by Michael Snyder, The Economic Collapse Blog:
What in the world is happening to the middle class? Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most vibrant middle class in the history of the world. When I was growing up, a single income was all that was needed to support a middle class lifestyle for an entire family. My mother didn’t work outside of the home, and that was the case with many other mothers that lived in our middle class neighborhood. None of the kids that I played with or went to school with were “wealthy”, but everyone lived comfortably. But now everything has changed. The middle class in America is working harder than ever, but it has been steadily shrinking. With each passing day, more Americans are falling out of the middle class and into poverty, and this is a trend that should deeply alarm all of us.
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In most families, both parents have to work extremely hard just so that the bills can be paid each month.
In fact, in many cases both parents are either working multiple jobs or putting in insane amounts of overtime. At this point, squeezing endless hours out of workers has become a permanent state of affairs in many industries. The following comes from an NBC News article entitled “36-hour shifts, 80-hour weeks: Workers are being burned out by overtime”…
From firehouses and police stations to hospitals and manufacturing plants, workers say they are being required to work increasing overtime hours to make up for post-pandemic worker shortages — leaving them sleep-deprived, scrambling to cover child care duties, and missing birthdays, holidays and vacations. While the extra hours can provide a financial boost, some workers say the trade-off is no longer worth it as they see no end in sight to a problem that has now lasted for several years.
“It’s getting to that fever pitch moment,” said Gonano, who is president of the Virginia Beach Professional Fire and EMS union. “It’s just rampant. People are tired of working all the overtime. It’s definitely causing morale issues.”
Many years ago when I worked in Washington D.C., I remember putting in 80 hour weeks.
Working such long hours can really affect your health after a while.
Unfortunately, these days many Americans have no other choice. The only way that the bills are going to get paid is by working countless hours.
But even though Americans are working so hard, they aren’t doing so well. According to a brand new survey, only 14 percent of U.S. voters say that Joe Biden’s economic policies have made them better off…
A new poll spells out the steep economic cliff that President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign is facing.
Just 14 percent of voters think his policies have made them better off, according to the survey published Monday.
And overall almost 70 per cent said Biden’s economic policies had either hurt the US economy or had no impact, including 33 per cent who said they believed the president’s policies had ‘hurt the economy a lot.’
This is one of the primary reasons why so many voters have soured on Biden.
And when that same survey asked about the sources of financial stress, the number one response was inflation…
When asked what was causing them most financial stress, some 82 percent of those surveyed said price increases.
‘Every group — Democrats, Republicans and independents — list rising prices as by far the biggest economic threat . . . and the biggest source of financial stress,’ said Erik Gordon, a professor at Michigan’s Ross School.
‘That is bad news for Biden, and the more so considering how little he can do to reverse the perception of prices before election day.’
Over the past several years, the cost of living has gone up much faster than paychecks have.
Just look at the cost of housing. Home prices have gone into the stratosphere, and as a result housing is now more unaffordable than it has ever been before…
The income of a typical homebuyer in the United States surged to $107,000 from $88,000 last year, as home affordability precipitously worsened, according to an annual report from the National Association of Realtors.
The 22% jump was the highest annual increase on record, and puts homeownership out of reach for many families in the United States, where the median income is about $75,000, according to the Census Bureau.
Buying a home has become much harder for people as mortgage rates surged over the past two years and home prices continue to rise due to very low inventory.
And don’t even get me started on food prices.
When I get to the checkout counter at my local supermarket, I feel like asking the cashier what organ I should donate in order to pay for my cart of groceries.
In order to get inflation under control, the Federal Reserve has been aggressively hiking interest rates, and an economist that worked at the Fed for six years is warning that interest rates are going to go even higher…
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