Goodbye Middle Class: 50 Percent Of All U.S. Workers Made $34,612.04 Or Less Last Year
Francesco Abbruzzino, The Uncensored Report, LLC
If we keep going down this path, soon we won’t have much of a “middle class” at all. When I first started writing about the economy many years ago, I often wrote about the tens of millions of “working poor” Americans that were enduring so many hardships. But at this point most of the nation now falls into the “working poor” category. That isn’t because wages haven’t been going up. Little by little, wages have been incrementally rising year after year, but meanwhile the cost of living has been absolutely soaring. Paychecks have not even come close to keeping up with inflation, and this has been eviscerating the middle class. Today, the majority of the country is in constant “survival mode” financially, and that isn’t going to change any time soon.
When I was growing up, retailers that catered to the middle class did exceptionally well. My mother was constantly taking me and my siblings to JCPenney and Sears, and it seemed like that was where virtually everyone shopped.
But now such retailers are rapidly going extinct. Today, the retailers that are doing well are those that cater to the very bottom of the economic food chain (Walmart, dollar stores, etc.) or those that cater to the very top of the economic food chain.
And that is because there isn’t much in between those two extremes anymore.
The Social Security Administration has just released final wage statistics for 2020, and they are extremely alarming. According to the figures that they have given to us, the median wage for 2020 was just $34,612.04…
By definition, 50 percent of wage earners had net compensation less than or equal to the median wage, which is estimated to be $34,612.04 for 2020.
It is really depressing to think that half of all U.S. workers made $34,612.04 or less last year.
That is less than $3,000 a month, and that is before taxes.
Needless to say, trying to survive in a major U.S. city on that kind of income is not easy in today’s economic environment.
Of course $34,612.04 would have been a very nice yearly income back in 1960, because back then the cost of living was much lower. The following comes from an article authored by MN Gordon…
In 1960, for example, a gallon of gas cost $0.31 per gallon. Similarly, in 1960 a gallon of milk cost $1.00 per gallon. Currently, the average price of gas and the average price of milk are $3.28 per gallon and $3.68 per gallon, respectively. That’s upwards of a 958 percent increase for gas and 268 percent increase for milk over the last 60 years.
Back in 1960, you could buy an entire house in a nice middle class neighborhood for $34,612.04.
Today, that would barely be a down payment on a dilapidated shack in many parts of the country.
In recent weeks, I have frequently pointed out that there are millions of jobs available in the U.S. right now.
But the vast majority of them are highly undesirable because they pay “working poor” wages.
So many people out there are working as hard as they can and they still can’t make ends meet. In fact, one recent poll discovered that 59 percent of Americans that make less than $50,000 a year have experienced “serious financial problems in the past few months”…