The End of the Middle Class

by

       George Sontag

"Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence." -John Adams, - December 1770  

      The quote above by one of our Founding Fathers is known as a truism. There can be no logical argument against truth, a point we here at The American Constitutionalist ensure with every article we print. At one time, the United States had the most vibrant middle class the world had ever seen. We were the envy of the rest of the planet, and people all over the world wanted to come here and live out “the American Dream”. That is no more. Continuing the discussion we started on September 24th, New World Order - Destroying the Middle Class, we can see proof that “the American Dream” is now dying, and most Americans don’t seem to care.

      The recent study known as The Pew Report found that the middle class in America is declining and no longer constitutes a majority under the Democratic Socialism that now rules the United States. The study, which found that “after more than four decades of serving as the nation’s economic majority, the American middle class is now matched in number by those in the economic tiers above and below it.” Pew found that the “share of American adults living in middle-income households has fallen from 61% in 1971 to 49.8% in 2015. 

     These are the cold hard facts:

• For the first time ever recorded, middle class Americans make up a minority of the population. But back in 1971, 61 percent of all Americans lived in middle class households.
• Median wealth for middle class households dropped by an astounding 28 percent between 2001 and 2013.
• In 1970, the middle class took home approximately 62 percent of all income. Today, that number has plummeted to just 43 percent.
• There are still 900,000 fewer middle class jobs in America than there were when the last recession began, but our population has gotten significantly larger since that time.
• According to the Social Security Administration, 51 percent of all American workers now make less than $30,000 a year.
• The median net worth of families in the United States was $137, 955 in 2007. Today, it is just $82,756.
• At this point, the U.S. only ranks 19th in the world when it comes to median wealth per adult.

     
 Poverty has also increased as it will under a society that has any form of Socialism.

• According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 49 percent of all Americans now live in a home that receives money from the government each month, and nearly 47 million Americans are living in poverty right now.
• In 2007, about one out of every eight children in America was on food stamps. Today, that number is one out of every five.
• 46 million Americans use food banks each year, and lines start forming at some U.S. food banks as early as 6:30 in the morning because people want to get something before the food supplies run out.
• The number of homeless children in the U.S. has increased by 60 percent over the past six years.
• According to Poverty USA, 1.6 million American children slept in a homeless shelter or some other form of emergency housing last year.
• For the poorest 20 percent of all Americans, median household wealth declined from negative 905 dollars in 2000 to negative 6,029 dollars in 2011.
• There are 1.5 million “ultrapoor” households in the United States that live on less than two dollars a day. That number has doubled since 1996.
•  If you have no debt and you also have ten dollars in your pocket, that gives you a greater net worth than about 25 percent of all Americans.

       

Socialism is the destruction of the middle class leaving a two class society, the elite few, who have most of the income and resources, and everyone else.

• Today, the top 0.1 percent of all American families have about as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent of all American families combined.
• The 20 wealthiest people in this country now have more money than the poorest 152 million Americans combined.

        A recent nationwide survey discovered that 48 percent of all U.S. adults under the age of 30 believe that "the American Dream is dead."What in the world is it going to take for people to finally wake up and start doing something besides blindly going to the polls to elect more elitist stooges who are bringing about our demise?

       According to Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer, the authors of a new book entitled “$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America“, there are 1.5 million “ultrapoor” households in the United States that live on less than two dollars a day. That number has doubled since 1996.

*Editor's Note - The income it takes to be middle income varies by household size, with smaller households requiring less to support the same lifestyle as larger households. For a three-person household, the middle-income range was about $42,000 to $126,000 annually in 2014. However, a one-person household needed only about $24,000 to $73,000 to be middle income. For a five-person household to be considered middle income, its 2014 income had to range from $54,000 to $162,000.