The middle class used to be the majority. No longer.
The country is exporting manufacturing jobs that used to support the middle class. There has been an influx of poor illegal immigrants taking jobs under the table. There are fewer two wage earner families and there are many more single female with children households.
I worry about the future for the country and my children.
There are charts showing how different cities are doing in the article.
No, the immigrants taking low wage jobs are not to blame. A lot of those people work hard at jobs and are still in the lower class, not the middle class.
I agree that we are exporting manufacturing jobs.
Also unions are no longer the force that they used to be. And companies lay off workers to increase stock prices and salaries for the few at the top. The people who now have to absorb the additional workload receive no/very small salary increases.
The answer is Economics 101; if you want more of something, subsidized it. When you enact policies that export middle class jobs, allow vast immigration of unskilled labor, and have a social safety net that acts more as a honey trap than a springboard out of poverty, it is little wonder that the middle class is collapsing.
Until there are some vast changes in society, the middle class will continue to wither and eventually disappear until the US economy resembles that Argentina, Brazil or most of the third world; a small, stable core of wealthy, and a vast sea of semi-working poor dependent on the government subsidizes.
I do not buy for a second that hordes of illegal aliens are taking away middle class jobs, especially not poor ones. Maybe if there are illegals taking software engineering jobs, those would be middle class jobs, otherwise that’s just propaganda.
Workers share of the economy has decreased.
Latest estimates are this decrease equals around $535 billion a year.
Interesting look at where and the middle class has shrunk - and it’s not always because they are losing ground and falling into the lower class.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/13/upshot/falling-middle-class.html?_r=0
The robots are coming. Jobs & entire fields are disappearing, not just moving to a different country.
In my world, there seem to be a lot of barriers to good jobs. Requirements for degrees, a certain work history + experience, personal reference, when, in fact, we could just train (inexperienced, no degree) people the way we want things done AND they might stick around a long time instead of job-hopping.
The jobs that are going to be affected in the future are white collar jobs.
What happens when a computer will diagnose a patient’s illness?
Wall Street already has high frequency trading. What happens when financial planners are replaced by software programs?
The technology and information already exists for the IRS to figure out the income taxes for 30 to 40 percent of the taxpayers. What happens to tax preparers?
Just a few examples…
How are companies/industries going to survive if no one has a job anymore to pay for their goods and services because they’ve all been replaced by robots/computer software?
As someone who has illnesses that don’t fall into neat little boxes, this scares the crap out of me.
Yes, I know doctors are fallible but the idea of plugging in “symptoms” to a computer and it spitting out a diagnosis just does not sit right with me.
But then again, I’m a techno-pessimist.
It is complicated, and the rhetoric on both sides of the coin politically doesn’t help. Illegal immigration has in fact hurt certain jobs, the claim that it takes ‘only low wage jobs’ like dishwashing and such (which is true), isn’t true in others. 25 years ago or more someone could make a living wage doing construction (and I know that for a fact, my uncle was a general contractor for many years), even laborers could make a fair wage. Look at most job sites today, and you will see a bunch of people laboring from Mexico and central and south america, and many of them are illegal immigrants taken in as day laborers, no worker comp costs, no insurance, guy gets hurt they dump him at an ER and leave, often don’t pay them, and pay them these days around 8 bucks an hour where I live…so it has hurt some jobs.
However, that isn’t the big one, it is a combination of things that have caused problems. One of the biggest is the middle class is often defined by the Median income, yet if you look at how much that is, that number has lost significant purchasing power compared to decades past, it hasn’t kept up with inflation (it is why they say real wages are fallen)…and what is really scary to me is that when they talk about the decline in the middle class, they are talking people not even making that median wage, 40k or so a year, roughly 20 an hour)…so what we even define as midlde income increasingly can’t provide what we used to call a middle income existence.
Those who support jobs going overseas point out that it has benefitted the middle class, because it has brought down prices…and yes, for certain things, they are correct, things like tv sets and appliances are much cheaper by any measure than they once were, clothing to a certain extent is, but it hasn’t translated elsewhere. They had these op eds in the NY Times commenting on Trump’s anti import stance, and it showed they live on planet zero, they made the argument that the lower cost had helped the working class and so forth, but were totally oblivious to something, and that is even with the cheaper prices people are struggling. While high end retailers are doing great business, constantly Nordstrom’s, Neiman Marcus, Coach, Tiffany’s and the like are doing good business, the low end retailers are not doing well, Wal Mart and Target, and even the dollar stores, are having troubles, and the prime cause isn’t because people are doing well and moving upscale, it is that even with cheap prices, lot of people can’t afford it. The other thing I hear is “we need to retrain people for jobs”, but that also leaves out something. Let’s say because manufacturing is booming in China, they are buying airplanes from Boeing, which should increase jobs. Leaving out something Trump is right (if china buys planes, they insist large parts of it be made in China), how do you retrain that mill worker from Georgia, and then get him to where the jobs are (I use him in the general, could be a man or woman). Economists live in a world of models and assumptions, but they are removing themselves from reality often in doing so.
Stockholders love outsourcing, stock analysts beam and upgrade stocks when companies announce they are moving jobs to China and India and Mexico, which makes the stockholders, especially the executives and big stockholders (who are all well off people) very happy, it is how CEO’s can make a hundred million in a year. Yet no one is bothering to think “hmm, we produce widgets, how will people afford them if they don’t have a job”. For the past 40 years, they have gotten away with it, first when with couples both people worked, then by all kinds of gimmicks, loose credit, low rates, home equity loans during the housing boom…but those have fallen aside, so now what do they do? The Chinese and Indians and Mexicans can’t buy the goods, so what do they do?
