“The Middle Class, died this week after a long battle with capitalism. Its passing has been expected since the recent death of its partner, The American Dream.” : Hamilton Nolan (Gawker)

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Published on

Thursday, December 10, 2015

by

Common Dreams

Deepening Inequality Driving US Middle Class into Oblivion

“The hollowing of the middle has proceeded steadily for four decades, and it may have reached a tipping point,” Pew Research Center says

by

Deirdre Fulton, staff writer

 

A closer look at the shift out of the middle reveals that “a deeper polarization is underway in the American economy,” says Pew Research Center report. (Image: DonkeyHotey/flickr/cc)

The American middle class is shrinking.

For the first time in more than four decades, middle-income households have lost their majority status in the U.S., according to new findings, and are now outnumbered by their counterparts on opposite ends of the income spectrum.

“The fastest-growing segments are the ones at the extremes, the very lowest and highest ends of the income distribution.”
—Pew Research Center

Based on the definition used in the Pew Research Center report released Wednesday, the share of American adults living in middle-income households—that is, with an income that is two-thirds to double that of the overall median household income, or $42,000 to $126,000 annually in 2014—has fallen from a high of 61 percent in 1971 to 50 percent in 2015.

At the same time, the share living in the upper-income tier jumped from 14 percent to 21 percent over the same period, and the share in the lower-income tier rose from 25 percent to 29 percent.

“The hollowing of the middle has proceeded steadily for four decades, and it may have reached a tipping point,” the Pew study suggests. Furthermore, a “closer look at the shift out of the middle reveals that a deeper polarization is underway in the American economy.”

“The movement out of the middle-income tier has been more than just a step in one direction or the other,” the report says. “The fastest-growing segments are the ones at the extremes, the very lowest and highest ends of the income distribution.”

In addition, middle class families have fallen further behind financially, the study shows, with the share of U.S. aggregate household income held by middle-income households having “eroded significantly over time.”

“Upper-income households now command the greatest share of aggregate income and are on the verge of holding more in total income than all other households combined,” the report reads. “This shift is partly because upper-income households constitute a rising share of the population and partly because their incomes are increasing more rapidly than those of other tiers.”

The Pew findings support what many 2016 presidential candidates, led by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, have been saying on the campaign trail.

In an op-ed published this summer, Sanders decried what he called “the war against the American middle class,” marked by Wall Street greed, anti-worker policies, and corporate tax evasion.

And on Thursday, he tweeted:

Bernie Sanders

✔ @SenSanders

There’s been a massive transfer of wealth from the 99% to the top 1%. We’ve got to bring that money back to working families.

8:05 AM – 10 Dec 2015

A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll in January found that 47 percent of respondents considered reducing income inequality an absolute priority for the government to pursue this year, with Democrats placing far greater importance on it than Republicans.

In a piece for Gawker on Thursday, Hamilton Nolan responded to Pew report with an irreverent eulogy.

“The Middle Class, a popular figure in American folklore, died this week after a long battle with capitalism,” Nolan wrote. “Its passing has been expected since the recent death of its partner, The American Dream.”

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Currently about 50 million Americans meet the USDA criteria for food insecurity. About 15 million of them are children.

         

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In These Times

With liberty and justice for all…

(Brandon Warren / Flickr)

Web Only / Features » November 23, 2015

American Hunger-Related Healthcare Costs Exceeded $160 Billion in 2014, According to New Study

Food insecurity, especially for children, remains near record high despite the Great Recession’s official end.

BY Elizabeth Grossman

 

Currently about 50 million Americans meet the USDA criteria for food insecurity. About 15 million of them are children.

While the official end of the Great Recession is a full five years behind us, there are now nearly 12 million more Americans who lack enough resources to access adequate food than there were in 2007, a number that has only improved slightly since United States food insecurity peaked at over 21 percent in 2009. These statistics alone are disturbing. But as detailed in a new study released today as part of Bread for the World Institute’s 2016 Hunger Report, absence of food security in the U.S. carries enormous healthcare costs, more than $160 billion in 2014.

