Facts: According to Gilbert and Kahl, the working class of society makes up about 30% of America’s population. Situated between the lower-middle-class and the working poor, the working class is identified as being the lowest level of middle class that can be attained. People categorized as part of the working class often times have their high school diplomas, GEDs, or another equivalent degree that allows them to get jobs. Many times, the types of jobs they attain are physically demanding and provide an annual income of about $35,000. It is hard for individuals in the working class to find better paying jobs with less physical labor involved because of their lack of experience, skills, or higher education. However, those jobs that are available do usually provide benefits. Signs of a working class lifestyle include minimum levels of housing, appropriate healthcare, enough food to maintain a household, adequate transportation, and clothing. According to the textbook, the chief element of a middle class life is working to maintain a comfortable …show more content…
One family in particular always comes to mind when I think of “middle class”. This family truly works for everything they have and takes pride in not taking assistance from the government or other organizations. This family I know includes four individuals and a dog. The parents, like many others, work for Mohawk because they didn’t pursue more education after high school. I believe the father has his GED, but the mother never finished high school. I believe their income is somewhere around $37,000 annually. Most of the money comes from the Father’s position in Mohawk. He trains employees on safety and equipment usage. The mother works at Mohawk too, but she earns less money. She works various basic level factory positions. Overall, the family is very well off. They may not have the most money, but they do have a comfortable mainstream
The essay “RIP the Middle Class: 1946-2013” was written by Edward McClelland. Edward McClelland is an American journalist. In this essay, McClelland is trying to prove a point that at some point there wouldn’t be the middle class and there would only be the rich and the poor, unless the government intervenes to balance out the economy.
Growing up in The United States, people are given this idea of an American Dream. Almost every child is raised to believe they can become and do anything they want to do, if one works hard enough. However, a majority of people believe that there is a separation of class in American society. Gregory Mantsios author of “Class in America-2009” believes that Americans do not exchange thoughts about class division, although most of people are placed in their own set cluster of wealth. Also political officials are trying to get followers by trying to try to appeal to the bulk of the population, or the middle class, in order to get more supporters. An interesting myth that Mantsios makes in his essay is how Americans don’t have equal opportunities.
The working class stays working and the middle class stays being middle. Author Nick Tingle, wrote “The vexation of class”, he argues that the working class and the middle class are separated educationally based on culture and the commonplace. Tingle uses his own personal experiences and Ethos, to effectively prove his point about the difference in class based on culture ; although, Tingle also falls short by adding unnecessary information throughout the article that weakens his belief entirely.
With each class comes a certain level in financial standing, the lower class having the lowest income and the upper class having the highest income. According to Mantsios’ “Class in America” the wealthiest one percent of the American population hold thirty-four percent of the total national wealth and while this is going on nearly thirty-seven million Americans across the nation live in unrelenting poverty (Mantsios 284-6). There is a clear difference in the way that these two groups of people live, one is extreme poverty and the other extremely
This quote from Freidman’s book agrees that people are trying to move up in the social class, “I once heard Jerry Yang, the cofounder of Yahoo!, quote a senior Chinese government official as saying, "Where people have hope, you have a middle class." I think this is a very useful insight. The existence of large, stable middle classes around the world is crucial to geopolitical stability… "Middle class" is another way of describing people who believe that they have a pathway out of poverty or lower-income status toward a higher standard of living and a better future for their kids” (537). This quote is trying to say that the people in the middle class do have hope in moving up because it will provide a better. life for their families. They are not just staying in the lower class but with the opportunity they are willing and motivated to do it. Having a college degree will give people more options. In the book, Class Matters, it has short anecdotes and Jeff in the story is a great example of someone who was stuck because he did not have a college education. Egan writes, “For a guy like me, with no college degree, it’s becoming pretty bleak out there” (106). In making this comment he knows that nowadays an entry level job is not a good stable job and that
“Where some possess much, and the others nothing, there may arise an extreme- either out of the most rampant democracy, or out of an oligarchy.'; This was once said by Aristotle who was probably the first to recognize the importance of a middle class. A powerful debate whether the middle class is essentially defined by cultural or economic factors still remains an issue. A rich tradition is devoted to disentangling economic from cultural components of a class. According to Karl Marx, the middle class is an outgrowth of economic factors, primarily capitalism. Many people tend to disagree with Marx that capitalism is the only important factor in the outgrowth of the middle class. Judith R. Blau argues that her understanding of the middle class has much to do with inclusive cultural values. Blau demonstrates her opinion though her ethnography, Social Contract and Economic Markets. I believe that Karl Marx’s economic factors and Judith Blau’s cultural factors together define the middle class.
