Precariously UNSUSTAINABLE!
Those who have NOT helped make The American Dream possible have GUARANTEED that The American Nightmare has become INEVITABLE!
“'And then you can see the straight decline for the bottom 80% for the vast majority of America.'”
"...Higher-income households’ paychecks grew 4% year-over-year in November — the highest since October 2021 and well above the 3% inflation rate. But middle-income households’ paychecks gained just 2.3% and lower-income households’ wages were up only 1.4% – half the pace of inflation."
"...Multiple prominent retailers that cater to middle-class and low-income Americans have said customers are visiting less and spending fewer dollars when they shop. That trend continued during the beginning of the holiday shopping season":
http://cnn.com/2025/12/09/economy/affordability-economy-windchill
"Now even the affordable alternatives are on track to become out of reach for a critical mass of Americans."
"...more than five years after the pandemic began, these places still aren’t building enough homes, and prices are still rising wildly":
https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/06/zoning-sun-belt-housing-shortage/683352
"In recent years...working-class Americans have become susceptible to a different sort of exploitation. Instead of assigning employees too many hours, large corporations routinely give them too FEW, hiring multiple part-time staff in place of one full-time worker. These precarious, contingent workers aren’t entitled to benefits and are subject to inconsistent schedules in which the number of hours they work fluctuates dramatically from week to week. The result is an inversion of the situation that reformers confronted a century ago. For millions of American low-wage workers today, the problem is not overwork—it’s underwork..."
"The fact that what is most efficient for an employer might prevent workers from living stable, prosperous, healthy lives is why labor laws exist..."
"...the available evidence suggests that most part-time workers would prefer to have stable full-time work...69 percent of part-time workers would like to be full-time...the nation’s largest employers have not only chosen not to disclose precisely what percentage of their workforces are part-time; they also haven’t released any data to support their claim that many workers prefer these sorts of schedules."
"...for all of its virtues, the [Fair Labor Standards Act] never contemplated the problem of underwork":
https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/05/part-time-jobs-underwork/682768
"...overdose deaths tend to be concentrated on non-college men. When we think about things like addictions to sports-gambling technologies, again, it tends to be concentrated in this group. We have factors like incarceration and so on...there’s something going on with this pool of folks that we ought to understand better because it has important implications for women, and especially non-college women":
"...the deeper I dug into the debate, the more I felt that BOTH teams were underestimating the extent of inequality in America. Both are limited by assumptions and definitions that are standard in the economics profession but contrary to how regular people think about inequality—or, for that matter, money itself..."
"To take the true measure of inequality, economists need a way to account for all the income and expenses that don’t show up on people’s tax returns."
"...it turns out that the data being argued over are missing a lot of what you’re trying to measure, and the definition of income being used is one that most ordinary people wouldn’t even recognize":
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/one-percent-income-inequality-academic-feud/677564
"Just-in-time scheduling, in which employers post employees’ schedules with very little notice and can change it at the last minute, made it difficult to arrange child care or, for that matter, any other aspect of their child’s life..."
"This triple load of work, parenting, and navigating public benefits is a direct by-product of America’s view of public support for parents as something you are not supposed to need, [Amanda] Freeman[, a sociologist at the University of Hartford who conducted a yearslong study of low-income mothers in America,] told me. It’s not something that happens when programs are universal..."
"At least one in 10 Americans has medical debt; one study found that postpartum women, more than one in 10 of whom are uninsured, are significantly overrepresented among them. Nearly 5 percent of children in America have no health insurance, and, by one estimate, a third of children are underinsured..."
"American families are also more likely to live in poverty than those in most other OECD countries..."
"...American children seem to be raised as if they were in a 'combat zone,' [Hannes]
Schwandt[, an economist at Northwestern University,] said..."
"...when you sign up to be a parent in the U.S., you are signing up to navigate threats to your kids’ safety and your family’s financial stability that you would not have to consider if you lived in any comparable country. There’s no opting out of these stressors; they’re part of the job..."
"...I don’t know if my relatives’ support would be enough to offset the feeling that MY COUNTRY doesn’t have my family’s back. It’s a tragic thought: that moving home is not what’s best for my family. But it’s one I cannot shake":
(Emphasis added.)
