The Startling Truth About How Working Families Are Truly Faring In This Economy
By Michael Snyder
EndOfTheAmericanDream.com
June 1st, 2016
It is hard to live the American Dream when the deck is stacked against you. Our politicians stood idly by as millions of good paying jobs were shipped overseas, our economic infrastructure was absolutely gutted and multitudes of small businesses were choked to death by miles of red tape. Now, we are reaping the consequences. In America today, nobody has a job in one out of every five families, and there are more than 100 million working age Americans that are currency not working. And thanks to our transition to a “service economy”, many of those that are actually working are deeply struggling too. According to the Social Security Administration, 51 percent of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year. And the Federal Reserve says that 47 percent of all Americans could not pay an unexpected $400 emergency room bill without borrowing the money from somewhere or selling something. That means that about half the country is flat broke, and things get even more precarious for working families with each passing day.
Of course the plight of working families is not something that is new. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, wages and salaries earned by workers accounted for around half of all gross domestic income. But since 1970 there has been a precipitous decline, and during the Obama administration we hit an all-time low. In other words, the share of the pie being enjoyed by working families just keeps getting smaller and smaller and smaller.
All over the country, median incomes have been falling for years. This is putting an incredible amount of financial stress on working families, and we have seen poverty grow explosively in the United States during the last couple presidential administrations. According to one study, median incomes have fallen in over 80 percent of the major metropolitan areas in this nation since the year 2000…
A major new analysis of income in America published by Pew earlier this month found that more than 80% of the country’s 229 metropolitan areas have seen real (inflation-adjusted) incomes fall steadily since the start of this century. Some of the steepest declines in median incomes have been seen in cities hit by industrial decline – for example a 27% drop in Springfield, Ohio and 18% in the conurbation that includes Detroit. But, ominously, even fast expanding success stories have seen incomes falling.
The area around Denver, Colorado, has seen its population grow by 600,000 since 1999, but its median income has fallen from $83,500 to less than $76,000. Similarly Raleigh, North Carolina, is a fast-growing city buoyed by a cluster of research universities and biotech firms; the population has shot up from 800,000 to 1.3 million this century. Yet its middle class has shrunk from 55% of the population to 50%, and median incomes have fallen by more than $11,000 to about $74,000.
The Rest…HERE
