Movin' On Up: The 'shrinking middle class' fallacy

Twenty years ago, as most of my friends prepared for graduation and the next steps in their lives, I was a college drop-out - flunk-out really. I was making barely over minimum wage and working two jobs, sometimes three, to pay bills. There were a good many reasons that I found myself in the predicament that I was in at the time, rather than fitting myself for a cap and gown, but none of them were external. In the intervening time period, a lot of things have changed. Which is why when I hear Bernie Sanders talk about the disappearing middle class, I just have to shake my head.

Bernie is looking at a number in isolation and saying ‘there are less people in this group than there were 30 years ago’. And his followers eat it up, because they want someone to blame for the malaise that affects them: college debt, poor job prospects, flat-lining wages. All of these things are because of the 1% on Wall Street, Bernie will tell you. They hold all that wealth! But wait just a second… If those people aren’t middle class anymore, exactly where did they go?

The Unequal Arguments on Income Inequality

There has been, for a few years now, a lot of hue and cry about income inequality. The obvious solution of those who think this is a drastic problem is to reallocate the funds of those with the most money to those who have the least. After all, they say, in the richest country in the world, why should anyone go without?

But wait – why stop there? Why can those in the richest country in the world not afford to provide for all? And by all, let us be truly inclusive. The ‘income inequality’ crowd like to crow about the 1%, but fail to acknowledge that the overwhelming majority of Americans fall within the 1% themselves. An American with a household income of $37,000 is better off than 99% of people in the world. In fact, according to a World Bank economist, the bottom 5% of Americans are still better off than 68% of the world. Yet we don’t see that same hue and cry to address this global issue from the folks on the streets wanting $15 per hour as a minimum wage. Why is that?