Vulnerability of middle-class

In the USA, generation Xers may well be the first generation whose lifetime earnings will be less than their parents. Already they have the weakest middle class of any generation born in the 20th century. Adjusted for inflation, the weekly earnings of men aged twenty to thirty-four have fallen by nearly one-third since 1973. College graduates have seen there earning fall from 1989 to 1995 fall by nearly 10 percent in relation to the previous generation - the first time that has ever happened. At the same time, young people between twenty-two to thirty-three years old have the greatest personal debt level of any age group. This includes over $2,000 per person in credit card debt, which is carried by 62 percent of Xers. They also suffer the greatest anxiety over debt, with nearly half reporting that it "concerns them a lot." Class antagonisms have been exacerbated to such a degree in market economies that even the bourgeois and petit bourgeois middle-classes, frequently willing aides and auxiliaries of the bourgeois-military state, are deprived of political power and threatened in terms of their economic existence.