The middle class: Why it’s struggling

last updated 8 January 2015

America’s middle class is “smaller, poorer, and more pessimistic” than at any time in living memory, said Taylor Batten in the Charlotte, N.C., Observer. A new study by the Pew Research Center found that for households earning between $39,000 and $118,000, the years from 2000 to 2010 were “a lost decade,” with the median middle-class income actually falling. And thanks to the collapse of house prices, the wealth of middle class families plummeted by 28 percent over the same period. The Great Recession is one obvious cause, said Henry Blodget in BusinessInsider.com, but so are the decline in wages caused by globalization, the decline of private-sector unions, and companies’ “wholesale embrace of a ‘shareholder value’ religion that values profit over everything else.” Many companies are reporting record profits, but are refusing to substantially raise salaries. As a result, the middle class no longer has the buying power that once made the U.S. economy “the envy of the world.”

You can blame President Obama for that, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. It’s true that the middle class’s problems began during the Bush administration, when there was “subpar economic growth” even before the Great Recession hit and cut median incomes by 2.9 percent. But incomes have sunk another 4.8 percent since the recession ended in June 2009, meaning “the Obama recovery has been worse than the Bush recession.” That does amount to “a stunningly bad economic record for an incumbent president to run on,” said Timothy Noah in The New Republic. Yet Obama remains the slight favorite to win. Why? The Romney-Ryan ticket is “uniquely terrible,” with its blatant emphasis on putting even more money in the pockets of the rich.

The reality is that neither Obama nor Romney can “do much to aid the middle class,” said Robert Samuelson in The Washington Post. What’s needed is a vibrant economic recovery, but the recovery will remain “glacial” until consumers regain confidence and start spending vigorously. Consumers, though, are still paying down all the household debt they ran up on credit cards and mortgages before the housing bubble burst in 2008. It’ll take years for that process to unwind. The good news is that thanks to “personal responsibility and a strong work ethic,” the middle class is headed back in the right direction. It’s those durable values, and not any presidential magic trick, that ensure “it will survive.”