The largest group in America is facing extinction. We are talking of course about the American middle class. In 1971 the American middle class population was 36% higher than the population of the lower class. However, today the middle class population is now only 22% higher than the lower class (McDill). This is only a 14% drop spread over 44 years. The major issue here is that while the middle class shrinks, the upper and lower classes are growing. Financial experts believe that soon the middle class will become nonexistent and America will be divided into two extremes, poverty and wealth. This issue has become so severe that the United States government has stepped in and created a “middle class task force” passed as part of the government “stimulus package” of 2009. However most experts including Kent McDill of the millionaires’ corner, Doyle McManus of the LA Times, Erik Kain of Forbes magazine believe that the government’s program is putting a knife in the middle class. They believe this because the government is taxing businesses until they are forced to leave America and go overseas. This, along with the rise of mechanical workers and ignorance of the issues facing the middle class led to the decreasing job market. Jobs in America will soon be split into either very high paying upper class jobs or very low paying jobs. This makes the job market a hit or miss in America. It is predicted that America will soon be either very rich or very poor with no middle ground.
The most often cited cause of the decline of the middle class in the United States is stagnant wages. Between 1955 and 1970, real wages adjusted and inflation rose by an average of 2.5 percent per year. Between 1971 and 1994, the average growth of real wages was 0.3 percent a year. The stagnation of wages has been especially noticeable to middle-class people, who rely very much on the money they make at their jobs. Recessions seem to hit higher income households much harder, which sends them down to the middle class. Middle-income households may or may not be more likely than higher-income households to qualify for unemployment compensation when jobs are scarce. But those who do are more likely than high-income households to receive benefits that replace a greater share of their regular wages, which helps them maintai...
Let's take it back to the past in regards to wealth distribution in this country. The fact is that the economy boomed from the end of WWII into the 1970's. “Incomes grew rapidly and at roughly the same rate up and down the income ladder, roughly doubling in inflation-adjusted terms between the late 1940s and early 1970s” (CBPP). Through the 70's economic growth slowed, and the wealth gap widened. Middle-class families were now considered lower class. People relied on the government to help them out with welfare programs. The middle-class class was weakened and the gap grew and grew. There were periods of positive fluctuation, however the middle-class simply never regained it's status that was held in more prosperous times in the past.
We, as a society, feel the need to draw imaginary lines to separate ourselves whether it’s the line between color of our skin, our religion differences, our political beliefs, or the status of our class. As much as I wish there wasn’t a defining line between high class and the educated vs. low class and uneducated, there is. In Mike Rose’s narrative essay “Blue-Collar Brilliance,” he describes his mother’s lack of education and her hard labor work which is the quote on quote the blue collar working class.
Even within the middle class, there are more specific class distinctions. The working class makes up 62% of the population (30). As the middle class is only half the size of the working class, the other half must come from other classes (4). By hiding the fact that the middle class exists, we can hide the fact that up to 75% of the unemployed belong in the working class based on their previous job occupations and skill sets (30). So, if so much of the underclass makes up the working class, why do many continue to put them
The American middle class is defined as a social class in the United States. It is the class of people in the middle of a social hierarchy. There are people in the United States middle class as well as other countries and this class of people has specific issues and interests that they are concerned with. Issues such as the health care reform, the financial reform, making college affordable, and housing. By dealing with these specific issues, the middle class has to vote, making them the middle class voters. In the middle class, there are four sections and all three make up the middle class. And in that middle class are the middle class voters, a small chuck of it. The middle class has been considered as homogenous, but with that different
Participants in the middle class are not necessarily living the American Dream but a lot of them are living comfortably. In some studies almost 90 percent of Americans have self-identified to be in the middle class stratum. (Conley 2015) Unfortunately, the average American believes that they are better off than they actually are. Many of the people who self-identify as middle class actually fall into the working class. How would one separate the two classes? The white-collar office worker usually describes the middle class while the working class is described as the manual labor worker. However, in the recent years the working class has as a whole sort of gained a new stratification and become an expanded part of the middle class.
The Untouchable by Thomas L. Friedman speaks about the world being flat, which is “the stunning rise of middle classes all over the world (pg. 323).” He explains how the American society is becoming global. This globalization that is occurring in today’s society is leading children in America to have a competing mindset against cultures such as the Chinese. We have to begin to think wise and know what route we have to take in life in order to flourish or survive. There will plenty of jobs out there; however, they will only be open to those people with the right knowledge, self motivation, ideas and skill.
be just that, and others may not. I was born to a middle class family in San Jose. My family has