The End of the American Dream: The Death of the Middle Class

The End Of The American Dream (2011): With around 120,000 people declared bankrupt each month, many of the squeezed middle-class see the American dream slipping away.

We'll Never Have It So Good Again

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: The middle classes can no longer afford the houses and schools that their parents did – and the future looks even more squeezed for their children

The Government’s social mobility tsar, Alan Milburn, will this week warn that social mobility has gone into reverse. For the first time in a century, the middle classes are becoming worse off. In the words of one Whitehall official: “Social mobility is no longer just an issue for children from poor families. There’s a real risk that children from families with above-average incomes will in future have lower living standards than their parents.”

To which I can only ask: you mean you’ve only just noticed? What took you so long?

It has been at least 20 years since I realised that, even though I was earning more than my father had ever made in his life, I could never hope to afford to live in a house like the one I grew up in, nor give my children the kind of education he provided for me and my sisters. And I am not the child of a wealthy man. My father was a diplomat. He earned a modest Civil Service salary. But my mother had inherited a few thousand pounds from her late father. So in 1964 they used that money to buy a five-bedroom detached house opposite Kew Gardens in south-west London. It cost £8,000.

In the early 1980s my parents sold it for the impressive-sounding sum of £120,000, having given me the chance to buy it first. I had to decline their offer: £120,000 was way beyond my means at the time. But I was at least able to get on to the housing ladder. In 1984, my then girlfriend, now wife, Clare and I bought a tiny one-bed Fulham flat for £34,000. So that was more than four times what my parents had paid for a large house. But it was at least affordable: about twice our joint incomes at the time.

Meanwhile, my old family home kept appreciating. Had house prices kept pace with inflation, one worth £8,000 in 1964 should now cost a little over £137,000. Well, in August 2011, our former home was placed on the market. The asking price was £2,475,000. So a house that had once been affordable by a young, middle-class couple was now being aimed at buyers who were, by any normal standards, very rich indeed. Read on and comment » | David Thomas | Monday, October 14, 2013

The Death of the Middle Class Will Undermine Our Democracy

THE GUARDIAN: The squeezed middle yelps. Indeed, on the latest statistics, it is gasping for air. Will they riot, or form an orderly queue to loot Debenhams?

A while back we heard a lot about the "squeezed middle", the decent, hardworking people who were having to tighten their belts or expand them according to the price of spelt. No more long breaks at Easter. More Lidl, less Ocado. Less discussion of house prices, more of the cost of education, all of this underpinned by a niggling anxiety about longterm employment. Sure, zero hours and freelance life is great for young "creatives". Less good if you have children, ever get ill, or (and this may come as a blow) you are not actually a "creative" but a worker. A middle-class one with a salary, but a worker nonetheless.

Workers should be able to save but are finding it impossible. The squeezed middle yelps. Indeed, on the latest statistics, it is gasping for air.

A sign of its distress is surely seeing Marx quoted in everything from the Daily Mail to the Spectator, publications not adverse to class war themselves. Now their fight is plaintive. It is for the middle class, which Marx said would be crushed by the logic of late capitalism. He spoke specifically about how the small shopkeepers and tradespeople would fail. There would be left the great mass of poor people and a tiny minority of the ultra-rich, and then of course violent revolution. » | Suzanne Moore | Wednesday, August 28, 2013

The Strange Death of the British Middle Class

THE SPECTATOR: The great stabilising force in our society is disappearing fast

To Voltaire, the British class system could be summed up in a sentence. The people of these islands, he said, ‘are like their own beer; froth on top, dregs at bottom, the middle excellent’. A harsh judgment, perhaps, but one that might still have some truth in it today. Yes, we have horrible poverty in our council estates and toffery on our country estates. But Britain is a country that has always taken pride in what we think of as middle-class virtues — hard work, honesty, thrift and self-help.

Today, however, we are witnessing the strange death of the middle class. In Britain, as in the United States, it isn’t just being squeezed — it is actually shrinking and sinking. This is the most disturbing social change of our age and will probably dominate your children’s lives. The lifestyle that the average earner had half a century ago — reasonably sized house, dependable healthcare, a decent education for the children and a reliable pension — is becoming the preserve of the rich. Middle-class pensioners look on amazed at how their children, now into adulthood, seem to have a far harder time.

Just as Britain has an unwritten constitution, so the values of the middle class have been tacitly understood — even if they have proven difficult to define. ‘England,’ declared the Liberal MP Charles Masterman in 1909, ‘is the tone and temper which the ideals and determinations of the middle class has stamped upon it.’ Advocating the Great Reform Act, Lord Brougham put it even better. ‘By the people, I mean the middle classes,’ he said, ‘the wealth and intelligence of the country. The glory of the British name.’ The Conservative party, when it has been most successful, has sought to define and champion the middle class — or, more importantly, its ideals. David Cameron tries, still, now and again. His government, he likes to say, is on the side of ‘hard-working people who do the right thing’.