Using data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Census Bureau and research on food security published in peer-reviewed academic journals between 2005 and 2015, a team of researchers led by Boston University School of Medicine associate professor of pediatrics John Cook, estimated these health care costs by looking at the costs of treating diseases and health conditions associated with household food insecurity plus earnings lost when people took time off work because of these illnesses or to care for family members with illnesses related to food insecurity.

As Cook, who is also research scientist and principal investigator with Children’s Health Watch, explained to In These Times, lack of access to adequate food does not necessarily directly cause a particular illness but “plays a role in that disease occurring.” Years of research consistently shows food insecurity increases the risk for a range of health problems. These risks are particularly great for children but poor and inadequate nutrition also increases risk for adult health problems, including obesity and chronic diseases, among them diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular disease. It also exacerbates illness duration and severity–in some cases simply because people lack money for medication–and therefore treatment costs.

Putting this in a broader economic context, Bread for the World Institute points out that the U.S. “spends more per capita on health care than any other high-income country but compares poorly with these others on key population health indicators such as life expectancy and child survival. This is due,” report authors, “in part to our tolerance as a nation, for higher levels of poverty and hunger.”

Currently about 50 million Americans meet the USDA criteria for food insecurity. About 15 million of them are children. In 2014, 19.2 percent of U.S. households with children were food insecure–about a third higher than households without. The Boston University research team found if the costs of special education for children whose learning abilities are adversely affected by food insecurity are factored in along with related education impacts for high-schoolers, the $160 billion rose by an additional  nearly $18 billion. This brings a total estimate of direct and indirect health care costs of U.S. food insecurity in 2014 to $178.93 billion.

 

Read More Here

England : Malnutrition and Cases of Victorian-era diseases including scurvy, scarlet fever, cholera and whooping cough have increased since 2010

 

 

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The Independent

Malnutrition and ‘Victorian’ diseases soaring in England ‘due to food poverty and cuts’

• Dean Kirby
• Tuesday 27 October 2015

While cases of malnutrition doubled in the four years to 2014, there has been a rise in diseases that were rife in the Victorian era such as scurvy, scarlet fever, cholera and whooping cough Corbis

Cases of malnutrition and other “Victorian” diseases are soaring in England, in what campaigners said was a result of cuts to social services and rising food poverty.

NHS statistics show that 7,366 people were admitted to hospital with a primary or secondary diagnosis of malnutrition between August 2014 and July this year, compared with 4,883 cases in the same period from 2010 to 2011 – a rise of more than 50 per cent in just four years.

Cases of other diseases rife in the Victorian era including scurvy, scarlet fever, cholera and whooping cough have also increased since 2010, although cases of TB, measles, typhoid and rickets have fallen.

Chris Mould, chairman of the Trussell Trust, which runs a nationwide network of foodbanks, said they saw “tens of thousands of people who have been going hungry, missing meals and cutting back on the quality of the food they buy”.

 

Read More Here

 

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The Independent

Malnutrition cases in English hospitals almost double in five years

Admissions to hospitals have soared as poorer families struggle to afford food

• Charlie Cooper, Kunal Dutta
• @charliecooper8
• Sunday 17 November 2013

 

The shocking impact of recession and austerity on England’s poorest people has come to light again in figures showing the number of malnutrition cases treated at NHS hospitals has nearly doubled since the economic downturn Rex

The shocking impact of recession and austerity on England’s poorest people has come to light again in figures showing the number of malnutrition cases treated at NHS hospitals has nearly doubled since the economic downturn.

Primary and secondary diagnoses of malnutrition – caused by lack of food or very poor diet – rose from 3,161 in 2008/09 to 5,499 last year, according to figures released by the health minister Norman Lamb.

While the data does not include information on the circumstances of each diagnosis, the rise coincides with a dramatic increase in the cost of living, and a spike in demand for charity food hand-outs.

