‘Or We’ll Lose the Whole Middle Class’: Gallup CEO

Economic recovery, but not for the ‘Invisible Americans’
Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO at Gallup, who presides over endless surveys of American consumers and businesses and knows a thing or two about them, has a message for the media and the political establishment that seem to be clueless: this meme about the recovering economy – ‘It was even trumpeted on Page 1 of The New York Times and Financial Times last week,’ he says – ‘I don’t think it’s true.’
In an article posted on Gallup’s website, he made his case:
The percentage of Americans who say they are in the middle or upper-middle class has fallen 10 percentage points, from a 61% average between 2000 and 2008 to 51% today.
Ten percent of 250 million adults in the U. S. is 25 million people whose economic lives have crashed.
What the media is missing is that these 25 million people are invisible in the widely reported 4.9% official U. S. unemployment rate.
Let’s say someone has a good middle-class job that pays $65,000 a year. That job goes away in a changing, disrupted world, and his new full-time job pays $14 per hour – or about $28,000 per year. That devastated American remains counted as ‘full-time employed’ because he still has full-time work – although with drastically reduced pay and benefits. He has fallen out of the middle class and is invisible in current reporting.

This post was published at Wolf Street by Wolf Richter ‘ September 20, 2016.