And yes, automation is increasingly taking over. Michael Crichton in “The Andromeda Strain” had medical scanners that could do as well as a human physician, but the main character jokes “The AMA won’t allow it”…that time is coming, for routine medical care there is no reason that we couldn’t have automated medicine. Likewise, robotics technology and nano technology are coming to a head where surgery may very well be done by robots in the not so far future. There already are automated financial advisors, Schwab and others have sophisticated investment “advisors” that is a program (and they don’t charge for it) that people can use, for example. In manufacturing, even China and India and Africa face a dilemma, because 3D printing technology is improving rapidly, the level of what it can do is huge, so cheap labor will fail because not only will 3D printing be cheaper, it also will introduce levels of quality not possible with traditional production.
It raises real questions, about what will happen going forward? The current mania, that the answer is education and retraining, will start to fail, we already have college graduates working at Starbucks and the like, and what happens when more skilled things are automated or go away?
Vonnegut predicted this in his book “Player Piano” more than 50 years ago, he predicted a society where there are the ‘engineers’ (managers really, in our new world order, computers are getting smart enough that they can design and build the next generation of things without much or any human intervention), and everyone else either is in the military or the ‘wreeks and wrecks’ (public works projects).
The ideas being pushed by the left, heavy tariffs, closing off trade, won’t solve the problem, and likely would hurt for a lot of reasons. In a utopian world, people would not have to work, that you would have a star trek kind of world where people could work at what they wished, find their passion, and not have to worry about money, I doubt that is going to happen, we have too many people still who crow about their success, who point to the person who ‘makes it’, without looking at the broader picture, or like for example the legal field, realizing that they can work hard, get into law school, get a degree, and find out there are no jobs for them (for example, legal research, which once was a ground floor for lawyers at law firms, has dried up, as has financial research, lot of it has been exported to places like India), and until a lot more people find themselves in trouble, instead of coming up with real solutions, you are going to see the left blaming big business and the politicians that support them, and the right wing saying there is no problem except people expect too much, want too much and don’t want to work, and we already are seeing some aspects of what happens, the anger behind the current campaign speaks to that. Even some conservative economists are looking at this, and saying it isn’t just the gap between the very well off and everyone else, it is about figuring out how to define the economy going down the line. I don’t think Marxism ever was the answer, but he raised many of the same questions, about how do we provide for people so they have some minimum level to survive? How do we do that, without taking away people’s dignity and pride?
Sorry this is long, but it is a complex topic.
“What happens when a computer will diagnose a patient’s illness?”
We are still light years from this being a reality. True that some tests are fully automated, but it still takes a trained human brain and a pair of eyes to piece the puzzles aka complex illnesses.
There was a thread about everybody receiving a guaranteed income. I was against this. However, I am rethinking this.
If jobs are replaced by robots, how can we expect people to find jobs?
Maybe jobs won’t be that necessary.
Society today is very different than it was in 1900.
I could see society change quite dramatically.
I remember going to a Disneyland exhibit in Tomorrowland in the 1960’s. One of the themes was there was going to be less need for work and people were going to have all this leisure time. (Is that two themes?) 
Hasn’t happened yet, but it might.
Then governments will have to tax the bejessus out of corporations/businesses so everyone can receive their guaranteed income - and that income has to be enough to support industry.
I know there are automated financial advisor products, but they don’t dominate their space yet.
I think these products will dominate in the future.
@emilybee, yes. There are problems with guaranteed income.
I think they would try this in a few local areas before guaranteed income covers the nation.
Some people would still work. I guess they tried this in a small area of Canada. They found that the primary wage earner did not quit his job. The secondary wage earner quit sometimes. Younger people quit their jobs in bigger numbers but they went back to school. They weren’t slacking off.
The program was abandoned. It was unclear to me if the guaranteed program cost too much or it wasn’t politcally acceptable.
Switzerland is voting on a guaranteed income program very soon, but it looks like it will lose by quite a bit.
I don’t think we are ready for this, but if society changes dramatically?
Social security and medicare and medicaid haven’t been around forever, but they are around now.
Society changes.
I’m definitely worried about not only this country but the entire earth. My kids have to live here. I’ll be fine, one way or the other, but I worry for the ones who will carry on long after I am gone.
The costs of everything just seems to go up and up. Medical insurance, education, occupancy costs, cars and trucks, etc. We completely accept the fact that cities like Chicago are out of control with crime. It is overwhelming to the cops. No one seems to care. Not far from Chicago, the K-12 teachers in Detroit had a few sick out days to call attention to their concerns and once again, if you blinked, you didn’t even hear about it on the news. Detroit is another major US city that is virtually flat broke. That should be unacceptable but it isn’t. It is normal. I don’t think Chicago or Detroit are all that different than a bunch of other places in this country and it is scary.
The worst part is the USA is significantly more stable than most of the rest of the world which is wracked with governmental corruption and fraud and income inequality that makes us look like a paradise by comparison. The notion that government doesn’t work makes more and more sense to me yet its almost as if we need bigger government to fix the problems we have. Combatting the Zika virus, for example. I am somewhat amazed we haven’t had a major nuclear war since WMD have been around for about 70 years with roughly 40 of those years with multiple unstable countries having WMD’s. It is just a matter of time before something really bad happens there and if that doesn’t do it nature seems like it is getting rougher all the time too.
It is hard for me to believe the next 50 years will be good.
Living in a highly populated area, as we do, it’s easy to forget that large parts of the country do not have jobs. Of course, there are job deserts in urban areas, but I’m thinking primarily of rural America.
Trust me, you don’t forget there are few jobs if you live in rural America 