by Michael Snyder, The Economic Collapse Blog:

The middle class in the U.S. has been steadily shrinking for decades, but in recent years our leaders have greatly accelerated that process.  In 2020, 2021 and 2022 they absolutely flooded the system with new money, and almost all of that new money went into the pockets of the wealthy.  The gap between the wealthy and the rest of us is now larger than ever, and that isn’t a good thing for our society.  Even if you are still making as much money as you did a few years ago, you have lost a lot of ground financially, because the cost of living has been rapidly eating away at our standard of living.  As I covered the other day, household income in the United States has declined by 9.1 percent since April 2020 after adjusting for inflation and taxes.  In other words, the middle class is a whole lot smaller than it was in April 2020, and it continues to get smaller with each passing day.