The best days of the American economy are long in the past, and better days for the United States (US) are unlikely in the foreseeable future.
The 20th-century idea of an “American Dream”—where a sizable majority of people in the US could become or aspire to become middle class, affluent or even extremely wealthy—is mostly dead in the second quarter of the 21st. According to a report from Moody’s Analytics in February, the richest 10 percent of Americans (households with an annual income of at least $250,000) drove half of all US consumer spending (about $10 trillion) between September 2023 and September 2024.
The fact that 12.7 million households could collectively outspend much of the rest of the nation is truly jaw dropping. It points to the end of an economy that has depended primarily on the needs-based and discretionary spending of ordinary working Americans since the end of World War II.
The best days of the American economy are long in the past, and better days for the United States (US) are unlikely in the foreseeable future. The 20th-century idea of an “American Dream”—where a sizable majority of people in the US could become or aspire to become middle class, affluent or even extremely wealthy—is mostly dead in the second quarter of the 21st.
According to a report from Moody’s Analytics in February, the richest 10 percent of Americans (households with an annual income of at least $250,000) drove half of all US consumer spending (about $10 trillion) between September 2023 and September 2024.
The fact that 12.7 million households could collectively outspend much of the rest of the nation is truly jaw dropping. It points to the end of an economy that has depended primarily on the needs-based and discretionary spending of ordinary working Americans since the end is exactly what the wealthiest of Americans have wanted for decades.
By the measure of most experts, the economic power of ordinary Americans peaked sometime between 1970 and 1974. More than six out of 10 Americans could claim middle-class status, and Black, Latinx, and other Americans of colour had begun to climb into the US middle class in larger numbers
The story goes that the OPEC oil crisis, brought on by the US supporting Israel during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, along with the deindustrialisation of the American Midwest, ground down the US economy from 1973-74 onward. The combination of higher unemployment and higher inflation, known as stagflation, ended a three decade run of endless US economic dominance and prosperity. But this story makes it seem as if a set of unfortunate circumstances ended the Pax Americana.
In truth, the major corporations, the wealthiest of Americans and the federal government began shifting resources away from ending poverty and sustaining the American working and middle classes during the 1970s. The War on Poverty/Great Society programmes President Lyndon B Johnson pushed through in 1965 were the final straw for the burgeoning neo conservative movement.
As the late neoconservative movement co-founder
