Both official data and numerous news stories confirm how badly average citizens have fared in the wake of the global financial crisis. Food stamp use has fallen only a tad from record high levels. WalMart has reinstituted layaway. The average home with a mortgage has no equity in it. Further confirmation comes via the Census Bureau release that showed the US poverty rate has risen a full percent in the last year to 15.1%, a level not seen since 1993, the end of a short but nasty downturn. And 1/4 of American children are living in poverty. Fewer young adults are able to start households. 14.2% of Americans between the ages of 22 and 34 are living with their parents, up from 11.8% before the downturn. As the Financial Times noted:
“To have hit 15.1 per cent is truly extraordinary,” said Alice O’Connor, a professor who studies poverty at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
“We are entering territory which looks like the period before we even started fighting a ‘War on Poverty’ in the 1960s. It’s quite stunning. This is a terrible statement about the depths of the Great Recession but, even more, about the recovery, which has clearly left the poorest out completely.”
Median income plunged 2.3% in 2010, is are down a full 7% from their high in 1999. Inflation adjusted median income is at the 1996 level. That makes it the first decade since the Great Depression in which inflation-adjusted median income has failed to increase. IN addition, Americans without health insurance reached 49.9 million, an increase of 1 million in the last year.
But focusing on the median as the American middle class is being hollowed out may be the wrong focus. Tech Ticker discusses how marketing giant Procter & Gamble has decided there is no future in the middle class ...
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