The phrase “middle class” summons the image of creepy, cookie-cutter houses and nuclear families with 2.5 children who are too polite to not be robots. In America, the middle class is the ultimate symbol of contentment – not immoderately rich, but just wealthy enough to be normal and have teens who decide that they are too cool for their parents’ sellout lifestyles. Within the past few decades, however, this suburbia has become increasingly difficult to grasp. It’s starting to seem like little more than a sci-fi setting of the past due to a little thing those suit-wearing monkeys who understand economics like to call “unequal wealth distribution.”
You’ve probably seen lots of news stories where people argue about minimum wage and various other money-sounding stuff, and maybe you sit there thinking, “I wish I could have an opinion on this, but I have literally no idea what’s going on.” In which case, same. Up until about three weeks ago, I just had the general “f*ck the bourgeoisie” attitude of your typical college student studying the arts. But now, thanks to one year of a public college education, I have a basis for that statement.
Despite what you may have been told by everyone in the upper class post-Reagan, the extremely rich cannot support the economy on their own by getting more rich. Sure, maybe they can buy four mansions, eight sports cars, and more gold-leaf toilet paper than they could conceivably need for a lifetime of pooping. But four mansions, eight sports cars, and a few hundred rolls of gold-leaf toilet paper do not a strong economy make. One person can only buy so much stuff. Which is why we need that creepy, cookie-cutter middle class.
They’re financially comfortable enough that they can buy stuff. Lots of stuff. It may not be one-hundred rolls of golden toilet paper, but millions of people can certainly support the regular toilet paper industry by buying millions of rolls. And now we’re a bit to focused on the whole toilet paper part of the anecdote. But the point is that millions of people in the middle class could collectively spend more money in more different areas that a single uber-rich dude in a top hat and monocle could spend. It’s this spending and ability to spend that make the economy super buff.
There has come a point, however, where that top hat and monocle man has shoveled all the money into his own hoard, leaving less and less for the middle class. Less money in their pockets means that they’ve had to take on more hours of work, and go deeper into debt to maintain the same lifestyle. But it soon became the case that this wasn’t enough – that people were slipping out of the middle class altogether. That means that they weren’t buying as much just for funsies, and thus not supporting the economy as well as they had been. As more and more people stumble into the abyss of the lower class, where people are exhausted from working, and still barely able to make ends meet (and where there is also little to no hope of escaping) they, understandably, get a little bit huffy. They panic and do things like elect a walking corn cob into the highest office in the nation because they think that the corn cob will smash the system that has made life so difficult for them.
So, what will be the repercussions of this growing problem, and how do we solve it? To that I say – I barely feel qualified to talk about this topic as much as I have. I guess we can hope that global warming destroys us before our economy completely falls apart? But, at the very least, you’ll know a little bit about why the economy is falling apart if that comes first.