class is dying on the vine and it’s due to the One Percent eating up all of America’s wealth. And we all know both political parties are beholden to the One Percent, big time. THAT’S why Trump and Sanders, outsiders both, are doing so well. (I will grant you that Trump is not REALLY an outsider, he’s an oligarch himself, but the Republican base has never been noted for understanding things.

If the Republicans and Democrats want to continue as viable political parties, THIS is the problem they need to address with actual, workable solutions. But the irony is, their wealthy masters won’t permit that.

It’s not so much the 1%, but the .01%: the multi-billionaires who shovel hundreds of millions of dollars into making sure that what you hear, read and see profits them and not you.

Eh, I’m sceptical. The total shift from middle to lower classes over the 40 year period was 4% of adults. The rest of the 11 point shift away from the middle class was adults moving into higher income classes. That doesn’t really seem like much of a reason to make a reality TV host President.

Plus, the average Trump primary voter had an income of like 70k, way above the average American household. Its hardly the unwashed masses that made him the GOP nominee.

It is, OTOH, a very good reason to make a social democrat president.

Dem primary voters appear to disagree.

Given the massive increase in single-mother households over the last 40 years, I’m surprised we’ve held up that well, since that is the likeliest demographic to be in poverty.

Sending Bernie Sanders to the White House to stem the tide of globalization and technological change is maybe half a notch more realistic than sacrificing goats until middle class jobs suddenly reappear.

We aren’t going to address income inequality until the Left correctly diagnoses the causes. Sanders is a giant step backward in that respect.

Do you think you know what the cause is? I’d be very curious to hear your thoughts on the matter.

To be honest though, If you’d told me 5 years ago that Bernie Sanders would be doing this well with voters in the primaries, I would have backed slowly away from you while maintaining eye contact at all times…

Well, you put it out there. I can agree that a lot of individuals make poor choices, but what about the oligarchs who make poor choices? Who has more influence on the economy: lenders who know they’re making risky loans and expecting taxpayer bailouts or the borrowers themselves?

Close to half of them don’t, and yes, that does matter, a lot. This ain’t going away. This is where it starts.

He might not have it all quite right but he is still a giant step forward in that respect, and any real improvements on his model will probably come from his left, not his right.

I understand where you’re coming from but the truth is he’s really not doing well. It’s more a case of him just not quitting. He basically got smashed to smithereens in South Carolina and Super Tuesday.

If I can make an analogy to Magic the Gathering, she’s basically had him in Stasis lock since turn 3 and he’s not conceding and insisting on playing out the match, as is his right, hoping that his opponent can make some huge mistake which he’ll be able to capitalize on.

However, he’s never really threatened her since he ran into her Nevada and South Carolina firewalls and he’s never managed to move beyond the same group of people who went crazy for Howard Dean, Jerry Brown, Dennis Kucinich etc.

True enough. I just One Percent as a shorthand for them. Though to be fair, mere multi-millionaires can have political clout, too!

Actually, the real and worse problem – because less odious and therefore more intractable – might well be the 10%, the “meritocratic” moderately-rich degreed-professional-and-executive class, which has pretty much taken over the Democratic Party since 1972, leaving the middle and working and poor classes with no party at all really representing their interests. See Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank.

No question that the very wealthiest, especially the 0.01% are much wealthier than ever before. But in fact everyone has gone up. Look specifically at the page entitled “Percentage Change in Average After-Tax Household Income between 1979 and 2010 by Quintiles and Top Percentiles (Reported in 2010 $).” The three lower quintiles? All UP 30 to 34%. Yes income inequality has increased at the same time because, dang, look at the top 1%, up 202% in the same time period.

So let’s be perfectly clear: the middle (i.e. the median) has gone up. And fewer are in the Pew defined “middle class” (“annual household income is two-thirds to double the national median, after incomes have been adjusted for household size”): some who were are now above that arbitrary definition and some who were are now below. Overall more the former than the latter.

Pew (the source) specifically looked at metroplolitan areas. Many had many people move up out of the middle, a smaller number had people moving down, and obviously some had both.

Is this increasing inequality a real problem even if all quintiles are going up? Yes. But no “the middle class” is not “dying on the vine” … more are moving out of the middle and into the point twice above the national median (meaning household income of $125K or greater.

Again, for emphasis, the gap between the very wealthiest and the rest of is absurd and wealth is power. Most of the growth for the middle occurred in the early days of NAFTA, median family income peaked in 1999, stayed mostly flat since, dropped some with the recession bottoming out in 2012 and while its recovering has not yet hit the old highs: median income is lower than in 1999, and still a hair lower than in 2008.

If America great is when we peaked with median income, then to make it great again we would want Bill Clinton back again because it was his 8 years that coincided with the rise to the peak. GW Bush broke it and Obama has oversaw stopping the drop and building it back up.

Really? because I looked at the charts, and what I saw on most of them was middle class percentages going up, lower class percentages going up, and upper class going up … but the slant of the upper class percentage was a lot shallower than the slant of the other two.

Let me guess … its poor people stubbornly refusing to make enough money, isn’t it?

Exactly. Change is always impossible until it happens. I remember a few years ago when there was wave after wave of legislation at the state level intended to stop gay marriage, and saying on this board that maybe the best thing is to retrench and work on educating people, and then within a year or two, states all over were legalizing it. It happened amazingly fast.

Same with democratic socialism. The time has come.

I am curious to know whether you have any idea what your opponents actually think and believe.

What do you imagine that people who disagree with Bernie Sanders’s proposed solutions think causes income inequality? Do you think they’re just twirling their mustaches and counting their gold coins and don’t care, or that they think greedy rich people steal from the poor, or what?