Yes Captain that is the point. You just got from here to a better extension of the socialism we need in the US. That is what makes for middle class with a better outcome.
The debate about middle class is meant for the outcome.
You can be a wealthy American in the middle class but when something goes wrong medically be wiped out. Or send your kids to college but not be able to afford to retire.
A less corrosive socialism? Good luck with that.
Your âhereâ is the US, mine is Venezuela where I lived for 40 years, quite comfortably, under a center left mixed economy socialism where the extremes were marginalized. All the extreme left micro parties combined never got over 15% of the vote,. According to a friend, the extreme right could hold a national convention in a VW beetle. The system was quite livable, oil brought in hard currency while construction, public and private, spread the wealth to the working classes. The downside was that the economy worsened each year by a bit and by May 1993 president Carlos AndrĂ©s PĂ©rez was deposed on trumped up charges (he did mess up supply side privatization). The economic collapse accelerated and five years later the latest Messiah, Hugo Chavez got himself elected by a 70% landslide victory â that how bad the economy had become. Then collapse went into hyper drive.
I prefer a less corrosive capitalism.
BTW, a lot of wealth flowed from Venezuela to Portugal via returning expats fleeing the socialist Chavez regime. Factoid, the first business in Venezuela to call itself a supermarket was a Portuguese owned bakery, Pan 900, which was still in business when I left Venezuela.
The Captain
What does Venezuela matter to this?
Lets look at Northern Europe because the assets per capita are similar.
The shrinking Middle Class is actually a good story. It is shrinking mostly due to prosperity and not due to poverty. This is a trend that I have observed and commented on here for at least the past decade.
Below is the latest from Pew:
Note the change from 1971 to 2021 in the first chart. Upper Income households grew by 7%. Lower income households grew by 4%, shrinking the Middle Class by 11% in total. So while it is certainly unfortunate that households at or near poverty are increasing and steps should be taken to alleviate this, the main reason why the Middle Class is shrinking is because more of them have moved into the Upper Class.
In a business society there are ups and downs for each household.
It is very short sighted not to have universal healthcare, well subsidized education programs and a retirement program that is somewhat more substantial.
Those who fall out of the wealthy classes would be a more interesting stat. Businesses come and go. I do not have that stat.
Frankly without the post 2009 bust bailouts and the Covid PPP there would not be much here. Socialism is the result of capitalism. Because in a life time capitalism will fail often.
Because you make your argument against something be the absolute worst example of what can happen and ignore all the other cases where it actually turned out good? Thatâs the only reason I can think of. 
Iâd rather sit alone and free on a dusty rock than crowded on a velvet sofa. Socialism has nothing to do with capitalism. It is simply the sirenâs false song of security. In reality, it is the arrogance of a flawed man-made religion that has never worked and has dispensed nothing but equal misery.
Capitalism wouldnât survive without socialism. The Property Owners wouldnât have it any other way. How much and who gets it is the difference between capitalism and socialism.
I guess we can mark you down as one of the 35%. {{LOL}}
intercst
Yes. Venezuela tragically mismanaged itâs oil wealth. All the benefits of oil were concentrated in a thin slice of the population at the top, while you still had a large number of poor people living in third world conditions. Eventually the poor revolted and you have the current mess.
If they managed the oil wealth like the Democratic Socialists in Norway, the whole country would be middle-class. And youâd still have your share of billionaires at the top.
Ignorance and innumeracy people.
intercst
No, itâs just that a 150 years of history and more than 200 million deaths across the world in order to engineer more cooperative societies, hasnât worked out so well.
Yes. A vanishing few climbed the ladder, but mostly weâve just thrown more money in tax breaks to the people already at the top of the pyramid. Inherited wealth has done very well over the past 40 years.
Hereâs a chart of the real median US household income over the past 40 years. Itâs increased by $14,800 (from $56,000 in 1983 to $70,800 in 2023) while political corruption and price gouging in healthcare has added at least $10,000 to the average familyâs costs â erasing 2/3rds of even that meager gain. For perspective, I note that a 1983 $56,000 investment in the S&P 500 is worth $1.15 MM today (inflation-adjusted) and is taxed at a small fraction of wage & salary income. Working for a living has been a loserâs game during the Reagan years.