The figures, broken down by region, reveal the heaviest burden of hunger is being felt in rural areas. Hospitals in Somerset saw the most cases, with 215 diagnoses, followed by Cornwall and Scilly Isles.

 

Read More Here

Goodbye Middle Class: 51 Percent Of All American Workers Make Less Than 30,000 Dollars A Year

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End Of The American Dream

The American Dream Is Becoming A Nightmare And Life As We Know It Is About To Change

By Michael Snyder, on October 20th, 2015

We just got more evidence that the middle class in America is dying.  According to brand new numbers that were just released by the Social Security Administration, 51 percent of all workers in the United States make less than $30,000 a year.  Let that number sink in for a moment.  You can’t support a middle class family in America today on just $2,500 a month – especially after taxes are taken out.  And yet more than half of all workers in this country make less than that each month.  In order to have a thriving middle class, you have got to have an economy that produces lots of middle class jobs, and that simply is not happening in America today.

You can find the report that the Social Security Administration just released right here.  The following are some of the numbers that really stood out for me…

-38 percent of all American workers made less than $20,000 last year.

-51 percent of all American workers made less than $30,000 last year.

-62 percent of all American workers made less than $40,000 last year.

-71 percent of all American workers made less than $50,000 last year.

That first number is truly staggering.  The federal poverty level for a family of five is $28,410, and yet almost 40 percent of all American workers do not even bring in $20,000 a year.

If you worked a full-time job at $10 an hour all year long with two weeks off, you would make approximately $20,000.  This should tell you something about the quality of the jobs that our economy is producing at this point.

And of course the numbers above are only for those that are actually working.  As I discussed just recently, there are 7.9 million working age Americans that are “officially unemployed” right now and another 94.7 million working age Americans that are considered to be “not in the labor force”.  When you add those two numbers together, you get a grand total of 102.6 million working age Americans that do not have a job right now.

So many people that I know are barely scraping by right now.  Many families have to fight tooth and nail just to make it from month to month, and there are lots of Americans that find themselves sinking deeper and deeper into debt.

If you can believe it, about a quarter of the country actually has a negative net worth right now.

What that means is that if you have no debt and you also have ten dollars in your pocket that gives you a greater net worth than about 25 percent of the entire country.  The following comes from a recent piece by Simon Black…

 

Read More Here

How Rising Rents Are About to Crush American Spending Power

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 Alex Lozupone

  Rent Is Too Damn High Party car

Wikipedia.org

……….

October 23, 2015

 

We just learned America’s rental affordability crisis is as bad as it’s ever been. Unfortunately, it’s about to get a whole lot worse.

The American Community Survey for 2014, released a few weeks ago, found that the number of renters paying 30 percent or more of their income on housing – the standard benchmark for what’s considered affordable – reached a new record high of 20.7 million households, up nearly a half-million from the year before. Despite the improving economy, the increase was nearly five times bigger than last year’s gain.

That means about half of all renters live in housing considered unaffordable. And the latest increase comes on top of substantial growth since 2000 that has seen this number climb by roughly six million households over the period, an increase of about 41 percent.

Related: More Americans Struggling to Pay the Rent

 

Read More Here

Rent is so high in San Francisco that I’m a software engineer and I live in a van

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QUARTZ

 

Money-saving mobile. (Katharine Patterson)

 

Written by

Katharine Patterson

October 17, 2015

About a year ago, I was having lunch with a friend when I made a throwaway comment: “Have you seen the rent in San Francisco? If I get a job in the Bay Area, I’ll totally live in a van.”

As I sit in darkness writing this, I’m trying to keep my typing quiet, lest a real inhabitant of the neighborhood I’m parked in should walk by and wonder about the sounds coming from the rusty bus loitering on their block. Yes, you understood that correctly: Today, I work in a multi-million dollar office complex, and I live in a van.

This summer, after receiving a job offer in Silicon Valley, I went on Craigslist and began sifting through housing listings: “verrrrrryyy cheap bedroom ;),” “great deal on rent!” A single room with a shared bathroom? Two thousand per month on the low-end. A small studio apartment, you ask? If your startup wasn’t recently bought for seven figures, forget about it.

