Almost Half of Americans Endure at Least One Aspect of Poverty: The Hidden Recession Continues to Hit Americans Hard.
Poverty is portrayed in a very simplistic fashion in the media. It is usually something that impacts other people far removed from your immediate family. However, poverty is incredibly widespread. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. We already know that half of the country lives paycheck to paycheck and is simply one small emergency from being out on the streets. We also know that in 2015 45,000,000+ people were assisted by food stamps. The number is still incredibly high but this year, nearly 1 million will lose access to food stamps because of how the unemployment rate is reported. Poverty is very real. The Brookings Institute just did a study and found that virtually half of Americans have endured some form of poverty. The report runs counter to the “great recovery†narrative.
The education and employment myth: Almost two-thirds of people in the labor force do not have a college degree.
There is an ongoing perception that most of the workforce has a college degree. When we say college degree we mean at a minimum a bachelor’s degree. You would think that with $1.3 trillion in student debt outstanding a good portion of the work force would be college educated. The opposite is the truth however. Almost two-thirds of the workforce does not have a college degree. That might be surprising to you especially for a country that pushes nearly everyone into college. Yet this blind pushing of people into college has created problems for those choosing careers and paths that simply lead into more debt and very little marketable skills. It is also a case where the younger workforce is more educated but also more indebted. They are paying more for their education and their incomes are simply showing paltry gains. This is why talks of the minimum wage are actually bigger than you think. Many people are what we would consider “working poor†even though the media fails to acknowledge real inflation that is hurting the standard of living. So how does this look on a nationwide scale?
Mancession: Men lost 2 times more jobs than women from the Great Recession and have gained half as many jobs since late 2007.
It should be clear that the Great Recession took a toll on most people. This is reflected in household incomes and savings. But one thing that is abundantly clear is that the Great Recession took a massive toll on male employment at a rate twice that of females. We’ll get into the charts and figures later in the article but suffice it to say that the recession didn’t hurt people equally. Some took on the brunt of the damage. When splitting out job losses and gains by gender, it is clear that something else was going on. One reason for this has to do with the big losses in construction and manufacturing that tend to be heavily dominated by men. The housing bubble imploding didn’t help in this respect. In many ways this has been a Mancession even in the midst of a recovery that started in early 2009.
1 out of 3 American households can no longer afford rent, food, and transportation. The biggest rise in expenditures comes from rising housing costs.
The driving force in this political movement is anger and many American families need only look at their bank statements to understand why. Since 2004 median income has fallen by 13% while expenditures have risen by 14% according to latest figures pulled by Pew Research. That strikes at the heart of why the middle class is now a minority. People are struggling to get by and while the Fed is obsessed with interest rates, most families are seeing the impact of crony capitalism devastating their wallets. One perfect example is the banking bailouts. The bailouts simply allowed the too big to fail banks to get even bigger and allowed large investors to purchase many homes as investments. This happened while regular families were struggling. The end result is higher housing costs but no real underlying gain in income. Since housing eats up the biggest part of your budget this has had a major impact. 1 out of 3 American can no longer afford rent, food, or transportation.