Inequalities

The best indicator of who will win the presidential elections in the states could be the increase in inequality in the country of the American dream, the founding fathers would be horrified!

Driving from Michigan to Minnesota to North and South Dakota you hear the same story: the middle class is disappearing

Although the hole into which the middle class has fallen has opened up well before Covid, it is with the pandemic that Americans have realised that they are sliding inexorably towards the lower classes and because the Biden Harris administration entered the White House in 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, they are held responsible.

If what the polls report is true, that is, that Trump is more popular among those who have not gone to college and have lower incomes, while Harris excels among professionals, graduates and the most wealthy, the impoverishment of the American population during the pandemic, i.e. the shirnking of the middle class, could lead to a second victory for Trump.

Let's start with the university. An ever decreasing number of Americans can afford it, the costs are prohibitive: the best universities cost up to 90 thousand dollars a year and in four years you have to pay 350 thousand dollars, for an average family that earns 75 thousand dollars a year it is impossible to afford this expense.

But that's not all, young people who decide to get into debt to study must deal with future salaries and job opportunities that are less attractive than those of their parents. At the moment there are more than 40 million Americans who collectively have to pay 1.6 trillion dollars in student loans , more than double that in 2010.

The question is: is it worth getting into debt to study?

In addition there is the family debt that has reached the record of 18 trillion dollars, of which more than a trillion belongs to credit cards, which impose high rates. How will Americans repay it? The debt weighs heavily on their finances and the outlook is not rosy.

The American middle class is not only sinking into poverty, it is becoming increasingly difficult to get into it from those aspiring to joinit. According to Bloomberg, to buy a house, a fundamental attribute of the middle class, the traditional 20 percent deposit now corresponds to 83 percent of the median annual income, in 2016 when Trump won the election it was 65 percent. How do you save enough to afford such a deposit? Buying a new car costs at least two more weeks of work for someone with a median income than it did eight years ago, and child care costs are equivalent to a third of the weekly median income, in 2016 it was less than a quarter.

Americans can afford less and less and are becoming increasingly poorer and less educated. 60 percent of middle-class people say that the cost of living, such as rent or mortgages, hits their wallets so hard that they have to give up activities that were previously affordable, from buying a new car to going on holiday. The youngest who cannot afford to buy a house with rates at 6 percent are waiting for interest rate to go back to at least 3 percent, but this level will not occur until the next crisis and at that point who knows what will happen to employment?

Too little attention has been paid to economic inequalities during the last four years in the mist of Covid, which ended up compounding inequalities, the Democratic Party that has governed for the last four years should have taken this into account. There are those who wonder why so much money has been allocated to distant wars and so little for the needs of the middle class. Electoral promises are nothing, Americans feel increasingly poor and could penalize those who have not paid attention to their needs.