I know we're not supposed to be talking issues right now - it's all GOTV, all the time until Tuesday - at which time we'll either be patting ourselves on the back or engaging in a jaigundo, virtual pity party, and Speaker-in-waiting Boehner will be consolidating his agenda for the next two years (obstruct, investigate, impeach, golf, tan). But let's talk real issues for a moment, because this one isn't going away, regardless of who wins on Tuesday.
In 2007, 43% of Americans reported living paycheck-to-paycheck.
In 2008, 47% of Americans reported living paycheck-to-paycheck.
In 2009, 61% of Americans reported living paycheck-to-paycheck.
Today, in 2010, 77% of Americans report living paycheck-to-paycheck.
What do these statistics mean? Let's dig into it just a bit further, after the flip.
As I was doing some research recently, I ran into the startling statistics shown in the intro above. It's not like we needed any further proof to bolster the argument that there's an ongoing class war, and we're losing the war, but there you go.
Harris Interactive has been conducting surveys for CareerBuilder.com for quite a few years. One of the statistics they've been tracking is how many people are living paycheck to paycheck. The Harris sampling is quite broad, and is conducted over basically the same period of time each year, so we get a couple of compelling takeaways from this knowledge:
- The methodology is consistent, year to year
- The MOE is very small (+/- 1.16 percentage points and +/- 1.86 percentage points)
I preface this diary with the above information so we're not splitting hairs about the data being skewed or somehow an inaccurate reflection of reality.
Let's repeat those numbers again so no one has to scroll back up:
In 2007, 43% of Americans reported living paycheck-to-paycheck.
In 2008, 47% of Americans reported living paycheck-to-paycheck.
In 2009, 61% of Americans reported living paycheck-to-paycheck.
Today, in 2010, 77% of Americans report living paycheck-to-paycheck.
It's sobering, isn't it?
Let's think about this for a minute. All of us have known someone who is or has been in financial difficulty. The phrase, "too much week left at the end of the money", isn't new. Those who live on the lower end of the economic brackets have almost always lived on the razor's edge of financial solvency. In 2010, though, there's a whole lot more people struggling than just those on the fringes of polite society. From the accompanying survey article:
As the effects of the recession linger on, one place it continues to have a tight grip is on workers’ wallets. Nearly eight-in-ten (77 percent) workers report that they live paycheck to paycheck to make ends meet. Sixty-one percent of workers said that they felt they lived paycheck to paycheck to make ends meet in 2009. Workers went on to say that sometimes they are unable to make ends meet at all, with one-in-five (22 percent) saying they have missed payments on bills in the last year.
I want to emphasize that this survey is about people who actually have a job and are receiving a paycheck, not those of us who are desperately searching for one. If you included those who are getting by only on an unemployment check (or none at all), the 22% who have missed payments on bills would surely be much higher. (I guess the backstory on that is that bill collection must be a huge growth industry right now.)
Here's an interesting little factoid regarding those in the upper middle class. The CareerBuilder / Harris survey from 2008 reported that:
One-in-five (21 percent) workers with salaries of $100,000 or more report they too live paycheck to paycheck.
Only one year later, in 2009, this number jumped to 30%, or nearly 1 in 3. It would be really interesting to know what that number is in 2010. So I called the Careerbuilder.com corporate offices. The nice woman I spoke with told me they are not releasing some data (including the 100K data point) this year. I wonder why?
I am truly stunned - it's almost mind boggling that the number of American workers living paycheck to paycheck has almost doubled in the space of four short years. So many of us are now just one paycheck from personal disaster, and there's very little left of the frayed social safety net to catch those who are falling.
Yet the GOP just keeps pushing their corporate agenda and campaigning against every social program in existence.
Sorry for the truly frightening info on a GOTV-Halloween Eve.
(For the purposes of this diary, paycheck-to-paycheck is defined as spending the equivalent of that paycheck on bills and whatever else prior to receiving the next paycheck. Having a little money left over at the end of the payperiod, but having used your credit cards to make up the gap, doesn't count as having money left over to save.)