Most of us who have been around since the Space Age began grew up in a middle class home with a Dad who worked, a Mom who stayed home to take care of the house and kids and at least one dog. There was that “corporate ladder” to climb with the promise of raises and promotions to those who worked hard. The economy thrived on the employment of trained and motivated people. Technological advances were in their infancy. This Middle Class Picture is the equivalent of the American Dream ? work hard at your job and you too can have a home, a car, college for the kids and a comfortable retirement. Unfortunately, this “picture” is fading fast.
The nature of available jobs has changed and technology has replaced the human being. Add to that the financial crises of the 1980s and especially in 2008 for the big changes in business today. Corporations focus on growing profits not hiring workers or expanding. When expenses increase here they outsource to Bangladesh. Banks hesitate to lend to those who do not already have a lot of cash on the balance sheet.
Leave it to a British paper to point out the one topic that is rarely mentioned in America even in the never-ending political debates, which is the emergence (again) of the “haves and have-nots”. The phrase “haves and have-nots” was last heard in the middle 1960s when President Lyndon Johnson instituted Medicare and Medicaid as part of his Great Society. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and there are more poor people than ever before. Paul Harris writing for the British national daily paper The Guardian, bemoans the demise of the middle class. Even large firms like Proctor and Gamble and Heinz no longer market their products to the middle class consumer aiming instead for the high-income or low-income customer. Citibank coined a phrase to describe the phenomena called The Consumer Hourglass Theory ? a society that bulges at the top and bottom and is squeezed in the middle. The income of the median American family is lower now than in 1998. The US Census Bureau recently released a survey that shows that the richest 20% of the US population controls 84% of the wealth. Another way to look at it is the richest 400 American families have the same net worth as the bottom 50% of the nation.
When the divide is so great between rich and poor and much of the middle class falling into poverty due to loss of home, job and retirement nest egg, there is a lot of fallout for society in general. Life expectancy of those in poverty decreases, crime increases, and solid middle class jobs change to low wage ones as evidenced by the Detroit auto workers where the new hires make only half of what the long-term workers make doing similar jobs. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was quoted by Aaron Smith in an article for CNNMoney when he expressed his concern over the risk of riots from high US unemployment similar to what we have seen in Europe and North Africa. The mayor said, “You have a lot of kids graduating college (who) can’t find jobs. That’s what happened in Cairo. That’s what happened in Madrid. You don’t want those kinds of riots here.” Our country does not have much to look forward to with an unemployment rate stuck at 9.1%. Even worse is the underemployment rate that factors in the number of people who have given up looking for a job and people who want to work full-time but have to work part-time. Underemployment is 16.2%.
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