German Of The Day: Mittelschicht

That means middle class.

And here you thought that your middle class was shrinking. And it is, of course. But the German middle class is shrinking, too. And “it’s shrinking as quickly as the middle class in the U.S.” It’s down to 54 percent of the population, from 60 percent 20 years ago.

Der Anteil der Mittelschicht an der Bevölkerung ist in Deutschland in den vergangenen Jahrzehnten auf zuletzt 54 Prozent geschrumpft. Rund 20 Jahre zuvor lag er noch bei 60 Prozent. Vergleicht man die Entwicklung von 1991 bis 2013, schrumpfte die Mittelschicht in Deutschland genauso stark wie in den USA.

Nothing Nouveau on the German Front

This is a very complex article, I grant you, a lot like that other one I mentioned recently, but with a little bit of effort I think I can somehow manage to summarize it for you thus (and I quote, more or less):

American society is breaking apart.

Everything is spiraling further and further into the abyss.

The American people are going through a Kafkaesque odyssey, the humiliation of which is hard to comprehend.

Help is not in sight, our government and our society have abandoned us.

Wall Street is preoccupied with chasing new profits again.

That old myth about working your way up, of bootstrap success and its ultimate prize, homeownership, has evaporated.

The middle class, America’s backbone, is crumbling.

The American Dream has turned into a nightmare.

Nothing’s going to happen because the political swing to the right is extremely hurtful and absolutely disastrous to the interest of the weakest.

Becoming unemployed is a devious trap. And on and on and tra, la, la until the amen part.

Like, you had no idea, did you? My fellow Americans, I mean. So there you have it. Yet again. And no, the O Word didn’t appear in this article either.