A July 2026 CNN/SSRS poll found that 71 percent of Americans believe Trump and his regime have not gone far enough to lower the price of everyday goods, leaving the middle class screwed.
A Trump-voting caller to my show yesterday, along these same lines, tried to mansplain to me that things really aren’t that bad, and that the numbers I’ve been using to describe the economic destruction by Reaganism are exaggerated.
For years I’ve been documenting the destruction of the American middle class at the hands of the GOP and neoliberal politicians (including some corporate Democrats).
I wrote about it extensively and did a deep dive into the problem and its causes in my books Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class,The Hidden History of the American Dream: The Demise of the Middle Class, The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America, and, just last month, Who Killed the American Dream?
As a result of FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society “socialist” programs, about two-thirds of American families were in the middle class with a single paycheck by 1973 as reported by The New York Times; today that number could be as low as a third of us, depending on your definitions.
And that’s where things get confusing, with statistics flying fast and furious (although everybody agrees Reaganomics has whacked working people), raising the question: What actually constitutes the middle class?
Pew, for example, uses the definition of middle class as people falling in the middle of the bell-curve of income distribution. By that definition, Pew says 61% of Americans lived in middle-income households in 1971 and by 2023 that had declined to 51% of us. This skewing of statistics is driven in large part by the massive wealth being accumulated by a few thousand American families, particularly the morbidly rich billionaire class.
Pew defines middle income as household income between two-thirds and twice the national median, adjusted for household size, and its historical figures are based on the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey data.
But does being “in the middle of the income distribution curve” mean that people in the “middle” today — even if it’s a smaller percentage of Americans — enjoy the same “middle class” lifestyle and opportunities as they did at the beginning of the Reagan Revolution?
This is where it gets sticky. If, instead of defining the middle class as those people in the middle of the income distribution you defined it by what that income buys, an entirely different picture emerges.
As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote in his 1991 book The Work of Nations:
“America has been the first nation in history in which the majority of its citizens considered themselves middle class. … For three decades after World War II, America created the largest middle class the world had ever seen.”
Even Pew acknowledged the problem with their income distribution numbers:
“Being middle class can refer to more than just income, be it education level, type of profession, economic security, home ownership or social and political values.”
Two years ago, The Washington Post surveyed Americans about what the middle class meant to them and who they thought was in it. The paper found broad agreement among the majority of Americans who say you’re only in the middle class if you have:
— A secure job (93%)
— The ability to save for the future (91%)
— The ability to afford a $1000 emergency (90%)
— The ability to pay all bills on time without worry (90%)
— Comprehensive health insurance (89%)
— The ability to retire securely (87%)
— A job with paid sick leave (73%)
— The time and money for vacations (67%)
— Own your own home (60%)
By that definition, the Post found:
“Just over a third of Americans met all six [top] markers of a middle-class lifestyle. While about 9 in 10 Americans had health insurance, only three-quarters had health insurance and a steady job. With each added measure of financial security, more Americans slipped away from the middle-class ideal.” (emphasis added)
And, with a nod to the difference between being in the middle of the income distribution and being able to live the lifestyle middle class people could when Reagan came into office, they added:
“Researchers often define the middle class based on income, in part because income data is frequently collected and easy to access. But that income doesn’t guarantee a middle-class lifestyle.”
And then there’s the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States. Using the Fed’s Survey of Consumer Finances, the Post’s authors doubled down on their assertion that the number of Americans today in the middle class is even lower than the 41% to 47% stat that I’ve been citing:
“Since 2017, the earliest year of comparable data, between 32 and 40 percent of Americans met all six measures, with a low in 2017 and a high in 2021.” (emphasis added)
The Brookings Institution also talks about various definitions of the middle class, one of them arguing it encompasses:
— stable employment
— home ownership
— retirement savings
— ability to weather emergencies
— intergenerational mobility
Depending on the selected definition and using the Fed’s numbers, Brookings calculates that between 23% and 48% of households would count as being in the middle class today.
And the Fed points out that just defining the middle class by a family’s position within the income distribution curve can be confusing and even deceptive. Their Survey of Consumer Finances and wealth surveys show that a family can earn a “middle income” but still have:
— no emergency savings
— no retirement assets
— little or no home equity
— heavy debt
Which is probably why Pew’s earlier work using Federal Reserve data showed that median middle-income family wealth fell dramatically after the Bush Crash of 2008 and has remained far below what previous generations accumulated ever since.
Finally, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) defines the middle class much as I do, by economic resilience, asking whether families can:
— withstand financial shocks
— accumulate wealth
— afford housing
— educate their children
— retire securely
Their conclusion was straightforward: many households traditionally labeled “middle income” no longer enjoy the security once associated with being in the American middle class.
And that’s also the conclusion of 71% of Americans, according to the new CNN/SSRS poll I mentioned earlier.
Set aside the pissing wars about what is and isn’t the middle class and simply consider Reagan’s war on unions, his slashing top income tax rates for corporations and the morbidly rich, and the Republican Party’s 45-year all-out attack on programs that support the bottom half of Americans.
These GOP policies have ripped the guts out of average American families’ ability to have — even with two full-time paychecks — the lifestyle that the majority of Americans enjoyed with a single paycheck in 1981 when Reagan was sworn into office.
This is what Republicans do, and have been doing since Nixon’s era: move wealth from working class people into the money bins of the morbidly rich. The Rand corporation says it is now over $70 trillion that the rich have stolen from the working class.