American middle class in jeopardy, struggling

By: Giovanni Gonzalez / Staff Writer

America’s average middle class worker is systematically disappearing.  About 50 percent of middle class Americans feel that their status is in jeopardy, according to a poll done by ABC News.

The class structure of our country is being reshaped into an hourglass figure with most citizens on the top and bottom and a diminishing few in the middle. There is a severe imbalance in our economy that is perpetuating the recession and creating a class divide in our country. This is unacceptable because the welfare of our country is every American’s responsibility.

As one of the top 10 commuter schools in the nation, our University is made up of a majority of middle class commuters.

Most of us want to get an education that will provide us with a good career when we graduate.

According to www.payscale.com, University graduates with a bachelor’s degree can expect a starting salary of $40,500. Yet, the number of jobs available to those graduates keeps declining with an almost 25 percent decrease in the number of available middle class jobs since 1999, according to an article on www.good.is.

This means that the number of higher end jobs is not changing much, middle class jobs are sharply declining and the number of lower wage jobs is increasing.

Many over-qualified workers are being forced to take up lower paying jobs as a result of the unbalanced dispersion of working positions.    The burden of our country’s debt should not have to be shouldered solely by the same middle class workers who made this country what it is today.

According to an article in the Canada Free Press, more than 65 percent of all economic growth in the United States went to the top one percent of Americans over the past 10 years. This is imbalanced, and only serves to show that the money that should be used to pay middle class workers did not just float away, it is being collected and stored by the richest of Americans.

If this misdirection of wealth continues on this path, we could soon see a society where there are only two classes of workers.

It is not fair that the American Dream is slipping away from us, and as the statistics show things only seem to get worse as time goes on. There need to be some serious changes in the way our economy and government work to begin to reverse these imbalances.