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Rip, the Middle Class

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Submitted By freshywells
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Wells Bratton

“RIP, the Middle Class: 1946-2013” Summary

The author of “RIP, the Middle Class: 1946-2013” is trying to prove a point that the middle class is going away slowly and that soon there will only be the rich and the poor, but no in-between. He starts by talking about how in the 1960s and 1970s a high school dropout could make enough money to buy just about anything he wanted, and that a high school teacher could not even make that much. Nowadays if somebody wants to make enough money to buy almost everything that they want it takes four years of college along with a high school degree and that does not guarantee that. The story begins with the author telling a story his history teacher told him about a student he had that refused to study and finally dropped out. That student came back to him a year later and pointed out the window at a brand new Camaro and said, “That’s my car”. Meanwhile, the history teacher was driving a beat up station wagon because he did not make enough money to buy a new one. This is the main prowess of the story. The middle class has been steadily declining since then and if we do not do anything about it, it will soon be gone and there will only be the upper class and the lower class just like old times. In the 1980s, this period of “the Decade That Taste Forgot” ended and people began to show up to their jobs to find that the doors were locked and that they no longer had jobs. The lucky ones that were not fired were moved to another factory where they made half of what they had made if they were lucky. Last year the wealthiest 1% took over 19% of America’s income, which is higher than has ever been taken by the wealthiest 1%. This shows that every year the middle class is shrinking smaller and smaller and that soon there will be no middle class which means that many people will be living a poorer life than they would if

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