Wednesday, April 23, 2014

The American Middle Class Is No Longer the World’s 'Richest'

While the American rentier class is outpacing global peers, a New York Times analysis shows that across the lower- and middle-income tiers, citizens of other advanced countries have received considerably larger income raises over the last three decades. Mind you, while the report suggests that the majority of Americans made more than their European counterparts thirty years ago, it must be noted noted that their ancestral cousins have long enjoyed the extensive benefits & security of a much stronger well-established welfare-state (though significantly diminished from recent neoliberalization, before & after the crisis of the Euro).
The numbers, based on surveys conducted over the past 35 years, offer some of the most detailed publicly available comparisons for different income groups in different countries over time. They suggest that most American families are paying a steep price for high and rising income inequality. Although economic growth in the United States continues to be as strong as in many other countries, or stronger, a small percentage of American households is fully benefiting from it. Median income in Canada pulled into a tie with median United States income in 2010 and has most likely surpassed it since then. Median incomes in Western European countries still trail those in the United States, but the gap in several — including Britain, the Netherlands and Sweden — is much smaller than it was a decade ago. 
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