The real âReagan miracleâ is that the middle class hasnât revolted. Theyâre just lucky that the 35% are buying the argument the blacks & Hispanics are causing the poor economic outcome.
intercst
You talking about socialism? Way way way more people have died over the years trying to impose capitalism on people or otherwise trying to make a buck off of people than ever died in any socialist gulag. Which btw is not unique to socialism. Gulags have always existed even in those capitalist utopias called Feudal societies. hey, they had privately owned property. Property rights. Profits driven economies. Inheritances. And workers who worked real cheap. Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, Jay Gould would have loved it.
Christ. The âjob creatorâ who invented leaded gasoline killed over 50 million people all by himself. And shaved 5 to 10 IQ points off the people who managed to survive the mass poisoning.
intercst
Câmon now. You know what I meant. Thereâs no reason to think a socialist world wouldnât have used leaded fuel. Leaded gasoline isnât unique to capitalism. Like I said earlier (Or maybe itâs on a different threadâŠ?) socialism has no magic powers. No power to âruin civilizationâ and no power to make every man a king. Itâs just another way of âkilling the bear.â Itâs whatâs for dinner.
Iâm trying to keep it clean here and not be an extremist 
I guess you havenât heard of Norway, Sweden, or Finland. Maybe the news about Social Security got buried in your newspaper? Perhaps you drive on all private toll roads? And say, howâs your health insurance? Paying the highest rates in the world for mediocre service?
For the record, universal education is socialist. Everybody pays, including me, even if I donât have children, because itâs better for society. So is having an Army. You want a system where you have to pay to call the police, or is the current âsocializedâ Police Force OK with you?
I can only guess you get your news pretty much from, well, carefully curated sources, and donât really understand much about the system.
SOCIALISM! Booga Booga!
Hopefully not. Thomas Midgley nearly died from lead poisoning in his lab while developing the product. And when GM opened the first commercial scale plant to produce tetraethyl lead, scores of workers died of lead poisoning in the first few months of operation before they installed a smattering of environmental controls. The people making major bank off the product knew it was deadly. Itâs almost an early version of the Sackler Family and Oxycontin.
intercst
(worked for the Ethyl Corporation 30 years ago while they were still making the stuff in Africa.)
It isnât an absolutist position, you can fund standing armies, roads, police and infrastructure and still have a largely privatized economy, it doesnât make a nation socialist or validate it. Particularly public education, we have agreed as a society that there is a greater good of public funding for that service, it still doesnât mean that privately funded education should not exist or isnât a better alternative. The same holds true for social security, medicaid and other public aid programs. All worthwhile programs to protect our least advantaged but not evidence that socialism should be substituted for private markets.
You must be part of the Bernie fan club. He often incorrectly cites Norway, Sweden and Finland. These are countries that experimented with socialist policies in the 70âs that largely failed. As a result, most of these countries have tended to lean more conservative and rank at or near the US on the Economic freedom index. Even those offering universal healthcare, the programs are administered through private health insurance programs, privately owned hospitals and medical service groups. All of these countries also tax lower and middle class citizens at a much higher rate than in the US, as they say there is no free lunch.
Healthcare in the US is expensive because it is in most cases the best and most expedient care in the world.
We got a live one!!!
Your response makes no sense. More climbed up the ladder than down it. 7% is more than 4%, no less.
Inherited wealth is not what moved that 7% from the Middle Class to the Upper Class. Tax breaks didnât do it either. These are not people already at the top of the pyramid - and simply moving from the Middle to the Upper leaves you a very long way away from the top 5%, or the top 1%, or the top 0.1%
I know you have an axe to grind but you are off topic. Median Income does not tell us anything about how some on the Middle Class have moved into the Upper Class.
Snip:
Older Americans and Black adults made the greatest progress up the income ladder from 1971 to 2021.
âŠ
Those ages 65 and older made the most notable progress up the income ladder from 1971 to 2021. They increased their share in the upper-income tier while reducing their share in the lower-income tier, resulting in a net gain of 25 points. Progress among adults 65 and older was likely driven by an increase in labor force participation, rising educational levels and by the role of Social Security payments in reducing poverty.
Black adults, as well as married men and women, were also among the biggest gainers from 1971 to 2021, with net increases ranging from 12 to 14 percentage points.
Again, this remains a good news story.