Politicians and legislators often speak loudly about the large American middle class as being the “Backbone” of this great nation. But, with the ever-increasing costs of home ownership and other fixed goods and services, today the average American family can hardly be called middle class because the line between middle class and surviving is becoming so invisible that it is hard to see the difference. I first heard of the “middle class” concept around fifty years ago when my parents and I immigrated to this country and began our the long-trek journey toward that elusive, but sometimes real goal called, the American dream.
Back in the 1960’s when I first arrived in the states, America was a much different country than it is today. In those days, there really was a middle class when one compared life in these great United States with other European countries such as Italy, my place of birth. There in the old country made up of villages and towns, there were only two classes of people, the rich landowners and the poor who begged and who depended solely on the rich to give them a day’s work at slaves’ wages.
Those were the days when finding a job in one of those villages was almost impossible as there were no large companies to employ people, just local establishments that more often than not, hired family members. When I first set foot on the land of opportunity, it was easy for me and anyone else who had eyes to see, that in America the middle class was not only alive, it was thriving. I especially marveled at the thousands of automobiles that lined the streets of New York City when I landed there on a cold Winter February day in 1961.
I once remember after living in America for about 5 years, my father saying after he received one of his paycheck one Friday evening, “Here in the land of honey…. with one of my weekly salary, my family has enough money to eat, pay the rent and the utilities and still have money left over to go to a restaurant or buy a new pair of shoes. This was not true in Sicily for my father or any other Sicilian where one would be lucky to have enough of a paycheck to buy food for his family let alone pay for anything else.
How things change even here in the blessed land we call, the country of opportunity. Today, America is not the same country of the 1960’s when jobs were aplenty and the economy was the envy of practically the entire free western world. Italy too has changed from the work-starved nation of the past to an economic miracle at par with other European nations.
To complicate matters for us, the United States currently has a debt of more than a trillion of dollars of which more than $500 billion is owed to China alone. Increasingly, the U.S. debt to other nation is increasing at dangerous levels that the question that must be asked is, “Who will own the United States if we continue on this road of spend and spend?” More importantly, the constant printing of money to pay for the ever-increasing debt will surely result in high levels of inflation in the near future endangering the standard of living for future generation of Americans. This is a sad commentary for a country that once was the economic envy of the world. Now, after decades of plenty, my children and grand children will have to owe their American dream to foreign nations while they see their hard-earned dollars go into a bankrupt Social Security system that more likely than not will not be there for them when they reach retirement.
So what is this constant litany we hear from politicians when they speak about the middle class being the backbone of America? There is no more middle class in this country because the same people that once considered themselves middle class Americans are becoming the “working” poor of America especially when one takes in consideration that today to make ends meet families need two wage earners, when in the 1960’s it took only one.
Yes, today the large middle class of the past is fast disappearing and is being replaced by a sub-par class which is not poor by government standards but not far from the poverty line when you take into account the inflated price of homes, apartments, increasing school taxes, utilities, other fixed expenditures and the amenities that in years past we took for granted.
So, just what is this American middle class everybody talks about? From where I am standing, the middle class is on the way of becoming an endangered species and will fast disappear if nothing is done to protect the working public of this country. America must return to the days when the good jobs in manufacturing were here and not sent overseas in droves. Our free market that once made our country economically strong has now gone globally but to the detriment of our own people. Our good jobs have gone to foreign lands and so has our middle class. We will soon become just another nation to fall high from the “might” that once was, the United States of America, the hope of the free world.
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