It’s a gross oversimplification to try to blame healthcare cost increases for this. When your dad and mine were working in the 50’s and 60’s, only a small percentage survived a heart attack, and breast or colon cancer was an automatic death sentence. You’d end up with a new wheelchair instead of a new knee or hip and people died or suffered from a host of diseases we don’t even hear about nowadays.
On the other hand there have been many other factors affecting paychecks. Not the least of which is the flattening of the world resulting from advances in transportation, logistics, and communications. I can sit here in American designing things in collaboration with a colleague in Europe that will be built by a factory in China and sell them anywhere in the world through a website that costs less than what people in the 50’s and 60’s spent on their landline phone bill.
The challenge for America is to apply the spirit that has made us the greatest nation on earth, using the assets and capabilities we now have to create the next growth curve of prosperity. But it’s a lot easier to sit around bitching and moaning about how things aren’t the same as they were 50 years ago.
The Truth burns, that is why most people don’t like it.
The American middle class could be thriving today, but then they'd have to settle for what we used to define as a middle-class standard of living.
I'd suggest that the middle class is disappearing because most people don't WANT to be in the middle class.