Apart from the rhetorical arguments etc. what would listers say was the answer
1. Have living standards fallen since end of 2008? 2. By how much? 3. How does that compare with recessions of, say 1980, or 1930? 4. Is there worse to come? 5. Are there regional differences?
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I am going to do the narrative because somehow facts and figures just don't cut much any more to define what is happening.
Living standards are very difficult to judge, let alone measure. Part of the problem is the expectation of improvement or decline. Another problem for me is judging how the standard working class is going to make it.
Taking those into consideration, I say we are fucked and getting more fucked every year no matter what goes on in the official economy, what blather comes out of Wall Street or DC.
I put myself through college. That is impossible now. My father did the same in the late 1920s. He had the bad luck to go to the University of Oklahoma in jouralism and graduate about a year before the Depression hit. He spent the first years in small town newspaper in OK and Texas during an oil boom. He finally got a somewhat decent job in Salt Lake City, then something came up in San Francisco...
Later in LA he supported a wife, two kids, two cars, and a house on a not well paying job at the Examiner and later the LA Times. Our next door neighbor in an nearly identical house had three kids. He worked in a lumber yard selling lumber and hardware and his wife worked part-time in doctor's office. Only one kid went to two years at a community college. Both brothers went into the military, one to Vietnam and the other to Germany. The brother that went to the Nam was a gunship pilot and came back all fucked up with the usual, drug and alcohol abuse, broken marriage, etc. I lost track about then. They had been my closest boyhood friends.
Most younger working class guys I've known in recent years can barely afford their own apartment. Others live with roomates, at their parents, or with a working girlfriend who is likely making more than they are. Others are divorced mostly over money problems and live the same way. Cell phones, credit cards, and cheap new car loans make these more concrete realities seem to go away.
The real cornerstone for the US working class is a grandparent who owns a house paid off sometime in the past and never sold or borrowed against it. When they died, they handed it off to the next of kin. One of the biggest traps around is that the kids decide to sell the house to pay for granny's care in something better than a Medicare approved nursing home.
I'd say the working class has been in and barely out of bad times since the 1970s. Not only have wages stagnated, they have creeply fallen. The way it works is you leave one job and get another that is even worse with less money.
Meanwhile bosses have gotten definitely nastier, more demanding, and very much less tolerant of any resistance. Most jobs I've had were non-union and were hire at will. This means you can be fired any day with no protection from any official source. If the boss wants to be especially nasty, he can fire you for cause and make up something like you violated some company policy or you were insuboardinate. This bars you from receiving unemployment benefits
At a guess, I would say there are vast regional differences that are completely masked by statistics that use national averages over the concrete picture of daily life in many places. For example, food prices have shot up around here. You can feel the effects by how the shelving and stock is arranged. It's quite subtle. Some drug prices have gone way up. The medication I started taking about six years ago has more than doubled. Without my now dead calculator, I'd say, two and quarter times its past price.
On the other hand, I am doing okay for the moment. There is only one reason. I am on Social Security and the community org I work for part-time, got some of the Obama stimulus money through the city.
My kid and his family are doing fine. Before I got this job, I talked a little to my daughter-in-law to see if I could stay with them. Her mother used to live with them half time of the year. She is a US citizen but she is afraid of leaving her house in Nuovo Laredo. Her son lives with her and so does his wife and daughter. Candy worked for decades as a hotel cleaning lady in Dallas and Houston.
Nobody else's kids (that I know) have really escaped the terrible insecurity of living from paycheck to paycheck, while being in part or in whole really or potentially subsidized by their parents.
What this completely unsustainable condition indicates is the death of the US middle class. It erodes as each family takes a hit from jobs, divorce, healthcare, and support of aging parents and/or kids who earn less than their parents.
This country is probably not going to recover. I think we are in step down mode were each drop, stays dropped until the next drop. As far as I can see there isn't even an awareness of this generalized internal rot in the elites of the political economy. They really don't care. The economy is broken, the government is broken, and many people are broken.
And yet, you go outside and new cars are driving down the street, most people look healthy and act pleasant as if nothing was wrong and they were not living on the edge of the abyss.
I finally realized why these appearences are deceiving. It's because Berkeley is very busy during the school term at UCB. But most students these days go back home for the holidays and summer. Once the students disappear so does their spending. It's then that you see what the local economy really depends on. It amounts to the tourist industry where the students are the tourists. And these tourist are coming in from richer and richer families spread around, mostly from LA and its exurbs.
My landlord has more and more trouble each year trying to keep several apartments rented in this student district. They go vacant during the summer because fewer and fewer students come to UCB during the summer session when the entrance requirements are lower.
Every year the students who show up in the fall are richer than the ones before them. The reason there are so many asian students, and mostly Chinese American is because of family traditions of saving and living below their means for years on end, just to put the brightest kid through school. I could also tell a Vietnamese American story, but it would just repeat the same mantra. The demand of parental and kid sacrifice is tremendous, even heroic. How much can you give up your own needs just on the promise things will be better for your kids? How much are your kids willing to give up just for the promise of their own better future?
For about six years I had a family from Beijing move in next door with their high school aged daughter. The father was an engineer, but US companies didn't consider his degree and his experience good enough to hire him as an engineer. So, he took low paid work in clean room assembly down in San Jose, an hour and half communte. The mother worked as a house cleaner, and the daughter worked part time. It took the combined incomes, plus the girl living at home through college, and working part-time to get a BS in the biological sciences. Her degree qualified her for entry level lab worker in bio-tech. To get a `real' job in bio-tech science, you need a PhD in molecular biology/genetics.
Well that was during the boom years of the 90s. So even that story is irrelevant. We are taking the face plant boys and girls. Get used to it.
With that rather too long description, I watched Obama's near famous get tough news conference. Utterly irrelevant. It all sounded good, until you remembered reality.
CG