Want a middle-class life? Prepare to pay up

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

The American middle class is struggling, and the reason is simple, according to a "Squeezed," a new book by journalist Alissa Quart: Affording a middle-class life costs 30 percent more than just two decades ago, while incomes over that period have barely budged.

"Squeezed" follows the lives of people including a public school teacher who drives for Uber to earn enough money to support his family and a meteorologist who juggles three jobs to pay for health insurance. The problem, Quart argues, isn't that Americans are managing their money badly or are lazy, but that the economy has fundamentally changed.

Quart writes that her book, published last month by Harper Collins, stemmed from her own experiences struggling to maintain a foothold in the middle class.

"When I posted on Facebook that I couldn't afford the relatively modest life my academic parents had, many friends added their own stories about how their income goes to rent and child care—the latter often siphoning off up to 30 percent of a family's earnings," she noted.

The markers of a middle-class life are "less and less common," she added. "The middle class is endangered on all sides, and the promised rewards of belonging to it have all but evaporated."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/personalfinance/want-a-middle-class-life-prepare-to-pay-up/ar-BBL1RXe?li=BBnb7Kz

Winning baby!!!!!

[smirkymonkey]

1. K&R

[Sherman A1]

2. The new Gilded Age has been

A long time in the making.

[TheFrenchRazor]

6. yep, and i'd say it's time for a correction. nt

[Sherman A1]

8. Long overdue

but, when you fight back, of course then it's class warfare........

[appalachiablue]

9. Planning for the New Gilded Age was after WWII, if not earlier..

[Sherman A1]

12. Agreed

They have been working on this for a very long time.

[backtoblue]

3. My salary, after 12 years of experience

was the exact same as my ex FIL made in 1980.

[CrispyQ]

4. Former senator Byron Dorgan wrote a book called "Take this Job and Ship It!"

In it he said that if minimum wage had kept up with CEO pay, it would be over $23 per hour, & that book was written in 2004.

[TheFrenchRazor]

5. this is a reality; i think young people in particular don't realize that there has been a transfer o

transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top that has been going on for at least 3-4 decades.

[eleny]

7. Corporate "giants" are going to have to figure this out if they want us to buy their products

We had one phone, one tv and one record player in our house when I was growing up. Unless we got free books the library was how we read and we read plenty.

These days our expectations are higher and I wouldn't want to go back to the old days when kids also got polio, measles, the killer flu and we took a Saturday night bath. No thanks.

So if they want us to buy their stuff they've got to figure it out. But maybe they don't care if we have purchasing power. Maybe they're relying on the Chinese to consume in mass quantities. Isn't that a kick in the pants. I've been trying so hard to be such a good shopper since I'm all grown up. They don't need me? Well shoot me now! Roll me to the curb so I can dry up and blow away.

[oberliner]

10. Or don't have kids

[roamer65]

11. People are being inflated into poverty.

Inflation is a tool of the wealthy elites for subjugation of the lower classes. It is a stealth form of rationing.

[appalachiablue]

13. Helluva lot of brutal truth there, esp. 'stealth form of rationing.'