Middle class isn’t getting poorer, but still feels squeezed

By Adam Belz

Star Tribune

Money’s tight for Curtis Griesel, mostly because of the costs of health care and college tuition, but he still considers himself middle class.

Household income for Griesel, his wife and their three teenage sons is in the ballpark of the median for their metro area. They live in a Bloomington, Minnesota, home built in 1955, don’t own a lot of expensive things, but can pay their bills, travel and save a little.

To Griesel, it’s not getting harder to be middle class, it’s getting harder to meet middle-class expectations.

“Our cultural expectations have elevated, and I think it’s because of our consumer culture,” he said.

Income for Americans in the middle has risen at a modest-but-steady rate over the past 40 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. And prices for consumer goods have dropped while their quality has improved.

This reality contrasts with perceptions that the middle class has stagnated since the 1970s. Those perceptions have been shaped in part by politicians — but also by the fact that the rich have fared even better, enjoying bigger gains.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe government does too little to help the middle class, and politicians are eager to agree. Hillary Clinton wanted to make college tuition free for the middle class. President-elect Donald Trump said he will cut their taxes by 35 percent.

“There is a lot of bipartisan consensus about the fiction that the middle class is deteriorating,” said Scott Winship, a visiting fellow at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity in Austin, Texas. “The actual problems in the world, including poverty and limited upward mobility from the bottom, tend to get ignored as a consequence.”

Griesel, who works as an office manager in Bloomington, points out that middle-income families face challenges. New housing in Bloomington, he said, is geared toward the upper class, and it would be difficult for his family to buy their home today.

“It’s really tough to send a kid to college right now, and it’s really tough to afford anything medically related,” he said.

Data that best bolster the claim of a disappearing middle class comes from the Census Bureau, and shows that the typical male worker earned lower wages in 2014 than he did in 1973.

Nobody disputes that the recession and slow recovery have hurt middle-class incomes in the past 15 years. But when it comes to the longer-term story, the CBO and economists like Terry Fitzgerald at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis arrive at a different conclusion: Middle class prosperity is gradually rising.

The CBO reported that after-tax income for households that are not in either the top or bottom 20 percent of Americans rose 41 percent from 1979 to 2013, taking into account the rise of health insurance as a form of compensation, the size of the typical household, and the lower federal taxes that middle-income Americans pay.

“For most people, on average, it’s getting better,” Fitzgerald said, although “the lives that individual people lead aren’t always correlated with the broader trends.”

Better consumer deals

And the rise of quality in consumer goods and services has been a hidden boost. Health care is more expensive than it was in the 1970s but is of much higher quality. Several types of cancer are no longer a death sentence, and older people routinely get hip replacements.

Electronics are another example. In 1975, an AM/FM stereo receiver — no speakers, record player or records — was priced at $460, or $1,615 in today’s dollars.

Now an iPhone 7 — which can launch a rocket, manage a bank account, shoot video and play much of the music that’s ever been recorded — costs $700.

Televisions, air conditioners, washing machines and refrigerators are cheaper today than 40 years ago adjusted for inflation, and more energy efficient.

“It’s definitely not the case that the middle class has deteriorated,” Winship said. “We’re essentially the richest middle class in global history, give or take a few countries.”

New sources of stress

None of this peruades Nan Madden with the Minnesota Budget Project, who says, “We’ve done well as a global economy at bringing down the costs of durable consumer goods, but housing, medical care and education are growing much faster.”

Even if the CBO analysis is taken into account, middle-class families have struggles their grandparents didn’t — notably the costs of health care, child care and college.

The runaway costs of child care and college force middle-class families to forgo opportunities and prevent poor families from rising to the middle, she said. “Back in the ’50s and ’60s, a college education wasn’t required to have a job that could support a family,” Madden said. “Now it is.”

Louis Johnston, an economic historian, said it’s difficult to compare standards of living across eras.

American history has been dominated by long periods of income inequality, he said, broken by occasional bouts of rising equality, usually during wars or recessions. The years after World War II were one of those periods, and the American middle class benefited disproportionately for a couple of decades.

That era still dominates in the public imagination, Johnston said, even though it was an aberration. “We get kind of messed up when we think of the postwar period as the norm,” he said.

Matt Peters, who now lives in New York, grew up in Park Rapids, Minnesota. He and his wife, who have four children, have more money than his parents had when he was growing up, but they also have more stress. Peters, like many of his peers, traded a simple childhood for a complicated adulthood with more money.

“When I grew up, we lived off of hand-me-downs from my cousins and siblings,” Peters said. “Now it’s like everybody needs to have new everything, iPads for every kid.”

Middle-class families may have money and possessions, he said, but they have no time. Both parents are working, they’re caught in a trap of overconsumption and credit-card debt, and live in fear of getting laid off.

“Nobody is comfortable,” said Peters, who quit working after 15 years in banking to stay home with his children.

He looks back fondly on his own childhood in Park Rapids, playing in the woods all day, even though he never had the newest Atari. His father was a pipe-fitter and his mom stayed home when he was young. That life appeals to him so much that he and his wife are trying to figure out a way to move back to Minnesota. Right now he feels squeezed and so do his friends.

“Some of it might be a lack of control. They don’t feel like their desires and wishes and ideals are being met,” Peters said. “There’s no purpose, no one to trust and no where to go, but you have to keep that rat wheel turning.”