It was Dinesh D’Souza who said that the problem will be glaring, when the people in the wagon outnumber the people pulling the wagon.
Well, we’re there.
As Michael Snyder wrote earlier this year, Goodbye Middle Class: 51 Percent Of All American Workers Make Less Than 30,000 Dollars A Year. He references a Social Security Administration report from 2014.
In his article, he laments:
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.
What is most telling in the report for Snyder is that 38 percent of all American workers made less than $20,000 last year. 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.
Now there are many holes in this argument, like the fact that he is talking about single income people, not necessarily people with dual incomes, or those working more than one job.
But what is disturbing are the next three categories.
- 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.
We have seen 16 million more people go on welfare in America under Obama. And though the Obama administration continues to tout the unemployment numbers, the facts are that more people are out of work than during the Great Depression.
Further, the jobs that are available are menial for the most part. So in short, one is actually better off on welfare. As the writer points out:
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.
But it gets worse in his assessment.
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.
I haven’t fact-checked his work, but if this is true, it is indeed staggering. Add to this Synder’s declaration that about a quarter of the country actually has a negative net worth right now, and you can see things are worse than we thought.
The following comes from a recent piece by Simon Black:
Credit Suisse estimates that 25% of Americans are in this situation of having a negative net-worth.
“If you’ve no debts and have $10 in your pocket you have more wealth than 25% of Americans. More than 25% of Americans have collectively, that is.”
The thing is – not only did the government create the incentives, but they set the standard.
With a net worth of negative $60 trillion, U.S. citizens are just following dutifully in the government’s footsteps.
The fact is, America has lost most of its middle class, as most Americans are poor.
