Everyone knows we’re not coming out of this unscathed. In the meantime, some are working hard at eating, drinking, and being gay, while others realize eternal souls of Americans are in imminent danger and are concerned about that.
All quintiles , when you adjust for spendable money after taxes are more than 10% down ... not just 5 or 6% .. and necessities are up in price ,, food by greater than 10% in a year , energy including electric is hovering at highs..
More and more Americans are collecting government handouts. More and more Americans have “left the labor force”.
America's debt has reached unsustainable levels.
As long as they allow the sloths, politicians and media to force them into it.
If the gummint can squeeze taxes outa you, you are middle class.
We will last as long as our net incomes are not exceeded by our gross taxes from every level and every left wing scam pretending not to be a tax in the form of bonds for education and fees we never heard of before.
Related question: “How long can the Fed prop up the stock market with QE gazillion?”
“The article references MIT’s Living Wage Calculator, which I found to be unrealistic in terms of the high-cost cities I know well (Honolulu and the San Francisco Bay Area). It appears the calculator data does not represent actual rents or food prices; the general estimates it uses woefully under-represent on-the-ground reality.”
As the very first link shows (which seems to be ignored elsewhere in the article) big Liberal cities are a problem unto themselves when it comes to affordability,
and income requirements there should not be conflated to any requirements elsewhere in the nation.
My other problems with with the “living wage” analysis is that the job, & hours worked assumptions about “living wage” are wrong and false, because they are positioned on the idea that everyone working is working as “primary head of household” and every job is a job meant and intended to be filled by a “primary head of household”. That has never been the reality of many jobs, as I have seen all my life.
I have been around sixty plus years, and going back to my childhood and teens, we considered ourselves middle class BUT dad’s job was not allowed to be considered all that all of us needed, and we all worked and contributed, when and how we could. Maybe what’s wrong is too many families today are under the impression that such a family pulling together financially is both verbotten and passe, and most of all politically incorrect. Maybe what’s missing is not missing, except that the TV families in the 1950s were idealized, and not COMMON in many ways, where today the gritty reality of most families family life is sold as just a “raw deal”.
Lastly, the authors reference to a study of who is Middle Class is a reference to a bogus study. They make their own criteria and new standard for middle class - applied where, when and how in past determinations of middle class?, no mention. Then as I reviewed the criteria it seemed to me that MOST of who has usually been considered middle class have NEVER mat all that criteria and many not even most of the criteria. By that criticism, to me, the study cannot be used as defining a sliding back of the middle class. Other factors might make valid arguments, but not that study.
wealth “inequality” is a statistic that does not identify who can and cannot afford something
both living wage (which uses income statistics) and “wealth estimates ignore the wage and wealth equivalents of public assistance in the lower income quintiles. and yes, staying at a “rent subsidy/public housing” level income amounts to an “asset” just like home equity, even though it is not a cashable, transferable asset - in fact, many with such assistance understand it that way and will not improve their “earned income” so as to not lose that asset