August 23, 2017--Spectre of Decline

Edward Luce's persuasive but highly disturbing 2012 book--Time to Start Thinking: America and the Spectre of Decline, in just two paragraphs, sets the context for the rise and election of Donald Trump.

About the hollowing-out middle class--

According to the Economic Security Index, which tracks the number of Americans who experience a drop in their annual income of at least a quarter, the rate has almost doubled since Reagan was president. In 1985 just over one in eight Americans suffered an income loss of a quarter or more. By [2008] the time the financial meltdown hit, almost one in five Americans were affected. Since then, that number has grown sharply. . . 

Since one year's casualties are mostly different from the next, much more than one in five Americans now live in semipermanent fear of falling off the precipice. In the decade leading up to the collapse of the subprime market, more than half of Americans experienced an income loss of a quarter or more in one or more years. Think of the General Motors worker with his pension and health care plan. In the 1960s he earned $60,000 a year in today's prices. Walmart, which as the largest employer is the equivalent in today's economy, pays its 1.1 million mostly female employees on average $17,500 a year, most of them without . . . pension or health care benefits.

Further--

In 2009, "Lee Scott, then the chief executive of Walmart, . . . earned more in two weeks than the average Walmart employee does in her lifetime."