I perked up after finding a listing for $1,000 per month. Now this could work. Clicking through to the details section however revealed the offer was for a single bunk in a room with eight people, a set-up referred to as a “hacker house” by an (evil) marketing genius.

Even if I was to spend the huge majority of my salary on rent, I knew I would likely still be in a grim living situation, resenting every penny I handed over that could have gone towards paying back my student loans. And as a software engineer, I’m one of the lucky ones! Imagine those who aren’t lucky enough to be on the tech payroll.

Anyway, three weeks ago I took the equivalent of three months’ rent and bought an old red bus. It’s a 1969 VW camper van with a hole in the floor and a family of spiders that has more of a right to be here than I do (sleeping in your car on public land in California is illegal).

(Katharine Patterson/blog.thinkkappi.com)

But with the help of Ikea and an army of cleaning supplies I was able to get the bus into livable condition.

Read More Here

Many Low-Income Workers Say ‘No’ to Health Insurance

 

 

 

MSN News

The New York Times

By STACY COWLEY 6 hrs ago

© Logan R. Cyrus for The New York Times An employee at Golden Corral taking clean cups from the kitchen. Some Golden Corral restaurants began offering health insurance to employees, but few have…JACKSONVILLE, N.C. — When Billy Sewell began offering health insurance this year to 600 service workers at the Golden Corral restaurants that he owns, he wondered nervously how many would buy it. Adding hundreds of employees to his plan would cost him more than $1 million — a hit he wasn’t sure his low-margin business could afford.

His actual costs, though, turned out to be far smaller than he had feared. So far, only two people have signed up.

“We offered, and they didn’t take it,” he said.

Evidence is growing that his experience is not unusual. The Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate, which requires employers with more than 50 full-time workers to offer most of their employees insurance or face financial penalties, was one of the law’s most controversial provisions. Business owners and industry groups fiercely protested the change, and some companies cut workers’ hours to reduce the number of employees who would be eligible.

But 10 months after the first phase of the mandate took effect, covering companies with 100 or more workers, many business owners say they are finding very few employees willing to buy the health insurance that they are now compelled to offer. The trend is especially pronounced among smaller and midsize businesses in fields filled with low-wage hourly workers, like restaurants, retailing and hospitality. (Companies with 50 to 99 workers are not required to comply with the mandate until next year.)

Read More Here

Hundreds of outraged Air France staff stormed a meeting where Company plans to cut 2,900 jobs were being discussed. Execs had shirts torn from their backs as they escaped the angry mob

 

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No need to get shirty! Air France executive is forced to climb a fence after staff attack him and rip off his shirt when he announces 2,900 job losses

• Air France executives attacked after staff stormed company headquarters
• Company plans to cut 2,900 jobs and 14 aircraft from its long-haul fleet
• HR vice president and long-haul flights deputy had their shirts torn off

By Sara Malm for MailOnline and Reuters

Published: 08:46 EST, 5 October 2015 | Updated: 13:17 EST, 5 October 2015

Air France managers have been forced to flee the company’s headquarters after being attacked by a baying mob of workers that tore their clothes off.

Hundreds of angry staff stormed the Air France building at the Charles de Gaulle International Airport in Roissy, near Paris, after the company announced plans to cut 2,900 jobs on Monday.

Two senior executives, Xavier Broseta, Vice President for Human Resources, and Pierre Plissonnier, deputy of Air France long-haul flights, both had their shirts ripped off their backs as they were evacuated through the crowds.

 

Under attack: A shirtless Xavier Broseta, Executive Vice President for Human Resources at Air France, is evacuated by security after employees interrupted a meeting with representatives staff at the Air France headquarters building at the Charles de Gaulle International Airport in Roissy, near Paris

Shortly before the attack, Mr Broseta and Air France Chief Executive Frederic Gagey had outlined a drastic cost cutting plan, which would see 2,900 jobs cut by 2017.

