America has always had its rich, and its poor -- but the number of the poor is growing these days. And the reason its growing is because the middle class is shrinking as more Americans experience stagnant wages in the face of growing inflation, which results in a shrinking wealth. Traditionally, at least since the Great Depression, America has had rules in place which forced a fairer capitalism -- and funneled part of the growing productivity into the hands of workers. And these rules were the foundation of a healthy and growing middle class.In fact, it was probably true years ago that the middle class in the U.S. was one of the world's wealthiest. Sadly that is no longer true. Not only is the middle class shrinking, but its wealth is also shrinking. One of the ways to judge the health of a middle class is to look at the median wealth -- the wealth where half of the population has accumulated more and half has less. One would expect that in the United States, the richest country in the world, that the middle class would be one of the wealthiest in the world (maybe even the wealthiest).
But anyone who thought that is wrong. There are at least 26 other nations (see chart above) that have a wealthier middle class (as determined by median wealth of the country). In fact, at least 14 of those 26 nations have a median wealth more than twice as large as that of the United States. The Huffington Post lists 10 reasons for the shrinking numbers and wealth of the American middle class:
- We don't have real universal health care. We pay more and still have poorer health outcomes than all other industrialized countries. Should a serious illness strike, we also can become impoverished.
- Weak labor laws undermine unions and give large corporations more power to keep wages and benefits down. Unions now represent less than 7 percent of all private sector workers, the lowest ever recorded.
- Our minimum wage is pathetic, especially in comparison to other developed nations. (We're # 13). Nobody can live decently on $7.25 an hour. Our poverty-level minimum wage puts downward pressure on the wages of all working people. Also while we secure important victories for a few unpaid sick days, most other developed nations provide a month of guaranteed paid vacations as well as many paid sick days.
- Wall Street is out of control. Once deregulation started 30 years ago, money has gushed to the top as Wall Street was free to find more and more unethical ways to fleece us.
- Higher education puts our kids into debt. In most other countries higher education is practically tuition free. Indebted students are not likely to accumulate wealth anytime soon.
- It's hard to improve your station in life if you're in prison, often due to drug-related charges that don't even exist in other developed nations. In fact, we have the largest prison population in the entire world, and we have the highest percentage of minorities imprisoned. "In major cities across the country, 80 percent of young African Americans now have criminal records." (See Alexander, Michelle (2010), The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York, The New Press. p. 7. as cited in Wikipedia.)
- Our tax structures favor the rich and their corporations who no longer pay their fair share. They move money to foreign tax havens, they create and use tax loopholes, and they fight to make sure the source of most of their wealth -- capital gains -- is taxed at low rates. Meanwhile the rest of us are pressed to make up the difference or suffer deteriorating public services.
- The wealthy dominate politics. Nowhere else in the developed world are the rich and their corporations able to buy elections with such impunity.
- Big Money dominates the media. The real story about how we're getting ripped off is hidden in a blizzard of BS that comes from all the major media outlets... brought to you by...
- America encourages globalization of production so that workers here are in constant competition with the lower wage workers all over the world as well as with highly automated technologies.
But all of these reasons are just parts of one big reason -- the imposition on the U.S. economy of the Republican "trickle-down" economic plan. This tilted the economic playing field toward the richest people and the corporations, leaving most other Americans (the 90-99%) scrambling just to keep up with inflation and unable to grow any new wealth.
The GOP plan has been immensely successful in making the richer much richer, but it has hurt ordinary Americans severely. It is time to return this country to a sane economic policy that will benefit all Americans. But that can only be done if the Republicans are voted out of power. Since the Republicans refuse to give up on their failed pie-in-the-sky "trickle-down" policy, the American people must give up on the Republican Party.
