Middle Class Death Watch: As Poverty Spreads, 28% of Americans Who Were Part of the Middle Class Have Fallen Out of It

September 15th, 2011

Editor’s Note: This is our first Middle Class Death Watch roundup. Building off of our extensive report on the financial destruction of the United States, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/0 ... 52244.html this will be a regular feature moving forward. Here we present a collection of news reports from the past two weeks detailing the collapse of the middle class.

Overall Snapshot

Middle-Class Americans Often Fall Down Economic Ladder: Study – nearly a third of Americans who were part of the middle class have fallen out of it

“The promise of the American dream has given many hope that they themselves could one day rise up the economic ladder. But according to a study released those already in financially-stable circumstances should fear falling down a few rungs too. The study… found that nearly a third of Americans who were part of the middle class as teenagers in the 1970s have fallen out of it as adults… its findings suggest the relative ease with which people in the U.S. can end up in low-income, low-opportunity lifestyles — even if they started out with a number of advantages. Though the American middle class has been repeatedly invoked as a key factor in any economic turnaround, numerous reports have suggested that the middle class enjoys less existential security than it did a generation ago, thanks to stagnating incomes and the decline of the industrial sector.â€