America's once thriving middle class is slowly but surely being squeezed out of existence as the gap between the haves and the have-nots continues to grow due to the nation's failed trade policies that have benefited the very few, according to Michael Snyder.
"Wealth and power are rapidly becoming concentrated at the top and the big global corporations are making massive amounts of money," Snyder writes at Yahoo! Finance. "Meanwhile, the American middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence as U.S. workers are slowly being merged into the new "global" labor pool."
The top 10 percent of Americans now earn roughly half of the nation's wealth, according to The Business Insider. Just 1 percent owns 83 percent of all the nation's stock. That same 1 percent of Americans were also the beneficiaries of 66 percent of all income growth between 2001 and 2007.
"The big global corporations have greatly benefited by exploiting third world labor pools over the last several decades, but middle class American workers have increasingly found things to be very tough," Snyder writes.
So tough in fact, that 61 percent of Americans now "usually or always" live paycheck to paycheck, The Business Insider says. Ninety-five percent of Americans have not earned enough additional income to meet the rise in housing costs since 1975. And the bottom 50 percent of Americans now hold less than one percent of the nation's wealth.
The American middle class was built on the backs of the nation's manufacturing base. So it stands to reason that the middle class would also fall with the decline of the industrial sector.
Today, top executives make, on average, 100 times more than their employees. In the 1960s, that gap was just 30 times as much. It is no coincidence then that since the 1960s, America has added roughly 46 million jobs, while shedding over two million manufacturing jobs.
"The reality is that no matter how smart, how strong, how educated or how hard working American workers are, they just cannot compete with people who are desperate to put in 10 to 12 hour days at less than a dollar an hour on the other side of the world," Snyder writes.
The nation is now more reliant on the low-paying service sector than ever. Currently, 40 percent of those that are employed work in a service industry job. The shift from the manufacturing sector to the industrial sector has forced countless Americans out of the middle class and into lower class status, making the nation's gap between the rich and poor even more pronounced.
In 2006, the 400 highest earning taxpayers in America made $105 billion in total adjusted gross income, for an average of $263 million each. Those making minimum wage in 2006 made approximately $13,100 for a difference of 20,000 to one.
In addition, a 2009 study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that the U.S.' wage gap between the rich and the poor is greater than that of 30 other developed nations - including the United Kingdom, known for its class system with little upward mobility. Furthermore, the study found that America's wage gap is more fitting for an economically downtrodden nation like Russia or Turkey. The top 10 percent of earners in America made roughly $93,000 per year, while the10 percent on the low end of the scale made only $5,800 per year.
"The globalism and 'free trade' that our politicians and business leaders insisted would be so good for us have had some rather nasty side effects," according to Snyder. "It turns out that they didn't tell us that the 'global economy' would mean that middle class American workers would eventually have to directly compete for jobs with people on the other side of the world where there is no minimum wage and very few regulations."
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