Bernie Sanders says the middle class is shrinking. He's wrong.

The Hill

12 hours ago

In the recent Joe Rogan interview with Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont made a simple and empathetic argument: People today are angry because, decades ago, families had money to spare and didn't have to constantly worry about emergencies.
Things have changed, he argued. The good old days are gone. Costs have ballooned and wages have stagnated. The middle class is shrinking.
This is a common assertion, and an easy one to believe. We know people who are struggling financially, or we are struggling ourselves. Many prices are higher than they used to be. Many more households are dual income now than were in, say, the 1950s.
It is easy to believe. It is also false.
Many people do live paycheck to paycheck, but it is a shrinking — not growing — percentage of people. Let's do the boring work of reviewing the stats, shall we?
In 1990, the median household spent $67,750 in 2023 dollars. By 2023, the median household was spending $77,280. This is a nearly $10,000 increase in expenditures over 35 years. That is total household expenditure, and it includes everything: healthcare, housing, education, food, clothing, gas, electronics, everything a house spends money on in a year. So expenses have increased, but have wages kept up?
Yes.
Real (inflation-adjusted) median household income went from $63,830 in 1990 to $80,610 in 2023. So real wages, after accounting for inflation, are up about $17,000 and expenses are only up about $10,000.
Which is to say that wages have grown faster than expenses.
In 1979, 13.4 percent of workers earned at or below the federal minimum wage, whereas today only 1.1 percent of workers earn at or below the federal minimum.
Between 1963 and 2022, the percentage of people living in extreme poverty has been almost stagnant, fluctuating between 0.25 percent and 1.25 percent.
And the general poverty rate has fallen. In 1990, 13.5 percent of Americans were living in poverty; in 2023, that number had fallen to 11.1 percent.
Even the household-debt-to-GDP ratio has been steadily declining since 2011.
You don't have to look at nap-inducing statistics to know that we are wealthier than our parents were. We have much more than they did — a larger selection of higher quality food, advanced technology, far more access to entertainment. More people travel, have gym memberships, go to college, have optional medical interventions (plastic surgeries, body fat scans, testosterone replacement therapy). More people own pets and spend more money on them. Houses are larger today and more likely to have central air and pools. The median lifespan has increased.
This is not to say Sanders is wrong about everything. Some costs are rising — education and healthcare and housing are more expensive today than they used to be. It is also true that the gap between the rich and the middle class has grown. But the point here is, overall, wages have more than kept pace with rising costs. The middle class today is richer than the middle class ever was before.
A more charitable view of the senator's message is that, even as households on the whole are making more money, they are only able to do it because both parents are working, whereas more households were single-income previously. Material wealth, by itself, does not fulfill people; though wages could have grown, many people are less happy.
But Sanders's message these many decades has not been that people ought to focus more on traditional family values (having children, deep friendships, a relationship with God), nor has it been about avoiding toxic behaviors such as substance addiction or obsession with social media and video games. Sanders's message has not been that we ought to think less about material wealth and more about spiritual wealth or vibrant communities. His message has been that the middle class is getting poorer, so the wealthy need to give up their money so that the poor and middle class can have more of it.
But if we convince ourselves, based on a falsehood, to redistribute more wealth, we may find that not only do we not solve the real issues causing social anger, we eradicate the progress we've already made in ensuring that more people have their needs met.
Gabriel McKinney is a former teacher.