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"30 Signs That Show The Middle Class
Is Dying Right In Front Of Our Eyes"
by Epic Economist
"The once strong and vibrant U.S. middle-class continues to shrink at a very brisk pace. Millions of Americans are falling down the middle-class ladder as the cost of living rises and incomes steadily drop. The decline of the American middle-class has greatly accelerated over the past decade, and conditions have been particularly detrimental over the past two years.
As more and more of our production is outsourced to foreign countries, the declining number of manufacturing jobs has kept a sizable portion of the U.S. population from entering the middle class. Meanwhile, the rate of inflation is still surging, but wages aren’t keeping up. To make things worse, an overwhelming amount of debt is choking the life out of more than half of American households.
As the price of housing, energy, and daily necessities skyrockets, with each passing day, more Americans are pushed out of their comfortable middle-class lives and into poverty. The number of middle-class jobs continues to go down at a staggering pace, and significantly fewer people can afford to buy a home in middle-class neighborhoods.
In contrast, the number of people that are forced to turn to the government for financial assistance continues to go up. In essence, as increasingly more workers can’t afford to make ends meet, America is getting poorer as a nation. When the cost of basic necessities rises much faster than incomes do, that means our overall wealth is getting smaller. At the same time, a larger share of wealth is becoming increasingly concentrated at the very top of the income scale. This is not how capitalism is supposed to work, and it is not healthy for America.
Currently, there are 262 million working-age people in America, but only about 161 million of them are working, marking a participation rate of just 61.1 percent. The numbers we’re about to report expose why the U.S. middle-class is disappearing right in front of our eyes. According to Forbes, approximately 42.5 million Americans or 13.4% of the U.S. population live below the poverty line. And since 2020, at least 131 million experienced some level of financial insecurity. Since 2021, workers' wages rose on average by 4.2%. On the other hand, inflation has soared 7.5%, which means that workers' earnings have actually eroded by 3.3% over the past 12 months. In 1970, consumer debt in the United States was standing at $430 billion. Today, it stands at $15.6 trillion, an absolute record-high.
Sadly, these numbers could go on and on. There are many other statistics that reveal the rapid decay of the U.S. middle class. The U.S. economy has been dramatically declining over the past few years, and economists say that trend has just begun. There’s a perfect storm of events threatening to spell much more trouble in 2022, as our politicians and policymakers scramble to fight against inflation and spark chaos on financial markets.
At the end of the day, the ones who are going to get hurt the most are the bottom 90 percent of the population, with many more of us falling into poverty, facing financial and food insecurity at a time the price of everything spirals out of control. We’re now on the path to another major financial crisis, but most people still don’t know the amount of pain that awaits us.
The truth is that our economy will slowly choke and die as the number of middle-class Americans needed to support it continues to decrease. Unfortunately, that’s to say that where we are now is as good as it gets. It’s all downhill from here. We should all start planning what to do to make it through the collapse that is ahead."
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