Newswire:

The Drowning Middle Class

The past five years haven’t been good for members of America’s middle class, who are struggling to keep their heads above water. [AP]

A Pew Research Center survey shows the worst assessment of personal progress (whether they feel they’re getting ahead) in “nearly half a century.”

The reasons? Take a guess: higher prices for health care, college, groceries, and gas, stagnating wages, and crippling debt.

Here are the numbers:

• 25 percent of Americans say their economic situation has not improved in the last five years, and 31 percent say they have fallen backwards.

• “Those numbers together are the highest since the survey question was first asked in 1964.”

Among the 53 percent of adults who call themselves middle class (making between $40,000 and $100,000):

• 53 percent said “they had to cut spending because money was tight.”

• 18 percent said “they had trouble getting or paying for medical care.”

• 10 percent said “they had been laid off or otherwise lost their jobs.”

• 25 percent “expressed worries that they would be laid off, that their job would be outsourced or that their employer would relocate in the coming year.”

• 26 percent “were concerned that they would see cuts in salary or health benefits.”

Paul Taylor, director of Pew’s Social & Demographic Trends project, states the obvious: “It’s been a lousy run for the American economy and people feel it.”

The richest of the rich? Oh, they’re doing just fine.

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