Why The American Middle Class Is Disappearing

There are actually a lot of reasons why the middle class, especially in the U.S., is currently being squeezed out of existence. Some of them stem from a concerted effort by corporations and their lobbyists to put all of the money into the wealthiest citizens' hands (through changes to the tax structure and attempts to drive working class wages down by, for example, breaking unions). But this New York Times article provides a glimpse into another reason: the migration of most of the manufacturing industry to Asia and parts of Europe.

Reading that piece, I kept coming back to the thought that we've become so obsessed with getting what we want for as little money as possible that we're well on our way to destroying the middle class through our own spending patterns. Anyone who lives in Canada, enjoying all of the safety, infrastructure and social equality that we're lucky enough to have around us, but who then shops in the States because "everything's so much cheaper there," as one example, is missing the point. If enough of us do that, Canada will simply become the U.S. eventually: we'll have high poverty rates, no middle class, lots of crime, little or no safety nets for the disadvantaged, and an abundance of cheap goods in our stores. Is that what we want? By the same token, as those of us in North America snap up products that are built by cheap foreign labour who live in dormitories and work for hundreds of dollars per week, we'll eventually transform this continent's socio-economic landscape to be just like what exists overseas. It's really inevitable, I think, as we're always going to do whatever selfish action appears to benefit us the most in the short term. But it's still very disheartening to think that we'll piss away so much for so little.