1 Sep 2025 10:00 am
Economically screwed or culturally screwed. Take your pick.
The dwindling of America’s middle class wasn’t inevitable; it was a policy choice.
For more than 40 years, we’ve been sold a myth: that America’s rich and powerful were under siege — over-taxed, over-regulated and carrying the weight of the economy on their shoulders. We were told that if you ease up regulations on the rich, they will prosper, and the benefits will trickle down to the rest of the population. But the reality is that economic policy has only succeeded in rewarding the rich — and it’s done so at the direct expense of the middle class, the working class and the working poor. Let me explain the root of the problem: According to the Economic Policy Institute, largely due to new technology, U.S. worker productivity grew 59.7% from 1979 to 2019, meaning workers have become almost 60% more productive at their jobs in the past four decades. However, a worker’s reward for all that extra output over the same period has only been a 13.7% wage increase. That’s a gap of 46% between what workers are being underpaid relative to their output. In more practical terms, that’s about $9 an hour in lost potential earnings for the typical worker.