Middle class has been shrinking for decades

If it takes additional wage earners to maintain the same "standard of living", then wages have gone down. And the real "standard of living", which includes such things as leisure time, has also decreased.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/256/story/56943.html

http://www.kentucky.com/181/story/613414.html

Wednesday, Dec. 03, 2008
By Tom Eblen - Herald-Leader columnist

Well, the economists finally made it official this week: We're in a recession. And, guess what? They said it began a year ago.

If you're like the three-fourths of Americans who consider themselves to be "middle class," this probably didn't come as a surprise. Many people feel as if they've been losing economic ground for years. That's because many of them have been.
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But the pain being felt in this recession has brought new attention to a trend economists have been watching for years: The rich really are getting richer, the poor really are getting poorer and the middle class has been shrinking steadily since the late 1970s.
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"I see, basically, that middle class dissolving," said Ron Crouch, a sociologist who has headed the Kentucky State Data Center at the University of Louisville since 1988. "The issue is, it probably takes two incomes to make it in today's society."

Middle class is hard to define, but a basic measure is income. A year ago, a study by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office reported big disparities in the growth of after-tax household income between 1979 and 2005, as measured in 2005 dollars.

The study found that the poorest 20 percent of American households saw their annual income rise by an average of $900 over that quarter-century. The second-poorest 20 percent, by $4,800. The middle 20 percent, by $8,700.

Things were much different on the high end. The upper-middle 20 percent of households saw annual income increase by $16,000. And the richest fifth, by $76,500. Among the wealthiest 1 percent of households, average annual after-tax income rose by $745,100, from $326,400 to $1,071,500.
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Most people define middle class more broadly than just income; it's more about a feeling of security, Brooks said. Do I feel secure in my job, my home, my health, my retirement and my assets' ability to weather a setback?

For example, if every member of a family doesn't have health insurance, "you're just one bad illness away from risk," Brooks said.

That could help explain why the Pew Research Center and the Gallup organization reported this year that 25 percent of Americans felt they hadn't moved forward economically in the past five years, and 31 percent felt they had fallen back. It was the worst result in a half-century of polling on that question. Attitudes are important, because confident consumers spend more, and consumer spending is two-thirds of all economic activity.