Middle Class Squeezed - I Mean Literally Squished

09 August 2013
Dave Johnson, Campaign for America's Future              

 

Two stories in the news this week illustrate what is happening to the middle class. One story is about numbers showing how the middle is being squeezed. The other is about how people are literally being squished. “The new business model, apparently, is to shrink the seats, charge extra for everything and offer nothing for free that might be construed as an amenity.”

In the Wall Street Journal, Behind the Middle-Class Funk tells the numbers story,

Many economists define the middle class as those adults whose annual household income is between two-thirds and twice the national median—today, that means roughly $40,000 to $120,000. By this standard, according to the Pew Research Center, the middle class is significantly smaller than it once was. In 1971, it accounted for fully 61% of adults, compared with 14% for the upper class and 25% for the lower class.

Four decades later, the middle class share had declined by 10 percentage points to just 51%, while the upper class share increased by six points and the lower class by four. The U.S. income distribution is still a bell curve, but the left and right tails are fatter and the hump in the middle is lower.

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