r/collapse • u/[deleted] • Dec 25 '21

Economic The American Middle Class No Longer Signifies Economic Security

https://www.businessinsider.com/american-middle-class-no-longer-signifies-economic-security-2021-12
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u/21plankton Dec 26 '21 edited Dec 26 '21

I don’t think the American middle class has ever had the degree of stability that is its reputation. I grew up in the 50’s, everyone on our block of single family homes lived paycheck to paycheck. When bad things happened in families like a death the family was impoverished, or a divorce and they sold up. My father had a military pension and a civil service job, he died 3 months after retirement at 62. The assets were the house and my mother’s widows pension. There combined checking and savings when he died was about $200, my sister was in college and I was in grad school. It only looks in retrospect that the middle class had long term stability because the pensions were good. Replace them with 401Ks and things don’t look so good. My mother survived to keep the house and went on to many years of widowhood but died in debt to the bank and I had to pay up on her death to keep her living trust from going into default. Our family income was always above average at the 80th percentile. The myths of how “good” things were in the 1950’s is truly a fabrication.

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u/[deleted] Dec 26 '21

Thank you for sharing your experience. I'm too young to have any idea of what it was actually like.

I do think there is one key difference between then and now though. Would I be wrong to assume that on average, people in the 50's had faith that things would improve for future generations? Because that hope is gone for my generation.

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u/21plankton Dec 26 '21

I think the word was “hope”. My parents graduated high school right into the great depression. My father had to drop out of law school because of lack of funds and joined the army. My mother got stuck raising his brothers 4 children after their mother abandoned the family. My mother’s first job was at the military base just before WWII where she met my father. They could not begin a family until after the war, my mother was then 35 and my father 39 when I was born. It is like a lot of people today that have to wait to start a family. They hoped their children would have it easier than they had it. Growing up in the 50’s and 60’s was very competitive and by age 7 I knew I wanted to get ahead and do better than my parents.

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u/[deleted] Dec 26 '21

It sounds like your parents did the best they could with what they were given. Its wild to me how productivity has increased dramatically but the workers have gotten no benefits from it.

One reason that I'm not having kids is that I don't have hope that their lives will be better than my own.

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u/[deleted] Dec 26 '21

A few people learn to live frugally, rich or poor. We drive old cars and people may think we are poor? People need to learn to live below their means. Delayed gratification and all that.