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Middle Class Shrinks Further as More Fall Out Instead of Climbing Up
Middle Class Shrinks Further as More Fall Out Instead of Climbing Up
The middle class that President Obama identified in his State of the Union speech last week as the foundation of the American economy has been shrinking for almost half a century.
In the late 1960s, more than half of the households in the United States were squarely in the middle, earning, in today’s dollars, $35,000 to $100,000 a year. Few people noticed or cared as the size of that group began to fall, because the shift was primarily caused by more Americans climbing the economic ladder into upper-income brackets.
But since 2000, the middle-class share of households has continued to narrow, the main reason being that more people have fallen to the bottom. At the same time, fewer of those in this group fit the traditional image of a married couple with children at home, a gap increasingly filled by the elderly.
This social upheaval helps explain why the president focused on reviving the middle class, offering a raft of proposals squarely aimed at concerns like paying for a college education, taking parental leave, affording child care and buying a home.
“Middle-class economics means helping working families feel more secure in a world of constant change,” Mr. Obama told Congress and the public on Tuesday.
Still, regardless of their income, most Americans identify as middle class. The term itself is so amorphous that politicians often cite the group in introducing proposals to engender wide appeal.
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Manufacturing Hit by Oil-Price Plunge? Southeast Worst Since Financial Crisis
Manufacturing Hit by Oil-Price Plunge? Southeast Worst Since Financial Crisis
Atlanta Fed suspects oil bust, strong dollar.
Despite President Obama’s emphatic assurances in the State of the Union Address that “our economy is growing and creating jobs at the fastest pace since 1999,” there have recently been some uncomfortable squiggles, so to speak.
The collapse in the prices of oil, natural gas, and natural-gas liquids has started to make its imprint on the largest hydrocarbon producer in the world, namely the US of A. Oilfield layoffs and project cancellations are raining down on the oil patch on a daily basis. Suppliers are hit too. Many energy stocks are in the process of evisceration. Energy junk bonds are in a rout.
But consumers love it – those who aren’t losing their jobs over it – because they spend less on fuel. Consumers are voters. So politicians love it because voters love it. Hence, it’s good for the economy. I get that.
These sorts of squiggles have been worming their way into national numbers. For example, Markit’s Services PMI for December dropped to 53.3, down for the sixth month in a row, after having peaked in June. This was “not just a one-month wobble,” the report said, as the economy “lost significant growth momentum at the close of the year.” But it remained above 50, the dividing line between expansion and contraction. It’s still an expansion, and “growth is merely slowing from an unusually powerful rate rather than stalling.”
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Obama Vows To Fight For Climate Policies In State Of The Union But What He Didn’t Mention Was Just As Telling
Obama Vows To Fight For Climate Policies In State Of The Union But What He Didn’t Mention Was Just As Telling
President Barack Obama could not have signaled more clearly in his 2015 State of the Union address that he intends to fight for his legacy on climate change in the face of a hostile, anti-science GOP-led House and Senate.
But it was what the President didn’t mention that could negate his climate legacy: free trade deals like the Trans Pacific Partnership that undermine local efforts to lower emissions, projects like Keystone XL that lock us into decades of continued dirty energy use, and the exporting of American-made coal, crude oil and natural gas to overseas markets.
Which is not to say that every policy position Obama laid out regarding energy and the environment entirely matched his lofty rhetoric about climate change.
At this moment — with a growing economy, shrinking deficits, bustling industry, and booming energy production — we have risen from recession freer to write our own future than any other nation on Earth. It’s now up to us to choose who we want to be over the next fifteen years, and for decades to come.
While Obama went on to list a number of achievements made in growing domestic renewable energy capacity under his watch, he also continued to pay lip service to an “all of the above” energy strategy—a strategy scientists tell us we most definitely do not have 15 more years to continue subscribing to.
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