America's white working class is the smallest it has ever been

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Trump land dying



White working-class Americans, or whites without college degrees, now make up 40% of the U.S. adult population — an all-time low.


Behind the group's decline is a confluence of demographic, economic and cultural changes, according to economists with the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Those include an increase in the number of employees who are minorities; higher college graduation rates for whites, which has lifted many into the professional class; and a surge in recent years of what researchers have termed "deaths of despair," the sharp rise in fatalities due to drug overdoses and suicides.

That tectonic national shift could have major implications for everything from political power to the strength of local economies. Already, the U.S. is experiencing a divergence between faster-growing coastal cities that attract college-educated workers and "left-behind" regions like the Rust Belt, widening economic and political divides. Indeed, such areas are "diverging fast" in key metrics such as family income and economic growth, analysts at the Brookings Institution wrote earlier this month.


https://www.cbsnews.com/news/americas-white-working-class-is-the-smallest-its-ever-been/

 

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Multiple studies have shown that, in the past decade, the political views of the white working class have largely split from whites with college degrees. Whites with no more than high school degrees are increasingly voting Republican, while those with college educations are more likely to vote as Democrats.

Interestingly, the shift comes not only as the white working class is losing population, but also falling back in terms of income and wealth. College-educated white workers, meanwhile, are experiencing strong income gains, placing the two groups on divergent economic paths.

For example, white college-educated Americans saw their share of the nation's income rise from 41% in 1989 to 53% in 2016, according to a separate St. Louis Fed paper published last year. But white working-class workers saw their income share plunge to 27% from 45% over that period, economists found.

 

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And trump's uneducated trailer park rubes think trump will help them

not only are there fewer white working class Americans than in previous decades, but they're earning less and falling further behind economically. A decade ago, according to Brookings, voters in Republican and Democratic districts earned almost identical incomes. That's no longer true. Median household income in Democratic districts now stands at $61,000, compared with $53,000 for Republicans, the centrist think tank found.