22 Statistics That Show The Middle Class Is Being Wiped Out Of Existence In America

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer at a staggering rate. Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, but now that is changing at a blinding pace. So why are we witnessing such fundamental changes? Well, 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. 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. 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.

83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people

61 percent of Americans “always or usually” live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007

66% of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans

36 percent of Americans say that they don’t contribute anything to retirement savings

A staggering 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement

24% of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year

Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008

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