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Decline of the Middle Class

Decline of the Middle ClassMany articles have been written about the decline of the middle class in America. In our post we are assuming that the middle class is already well on the way to decline. Which really means that the middle class will shrink leaving fewer people with sufficient money to achieve the American dream. The 1% group continue to get rich. While more and more people have trouble just making enough to pay for food, clothing and lodging. These are the basics for many people without even considering simple extras like owning your own home, saving for retirement or paying for health care. Why is this occurring?

Factory Jobs are Disappearing

Many factory jobs have left the country for other countries. As well as many jobs have been automated. The jobs that are left are either very few high skilled jobs or many jobs that are not paid well. They are low skill jobs. The Walmarts, the fast food stores and the retail industry in general are examples of low paid, low skilled and no benefits types of jobs. Consumers with these types of jobs can barely survive let alone even think about saving for retirement.

It has often be said that money breeds money. It is certainly true for the rich. They have invested in the stock market. They have seen their share values escalate by huge amounts over the last 5 years. Sure they may have lost some money during the recession. However they only lost this money if they cashed in these investments at that time. If they held onto these investments, they not only recovered their loss, they are well ahead of these potential losses. They are even more rich than they were before. But the poor middle class guy has fallen further behind due to his lack of investments in the stock market.

Decline of the Middle Class

The gap has certainly widened between the upper class and the poor with the middle class getting further  squeezed. As time goes on and these people approach retirement, they will find that they are having to work well into retirement years with no thought or ability to even think about retirement.

Over the next 20 years we anticipate that this decline of the middle class will become even more pronounced and will lead to more crime, to more poverty, to situations where families must look after each other since there will be no one else to look after them. This will create a lot of hardship, even more than what we have today. Unfortunately this is the environment that we have to look forward to over the next 20 or 30 years.

There will be more gated communities, there will me more crime, there will be more people begging and so on compared to what we have today. This is not a great scenario, unless we can get America back to work and lower the cost of living.

What are your thoughts? For more ideas about future trends, click here.

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