47 Percent Of Americans Cannot Even Come Up With $400 To Cover An Emergency Room VisitBy Michael Snyder Earlier today someone pointed me toward an excellent article in The Atlantic that discussed this, and I have to admit that The Atlantic is one of the last remaining bastions of old school excellence in journalism that you will find in the mainstream media. Of course I dont see eye to eye with them on a lot of things philosophically, but there are some really hard working journalists over there. The article where I found the 47 percent figure comes from The Atlantic, and it is entitled The Secret Shame of Middle-Class Americans. It was authoredby Neal Gabler, and he says that he can identify with the 47 percent of Americans who dont have $400 for an unexpected emergency room visit because he is one of them I know what it is like to have to juggle creditors to make it through a week. I know what it is like to have to swallow my pride and constantly dun people to pay me so that I can pay others. I know what it is like to have liens slapped on me and to have my bank account levied by creditors. I know what it is like to be down to my last $5literallywhile I wait for a paycheck to arrive, and I know what it is like to subsist for days on a diet of eggs. I know what it is like to dread going to the mailbox, because there will always be new bills to pay but seldom a check with which to pay them. I know what it is like to have to tell my daughter that I didnt know if I would be able to pay for her wedding; it all depended on whether something good happened. And I know what it is like to have to borrow money from my adult daughters because my wife and I ran out of heating oil. To me, this is yet more evidence that the middle class in America is dying. Last year, it was reported that middle class Americans make up a minority of the population for the very first time in our history. So what happened? Well, the big corporations started shipping millions of good-paying manufacturing jobs overseas. Millions of other good-paying jobs were replaced by technology, and the competition for the good jobs that remained became extremely intense. During the good times, the U.S. economy still created new jobs, but most of those jobs were low-paying service jobs. At this point, a majority of American workers have jobs that would be considered low paying. In fact, 51 percent of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year according to the Social Security Administration. And once you account for inflation, the truth is that our incomes have been going down for years. According to a study that was released by Pew Charitable Trusts, median household income in the United States decreased by 13 percent between 2004 and 2014. That isnt progress any way that you slice it. If you go all the way back to 1970, the middle class took home approximately 62 percent of all income in the United States. Today, that number has fallen to just 43 percent. So the fact that 47 percent of Americans cant even pay for an unexpected emergency room visit is not exactly a surprise. To be honest, a whole host of other surveys have come up with similar numbers. Here is more from Neal Gabler A 2014 Bankrate survey, echoing the Feds data, found that only 38 percent of Americans would cover a $1,000 emergency-room visit or $500 car repair with money theyd saved. Two reports published last year by the Pew Charitable Trusts found, respectively, that 55 percent of households didnt have enough liquid savings to replace a months worth of lost income, and that of the 56 percent of people who said theyd worried about their finances in the previous year, 71 percent were concerned about having enough money to cover everyday expenses. What all of these numbers tell us is that the middle class is disappearing. I tend to compare it to a game of really bizarre musical chairs. With each passing month more chairs are being pulled out of the circle, and those members of the middle class that havent fallen into poverty yet are just hoping that a chair will still be there for them when the music stops. Even during the Obama recovery, we have seen poverty in America absolutely explode. In fact, some brand new numbers just came out that are quite startling. The following comes fromanother author for The Atlantic named Gillian B. White Recently, the Brookings Institution published a report looking at the same idea but giving it a different name. The paper, builds on research from the British economist William Beveridge, who in 1942 proposed five types of poverty: squalor, ignorance, want, idleness, and disease. In modern terms, these could be defined as poverty related to housing, education, income, employment, and healthcare, respectively. Analyzing the 2014 American Community Survey, the papers co-authors, Richard Reeves, Edward Rodrigue, and Elizabeth Kneebone, found that half of Americans experience at least one of these types of poverty, and around 25 percent suffer from at least two. To underscore this point, let me just run five quick facts about the growth of poverty in this country by you That last number really gets me every time. How can the wealthiest and most powerful nation on the planet have more than a million homeless children? This is one of the reasons why I hammer on our ongoing economic collapse over and over and over. It is affecting real families with real children that have real hopes and real dreams. This is not the way our country is supposed to work. It is supposed to be the land of opportunity. It is supposed to be a place where anyone can live the American Dream. But instead it has become an economic wasteland where the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world is being systematically eviscerated. So no, the U.S. economy is not doing just fine anyone that tries to tell you that lie is simply peddling fiction. *About the author: Michael Snyder is the founder and publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog. Michaels controversial new book about Bible prophecy entitled The Rapture Verdict is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.* Corporations serve only the zioinsts scum that have usurped all of the mom and pop shops and extract as much back from their slaves as possible. our government has been bought and paid for and the owners are the ones calling the shotsand all of the shots benefit the ruling elite. there is nothing that benefits we the people peons. Since when does a visit to the ER cost only $400 ?!?!? My last visit, just this past week, was well over $1000. 