"...millions of Americans feel left behind, under siege, and out of opportunities..."
"Many of the big internet companies have standardized privacy invasions and surveillance as integral to their business model":
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/twitter-facebook-misery-misinformation/621073
“'As wealth goes up, the stinginess seems to increase,' Piff said":
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/does-wealth-rob-brain-compassion/618496
“'This is not the America in which we grew up,' I wrote in a magazine column at the time, by which I meant America of the several very prosperous decades after World War II, when the income share of the super-rich was not yet insanely high..."
“'We’ve not only let economic uncertainty and unfairness grow to grotesque extremes,' I wrote, but 'also inured ourselves to the spectacle...'”
"A Raw Deal replaced the New Deal. And I and my cohort of hippie-to-yuppie liberal Baby Boomers were complicit in that..."
"...in the late 1970s big business and the well-to-do were at the start of a 40-year-plus political winning streak, economically, at the expense of everyone else..."
"I know I rolled my eyes at the Gen-X kids in Seattle chaining themselves together and getting off on tear gas; at their lack of a feasible agenda or nuance or even coherence; and at the belief of so many of them in a shadowy, multi-tentacled conspiracy of the omnipotent elite to tyrannize the little people and subvert democracy. It took me a few more years to realize that their caricature of the new economic paradigm was closer to right than wrong":
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/i-was-useful-idiot-capitalism/615031
So stop MOCKING The Prescient YOUNG!
"...the median black family had net wealth of $1,700 in 2013, and the median Latino family had $2,000, compared with $116,800 for the median white family. A 2015 study in Boston found that the wealth of the median white family there was $247,500, while the wealth of the median African American family was $8. That is not a typo. That’s two grande cappuccinos. That and another 300,000 cups of coffee will get you into the 9.9 percent..."
"Money may be the measure of wealth, but it is far from the only form of it. Family, friends, social networks, personal health, culture, education, and even location are all ways of being rich, too. These nonfinancial forms of wealth, as it turns out, aren’t simply perks of membership in our aristocracy. They define us..."
"In America today, the single best predictor of whether an individual will get married, stay married, pursue advanced education, live in a good neighborhood, have an extensive social network, and experience good health is the performance of his or her parents on those same metrics..."
"The colleges seem to think that piling up rejections makes them special. In fact, it just means that they have collectively opted to deploy their massive, tax-subsidized endowments to replicate privilege rather than fulfill their duty to produce an educated public":
http://theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130
Oh, my!
"Well over half of Ivy League graduates, for instance, typically go straight into one of four career tracks that are generally reserved for the well educated: finance, management consulting, medicine, or law. To keep it simple, let’s just say that there are two types of occupations in the world: those whose members have collective influence in setting their own pay, and those whose members must face the music on their own. It’s better to be a member of the first group. Not surprisingly, that is where you will find the college crowd..."
"...proximity to economic power isn’t just a means of hoarding the pennies; it’s a force of natural selection. Gilded zip codes deliver higher life expectancy, more-useful social networks, and lower crime rates. Lengthy commutes, by contrast, cause obesity, neck pain, stress, insomnia, loneliness, and divorce..."
"The best revolutions do not start at the bottom; they are the work of the upper-middle class."
Ibid.
"Financial impotence goes by other names: financial fragility, financial insecurity, financial distress. But whatever you call it, the evidence strongly indicates that either a sizable minority or a slim majority of Americans are on thin ice financially..."
"There isn’t much net worth to draw on..."
"With the rise of credit, in particular, many Americans didn’t feel as much need to save. And put simply, when debt goes up, savings go down..."
"...the primary reason many of us can’t save for a rainy day is that we live in an ongoing storm. Every day, it seems, there is some new, unanticipated expense...And those are only the small things..."
"To fail—which, by many economic standards, a very large number of Americans do—may constitute our great secret national pain, one that is deep and abiding. We are impotent."
"And while the affliction is primarily individual and largely hidden from public view, it has perhaps begun to diminish our national spirit. People want to feel, need to feel, that they are advancing in this world. It is what sustains them. They need to feel that their lives will improve, and, even more, that the lives of their children will be better than theirs, just as they believed that their own lives would be better than their parents’. But people increasingly do not feel that way":
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/my-secret-shame/476415