http://rt.com/usa/news/workers-usa-middle-class/
Until a few years ago the middle class in America represented the American Dream. Being able to have a steady job and to own a house and a car became a symbol for reaching the American Dream and living a life of happiness. But recently we’ve witnessed America pushing into the direction of a two class society. In Chapter 10 of the textbook, the text discusses class distinctions and how in the past few decades the income gap between the rich and the poor is continuously growing, ultimately driving out the middle class. The video discusses the struggles for many Americans to accomplish the American Dream given the horrible conditions for finding a job, and how the “middle class is being squeezed out”. What once was more than just a dream, has become a fantasy.
The video gives a statistic that there are over 13 million people still looking for a job in the United States and that although people are in desperate needs of jobs, there continues to be an increase in military spending. It’s disappointing that the main focus is not on solving the wide income gap and helping the millions of people that are suffering without a job. Instead of putting so much money into the military, there should be a priority of creating jobs for our people. The job search for individuals keeps getting more and more difficult, even for people with an education or with experience from previous jobs. And a lot of individuals with jobs are living their lives through each paycheck, and having very little left to make, for example, mortgage payments each month. America has been looked at as a country where if you work hard, you will succeed. But individuals are working harder than ever, and dreams of living a life with a steady job and a house are becoming tougher to turn into reality.
We constantly hear and read that the economy is still doing bad. Millions of people are unemployed. The people that are suffering the most are people from middle and working class. We often hear that even with a bachelor degree it is difficult to find a decent job. The bachelor degree is becoming worthless because everyone is getting a college degree. More and more people are pursuing a college degree and it is becoming very competitive to find a job because more and more people qualify for the same position.
With unemployment rising, the middle class is getting smaller and smaller. People don’t have enough income to support themselves and their families. More and more people are losing their homes because they get laid off from work. And people do not buy a house because of job insecurity. This pattern does not allow the economy to grow which unfortunately the government or the private industry has not figured out how to deal with it. And now more people are falling into the working or poor class category.
Owning a house or at the very least finding a job is getting really tough. People are getting very frustrated and don’t know what else to do. The way that the economy is going there is going to be an even smaller middle class. There has to be an immediate solution to bust the economy up and get people back to work or the United States is not going to be the land of opportunities anymore.
The disappearance of middle class families in United States is slowly happening. I found from World Bank that actually 72.3% of total population in United States falls under the category of middle class, others belong to either rich class or poor class. If you look at the history of human civilization, you could clearly see that a strong and big middle-class helps a country to excel and epitomize their progress. For a long long time, countries like US and some Western European countries have done just that.
However, the recent recession has changed the complexity of the whole story. United States is probably at its worst shape after that ‘Great Depression’. In these 70 years, United States has successfully elevated a lot of people out of poverty. If you ask me about my opinion, I would see the GDP growth of United States has reached its peak. It might not going to grow any faster. A lot of students are finding it hard to get a job. There might be plenty of reasons for that. I can talk about manufacturing sector, since the cost of production is high in United States, they are outsourcing thousands of jobs to China and overseas countries. It is not necessarily those corporates fault in my opinion, as I was mentioning in my 1st blog. I think capitalism as a system is not helping American economy since it emphasizes on free-labor theory and absolute maximization of profit. This is one aspect of economy and we have examples like this in other sectors as well. A lot of call center (service) jobs are outsourced to India and other South Asian countries for example. Outsourcing is one way to look at the disappearance of middle class. There are plenty of other ways to perceive it as well.
At the end of the day, United States has to maintain this rich tradition of having a good middle class in order to maintain their status as the biggest economy in the world.