The cuts include 1,700 ground staff, 900 cabin crew and 300 pilots, as part of efforts to lower costs, two union sources said.

Air France also confirmed in the meeting that it plans to shed 14 aircraft from its long-haul fleet, reducing the business by ten per cent, and that it wants to cancel its order for Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft.

This outraged staff, who are already at loggerheads with the company, and hundreds stormed the building, interrupting the meeting.

Mr Broseta and Mr Plissonnier were aided by security as they tried to escape the baying mob

Read More Here

102.6 million working age Americans without jobs right now. That is not an economic recovery – that is an economic depression .

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Unemployment Line  –  Wikipedia.org

The Economic Collapse

Right Now There Are 102.6 Million Working Age Americans That Do Not Have A Job

By Michael Snyder, on October 4th, 2015

The federal government uses very carefully manipulated numbers to cover up the crushing economic depression that is going on in this nation.  For the month of September, the federal government told us that 142,000 jobs were added to the economy.  If that was actually true, that would barely be enough to keep up with population growth.  Sadly, the truth is that the real numbers were actually far worse than that.  The unadjusted numbers show that the U.S. economy actually lost 248,000 jobs in September and the government added more than a million Americans to the “not in the labor force” category.  When I first saw that number I truly believed that it was inaccurate.  But you can find the raw figures right here.  According to the Obama administration, there are currently 7.9 million Americans that are “officially unemployed” and another 94.7 million working age Americans that are “not in the labor force”.  That gives us a grand total of 102.6 million working age Americans that do not have a job right now.

That is not an economic recovery – that is an economic depression of an almost unbelievable magnitude.

This is something that my friend Mac Slavo pointed out the other day.  I encourage you to read his analysis right here.  If we measured unemployment the way that we did decades ago, we would all be talking about how similar Obama’s economy is to the Great Depression of the 1930s.

But instead we let the feds get away with feeding us this completely fraudulent “5.1 percent” unemployment number and most of us believe the mainstream media when they tell us that everything is just fine.

 

Read More Here

Fed blames 94 million Americans out of work for simply not wanting a job

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October 2, 2015 2:18 PM MS

Kenneth Schortgen Jr

Finance Examiner

Wall Street

Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images

It has been a long time since the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) published the real unemployment numbers for all Americans who fit the criteria of being able to work in the economy, but have not been able to find a job for one reason or another. Instead, the BLS has simply changed their data models numerous times since 1980, and now we have reached the point where there are actually more people between the ages of 16-54 who don’t have a job versus those in that same age range who do.

And with the Federal Reserve using these BLS numbers as the catalyst for whether to raise interest rates after nine years of them being pushed down to near zero, one regional central bank on Oct. 2 laid the blame for there being over 94 million Americans out of work and not counted in the unemployment models as simply ‘not wanting to get a job’.

 

Read More Here

 

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There Are Not Enough Jobs, And Austerity Is To Blame

The September jobs report is spooking even the optimists.

Daniel Marans Reporter, The Huffington Post

 

 

The especially poor September jobs report reinforces what many economists have been saying for months: The six-year recovery from the Great Recession has been too weak to create enough jobs for America’s growing population, let alone restore significant wage growth. 

Domestic fiscal austerity, not recent global volatility, is primarily to blame for the inadequate job growth, these economists argue.

The U.S. economy created 142,000 jobs in September, bringing average monthly job growth to 198,000 this year — way down from the monthly rate of 260,000 in 2014. Average hourly wages decreased slightly in September, meaning pay has risen just 2.2 percent in the past 12 months. 

In addition, the percentage of the population working or looking for work has dropped to 62.4 percent, the lowest it has been during the Obama presidency. The progressive Economic Policy Institute estimates that we need 2.6 million more jobs to keep up with population growth.

• Economic Policy Inst ‏@EconomicPolicy 11h11 hours ago

  To keep up with population growth, we still need 2.6 million more jobs. http://on.epi.org/1L8D7mk 

  

  Read More Here