Posted on 09/22/2014 8:29:16 PM PDT by Theoria
In 1988, the typical American adult was 40 years old, white and married, with a high school diploma. If he was a man, he probably worked full time. If she was a woman, she probably didn’t.
Twenty-five years later, Americans are older, more diverse and more educated. We are less likely to be married and more likely to live alone. Work is divided more evenly between the sexes. One thing that hasn’t changed? The income of the median U.S. household is still just under $52,000.
The government’s release last week of income and poverty data for 2013 brought renewed attention to the apparent stagnation of the American middle class — not just since the financial crisis hit six years ago this month, but for much of the decade that preceded the crash. The report showed that the economic recovery has yet to translate into higher incomes for the typical American family. After adjusting for inflation, U.S. median household income is still 8 percent lower than it was before the recession, 9 percent lower than at its peak in 1999, and essentially unchanged since the end of the Reagan administration.
“As a country,” New York magazine’s Annie Lowrey wrote Friday, “we peaked in the late 1990s.”
There’s little doubt that the past 15 years have been hard ones for the middle class. But median income isn’t necessarily the best way to show that. The problem is that changes in median income reflect several trends all jumbled together: the aging of the population, changing patterns in work and schooling, and the evolving makeup of the American family, as well as long- and short-term trends in the economy itself. Understanding the state of the American middle class requires digging a bit deeper than median income alone.
(Excerpt) Read more at fivethirtyeight.com ...
The good news is that the parasite class that doesn’t work and the federal apparatchiks are partying like it’s 1999!
In sales, one receives a “raise” every time they sell an extra item or service. As a per hour or salary slave, you are at the whim of the employer.
In hindsight 9-11 marked the beginning of the end of American economic power.
What is interesting is that all changes that have taken place are as a result of government policy, not because of individual choice.
And in sales you get a raise every time there’s a price increase.
Their raise was spent on domestic social programs, wasted on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and unappreciated foreign aid that ended up in the wrong pockets.
What is the income of the “parasite class”? I guess it is low, so that the growth of this class will pull down the median income. So if the median income is the same, and the parasite class has grown, the median wage earner income must have grown too.
Go Bears!!!
Middle class benefits have decreased since the Reagan years, and drastically increased for minimum wage earners.
The qualification for household income for government assistance has more than tripled since the Reagan years, and of course, middle class households do not need to bother looking.
A ‘household’ who earns 18,000 a year with two kids (nevermind if one or both of the adults (or more adults) are earning wages under the table) can land nearly $32,000 a year in benefits (health insurance, vision, dental, food stamps, cash assistance, WIC, rent assistance, low priced cable, telephone, internet, electricity, gas...) That pushes them up into nearly median household income, and once you add in the under the table wages, pushes them straight into the middle class.
Meanwhile, taxes for everything have gone up, and of course, legislatures across the country want to raise it even futher.
PFL
It’s gotten so bad that last year I got a 1% raise and I was grateful.
but the rest of us have to usually pay an accoutant, pay him, then pay the taxman as if what they take out each paycheck isn't enough...
Progressives do not want a middle class.
Just the 1% and the peons.
Fairly misleading. Do those charts with trend lines so the sharp ups and downs average out, and the turn is 2007/8. The millenium bubble is the high, but it was a brief IT/ internet/stock market bump that evened out.
Running massive trade deficits and sending 50,000 US manufacturing facilities to Asia will do that.
You think it’s bad now. just wait till we have to start paying the health costs, welfare, incarceration and school bills for all the illegals Obama is pumping into the country.
Maybe people should work on their skills and keep their “tools” sharp and current.
In 1988 programmers/developers demanded good salaries. Nowdays the ability to program computers is a trade, at best. I can get a roomful of programmers for $5 an hour.
My skill is in determining WHAT needs to be programmed and WHY and HOW it solves the problem(s).
That is why salaries stagnate — people stagnate.
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