Andy Kroll: Food Pantries Picked Over, Incomes Drying Up!

Here is our current dilemma: Food pantries picked over, Incomes drying up, Shelters bursting with the homeless. Job seekers spilling out the doors of employment centers. College grads moving back in with their parents. The angry and disillusioned filling the streets. Pan your camera from one coast to the other, from city to suburb to farm and back again, and you'll witness scenes like these. They are the legacy of the Great Recession, the Lesser Depression, or whatever you choose to call it. In recent months, a blizzard of new data, the hardest of hard numbers, has laid bare the dilapidated condition of the of the American economy, and particularly of the once-mighty American middle class. Each report sparks a flurry of news stories and pundit chatter, but never much reflection on what it all means, now that we have just enough distance to look back on the first decade of the twenty-first century, and see how Americans fared in that turbulent period, and yet the verdict couldn't be more clear-cut. For the American middle class, long the pride of this country and the envy of the world, the past ten years were a bust, a washout, a decade from hell! Paychecks shrank. Household wealth melted away like so many sandcastles swept off by the incoming tide. Poverty spiked, swallowing an ever-greater share of the population, young and old: "This is truly a lost decade," Harvard University economist Lawrence Katz said of these last years. "We think of America as a place where every generation is doing better, but we're looking at a period when the median family is in worse shape than it was in the late 1990's."