Happy New Year! Your middle-class status has been revoked and a college degree will not get you reinstated

 As 2020 comes to a close, you may think 2021 will be a better year. And if you are among the nation's wealthiest Americans, things look pretty rosy.

But if you are a middle-class person, next year will be worse for you than 2020.

First of all, as Charles Hugh Smith pointed out in a recent online essay, the middle class is an illusion. If you think you are in the middle class, you have been deceived. In fact, you are in a "phantom middle class," a class of permanent debtors.  

Over the past 40 years, earnings for the top one-tenth of one percent of Americans has grown 15 times faster than income for the bottom 90 percent.  Wages as a share of the national economy have been going down for the last half-century. 

You know that because you saw how wages went up for your parents' generation, but are not going up for working people today. 

Or as Mr. Smith put it: 

If the top 10% own 90% of the wealth and has captured virtually all the income gains of the past 20 years, then isn't it obvious America has no middle class? What the traditional middle middle class . . . owns is debt . . . .

Nowhere is this more obvious than when we look at the massive debt that gullible Americans have taken on to get a college degree in the pathetic hope that a diploma would get them into the middle class or keep them from falling out of it.

As Mr. Smith pointed out, Americans are burdened by "$I.7 trillion in student loan debt burdening those who bought the narrative that a college diploma was a passport to the security of the middle class. The debt load carried by those clinging on to aspirations of middle-class security is staggering."

Indeed, "burdening powerless students with uncertain futures with trillions in high-interest debt would have been viewed as criminal two generations ago, but now it's celebrated by those reaping interest from precarious debt-serfs."

The poor saps who have been plunged into poverty by their student loans cannot discharge their debt in bankruptcy courts, and they got nothing but crumbs from Congress's so-called coronavirus relief legislation.

College presidents--most of whom make more than half-million dollars a year, whined to their legislators about how much the pandemic was costing them, and Congress bailed them out. But did even one of these charlatan bozos urge some relief for their ex-students who are groaning under the burden of student loans they can never repay? No, they did not.

If Americans graduated from colleges and graduate schools with useful skills, they would earn enough to pay off their student loans quickly--within 10 years at least. But they are not acquiring practical skills--especially if they majored in the liberal arts or the social sciences.  

Again, Mr. Smith:

As for possessing skills, much of the workforce has few producer skills, as the consumer economy devotes inordinate attention not to producing but to marketing, speculation and complying with counterproductive regulations and bureaucratic file-shuffling.

But our fun-house economy cannot continue indefinitely with the superwealthy exploiting the rest of us while the government prints money and runs up the national debt--now pushing $28 trillion. As Smith observed:

Once the con of printing trillions of dollars out of thin air dissolves and the nation has to balance its books in the real world, these file-shuffling and speculative skills will no longer generate meaningful income.

Those of us in the bottom 90 percent of the nation's earners can do very little to stop the downward spiral in our wealth and income.  But at least we can advise our children not to take out student loans to get worthless college degrees, useless MBAs, obscenely expensive law diplomas, and meaningless doctorates.

Does Harvard President Larry Bacow have anything to say about student debt?

 

Going to college doesn't guarantee a middle-class lifestyle

 When I was a kid, my family would mark the holiday season by driving to Oklahoma City to do our Christmas shopping.

We always made three stops. We would drop by the Sears store, which was a treat for me because it had escalators, and popcorn was always popping on the first floor. Popcorn and escalators! I was in heaven.

Our family would also visit Brown's Department Store, one of those old-fashioned multi-story affairs in the heart of downtown Oklahoma City.  Brown's had elevators--not escalators, and each floor was devoted to one or two retail sectors--menswear, womenswear, appliances, etc.

We usually had lunch at Beverly's restaurant on 23rd Street--one of a family-owned chain of eateries specializing in "Chicken in the Rough," which meant fried chicken in a basket of french fries, accompanied by delicious rolls that I could slather with butter and honey.

The Fosseys were a frugal family, and my parents drove a Chevrolet as an emblem of our sober lifestyle.  If we ordered Chicken-in-the-Rough, my brother and I would split the plate. We each got one piece of chicken and a handful of fries.

I associate all those places with my family's dogged aspiration to be part of the middle-class. But Brown's Department Store is gone now, Sears is gone, and Beverly's is gone.  And perhaps that is appropriate because the American middle class is fading away, just like the department stores and family-owned restaurants.

Jason Del Rey, writing for Vox, wrote that department stores and the middle class are dying together.  According to one prediction, more than half of all mall-based department stores will close by the end of next year. 

And the middle class is shrinking as well.

"Since the Great Depression began in late 2007," De Rey observed, "the vast majority of income growth in the US has gone to high-income households, squeezing middle-class households and altering the way they spend money." In a 2018 study, the Deloitte consulting firm reported that "the middle 40 percent of the country saw its income shrink in the previous decade, while $8 out f every $10 in income growth nationwide went to high-income households" (as reported by Del Rey).

If you considered yourself to be a middle-class person ten years ago, it is a good bet that you don't think of yourself as middle-class today. Our income doesn't go as far as it once did, and we no longer expect our incomes and lifestyles to improve.

Not only is the middle class seeing a decline in income, but it also sees a decline in its status.  Middle-class people once lived in the Heartland. Now they live in flyover country. Middle-class people once took pride in their patriotism.  Now the media elite label that patriotic instinct is as white nationalism.

And if America's middle class is dying--and it is--our nation's colleges and universities have their fingerprints on the dagger that stabbed it in the heart.  Millions of American young people are taking out student loans in the naive hope that a college degree will improve their economic status, but they are being scammed.  

The biggest rubes are the ones who get degrees in the soft majors--liberal arts, humanities, social sciences, ethnic studies, etc. After spending a lifetime in academic settings, I see now that degrees in these fields were always dubious. But at least history majors were forced to write essays and familiarize themselves with some of Western civilization's significant events.

Now, most students get As, and the professors are too lazy to read term papers. The broad themes of our American heritage have been repackaged into ethnic studies taught by card-carrying members of the cancel culture.  

Tragically, young people are taking out student loans to pay for this gibberish. When they graduate, they are saddled with unpayable debt, and they can't get a job that pays a middle-class wage. 

So if you are one of those people who went deep into debt for a degree in Inequality Studies and find yourself working at McDonald's, this is my advice. When your former professor shows up and orders a Big Mac--the one who taught you nothing useful--spit in his burger.