And how might you define the right thing? Studying hard at school and university, finding a job, getting married, saving money and buying a house. For those who did that, Britain has been — until recently — a superb place to live. Evelyn Waugh wrote Brideshead Revisited in 1945 as a requiem for a ruling class that he thought would be supplanted by a new, regnant middle. This seemed to arrive in the Thatcher government, in the ascendancy of a grocer’s daughter from Grantham who revered small businessmen and savers. It struck many as crude, certainly déclassé. But it seemed to represent a transfer of power from the well-born elite and towards a self-confident middle class. » | Ed West and Fraser Nelson | Saturday, August 24, 2013

The Pain in Spain: Recession and the Middle Class
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Unemployment, debt and the collapse of industry have brought Spain to its knees – even the middle classes are now queuing at the food banks

Spain, the fourth-largest economy in the Eurozone, is treading water. Europe is poised to approve a loan of up to €100 billion to save its stricken banking sector, and with Spain's borrowing costs remaining dangerously high, fears are growing that it could follow Greece, Ireland and Portugal in a full-scale bailout. The prospects for growth are low as Spaniards steel themselves for the effects of €27 billion worth of cuts this year as the country struggles to bring its budget deficit down from 8.9 per cent of GDP in 2011 to under three per cent by 2014.

Spain is forecast to be the only country among the 17 nations of the Eurozone to remain in recession in 2013. Unemployment, already at 24.3 per cent, is expected to worsen. Half of all Spaniards aged between 18 and 25 are out of work – youth unemployment in Spain now exceeds 50 per cent, matching that of Greece. Blocked out of a labour market that favours older employees on permanent contracts who are expensive to fire, youth workers in Spain have suffered the brunt of the economic crisis. Once, many unskilled youths found work in the construction sector, but with growth crippled and Spain sliding into its second recession within three years the competition for jobs is high.

Where their parents looked to a bright future, as Spain developed from a fledgling democracy on the death of the Fascist dictator Francisco Franco to one of the success stories of the European Union, today's youth have little to do with their time but join marches and sit-ins against the austerity cuts, the political system and rising unemployment.

In Tres Cantos, a dormitory town 20 miles north of Madrid, the heat of the day was barely diminished at 7pm. An elderly couple shuffled beneath a pergola draped in wisteria, seeking out what little shade there was. Restaurant terraces were empty, their tables laid optimistically for an evening rush. The one hive of activity was outside a collection of white portable buildings on scrubland behind metal fencing in the heart of the town centre. Here, a queue of people snaked out of the gates. Their heads down, they pulled shopping trolleys and clutched bags marked with the names of leading supermarkets, but this was not a supermarket. It was a Red Cross centre. Read on and comment » | Fiona Govan | Saturday, July 21, 2012

Can America Survive without Its Backbone, the Middle Class?
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: As the gaps within the classes widen, American society is starting to fracture.

My friend J grew up in Chicago, but spent his summers in a small town on a Michigan lake. His family, because they came from the city and because they were “summer” visitors, were slightly more privileged than those who lived in the town. Nevertheless, the town considered itself “middle class” and the children observed no social distinctions playing together. J told me recently that he had been back to that town and found it utterly changed: shops were boarded up, houses were being repossessed, cars were old. He no longer had much in common with people he had known as children, some of whom were now unemployed, all of whom had far lower incomes than he.

J isn’t a hedge-fund manager or a plutocrat, but he is a member of the American upper-middle class, a group which is now sociologically and economically very distinct from the lower-middle class, with different politics, different ambitions and different levels of optimism. Thirty years ago, this wasn’t the case. A worker in a Detroit car factory earned about the same as, say, a small-town dentist, and although they might have different taste in films or furniture, their purchasing power wasn’t radically different. Their children would have been able to play together without feeling as if they came from different planets.

Now they couldn’t. Despite all the loud talk of the “1 per cent” of Americans who, according to a recent study, receive about 17 per cent of the income, a percentage which has more than doubled since 1979, the existence of a very small group of very rich people has never bothered Americans. But the fact that some 20 per cent of Americans now receive some 53 per cent of the income is devastating. Read on and comment » | Anne Applebaum | Friday, October 28, 2011

My comment:

This is the direct result of Reaganomics: Let the rich become ever richer! Damn the poor! Who cares about social cohesion? The result will be blood on the streets. If these ridiculous, selfish policies are not reversed, and soon, there will be revolution. It's inevitable. – © Mark

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Paul Krugman: Income Inequality and the Middle Class

Harriet Harman: If You're Middle Class, You Can't Work Here
Photo of Harriet Harman courtesy of The Telegraph
THE TELEGRAPH: Simon Heffer wonders if Miss Harman is modelling herself on Stalin with her latest attempts to remove Britain's class divide.

With all the zeal of one born into upper-middle-class comfort – she is, after all, the niece of an earl – Harriet Harman is setting out to remove Britain's class divide . She has done her bit by marrying a prominent trade unionist; though the gilt went off that particular piece of gingerbread when she contrived to send one of her children to a school miles from her home to get a decent education.

However comical it may seem, Miss Harman thinks she has a chance of being the next leader of the Labour Party. Those who want to accept this increasingly poisoned chalice know they must grease up to Labour's somewhat neglected core vote of disadvantaged working-class people and the hard Left. Miss Harman does it by saying she will ensure that working-class people have the same advantages as middle-class ones. >>> By Simon Heffer | Friday, January 16, 2009

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