The middle class has been shrinking for 30 years and  it might as well have met its demise.  Do you make more than 27 thousand dollars a year? If so then you are literally doing better than half of the nation financially.  As per the Social Security Administration wage statistics the median is 27,520.00. Who the heck can  raise a family off of that? No one. No American Dream anyway. Take away taxes and that may equate to 2,000 a month if you are lucky. Less than 500 dollars a week. Try paying a car payment, mortgage & utilities, heath insurance while providing food, clothing and basic entertainment to your family. Yeah. Not happening. Which is why both parents in the household must work and with no hiccups.

Sadder still and more often than not is when both parents work (often over the weekly 40 hour work week) just to pay the bills and nothing else.  Have your paychecks risen over the years? No. But the cost of living and your taxes sure do. This pushes the middle class back and back and its ranks slowly out of existence.  The middle class dream everyone aimed for (A modest home, 2 cars and a nice vacation every year) is a thing of the past for so many of our working middle class.  Just look around and you will see that the middle class is decaying. People are either doing very well or struggling to  make ends meet. Not to mention a forth class, the entitlement class. This class often does much better than the middle for all its perks but that is another story.

Up until recently there has always been plenty of  entry level jobs readily available to people looking to work hard and excel. This helped the middle class to do  well and the job pool is one of the things that made America great. It enticed people from all over the world to come to America. Everyone wanted a part of the American Dream. But as mentioned the middle class and its American Dream are dead. Even if you the reader happen to be doing well (consider yourself lucky)  I assure you the middle class is on life support.  No matter how hard so many people try these days they struggle.

But what good is it for me to ramble. Here are some numbers and links to back up my claim. Listed below are 13 more unlucky signs that the middle class is near non existent.

#1 If you defer to the governments own data, , about 20 percent of the families in our nation have an entire household on the couch. As in… they do not have a single house hold member that is employed. No one is working anymore.  This scares me more than a lot of the stuff I talk about but also leads into everything I mention below.

#2 Debt. The average persons credit card debt in the United States is $15,279. The average persons  student loan debt in the United States is $32,250. The average homeowner mortgage debt in the United States is $149,925. In total… U.S. consumers are $11,360,000,000,000 in debt. What happens when you cant pay your credit card debt? You don’t get a mortgage or chance at owning a home.

#3 Our Nation (the US national debt) owes a whopping $17,263,040,455,036.20. CNN has reported that is has grown by$6.666 trillion alone in the Obama years.  Who pays this burden? The poor?Of course not. They, unfortunately, helped borrow a nice chuck of that change. The rich? the 1%. Hardly. The majority of that debt is and always has been a burden on the backs on the middle class. And does anyone really think this debt will ever be paid?

#4 Some of that amazing debt goes to welfare as mentioned.  3.7 trillion dollars has been spent on welfare programs over the past five years.

#5 If you ask the Congressional Budget Office, interest payments owed on our national debt will quadruple over the next ten years. Yeah baby.

#6 56 percent of all Americans now have “subprime credit”.

#7 The American Dream is going alright. The US Census Bureau reports that  meager 36 percent of Americans under the age 35 actually own their own home. This number has never been this low. Top that with the thought of retirement going out the window. Apparently 25% of all american adults have yet to save even one penny for retirement.

#8 Home ownership has plummeted.  It has fallen for the past eight years and now dropped to the lowest  it has been in 19 years dating back to 1995.

#9 Over half the nations  home owners (52 percent) of Americans can not even presently afford to live in the home they own.

“Over half of Americans (52%) have had to make at least one major sacrifice in order to cover their rent or mortgage over the last three years, according to the “How Housing Matters Survey,” which was commissioned by the nonprofit John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and carried out by Hart Research Associates. These sacrifices include getting a second job, deferring saving for retirement, cutting back on health care, running up credit card debt, or even moving to a less safe neighborhood or one with worse schools.”

#10 More people are forced to seek government help for health care. The medicad program  is excelling. Right now 82.4 million people live in a home where at least 1 person participates in medicaid,

#11 Just under the Obama years the number of Americans on food stamps has risen from to 32 million to 47 million. While we are on the Barack Obama bandwagon, the percentage of working age Americans that are presently working has declined from 60.6 percent to 58.6 percent.

#12 Don’t feel bad for the starving kids in Africa. Well, I shouldn’t say that. But lets worry about the starving folks here before there. One out of every five children in the United States is living in poverty presently. Thats 20% of our youth. Looking at another report by Feeding America  they state that 50 million Americans are presently dealing with hunger issues in America.

#13 I just don’t see the middle class ever returning to its former glory. Not only do we not have enough jobs to go around but the ones that are left are being shipped out of the country, worse still is that we bring immigrants into America to compete for the same pool of depleting jobs. Our youths life expectancy has magically been raised ironically along with the age in which one can collect social security, yet we sure aren’t any healthier.

Its a dog eat dog world and the only advise I can give is to work hard when you can. And if that fails you, like it has so many… just remember that no one cares for you or your family as much as you so and to do what ever you have to do to get a head in life.

Images via Mediawiki and MediaWiki again.