美国中产阶级崩溃：五成美国人生活贫困或在贫困边缘_时事

美国中产阶级崩溃：五成美国人生活贫困或在贫困边缘

佩尤研究中心发现。近十年来，很大一部分美国中产阶级的萎缩导致中产阶级不再是美国成年人口的多数，令人惊讶的是这是因为美国日益富裕造成的。

But the country’s lowest income group — defined by Pew for a three-person household as earning less than $31,402 a year — has also grown at more than five times the rate of the middle class in the past seven years. There are now 48.9m adults in this bracket in the US, up from 43.2m in 2008 and just 21.6m in 1971.

但美国最低收入群体——佩尤定义的即三口人家庭年收入低于31402美元——在过去7年间，是中产阶级增加速度的5倍多。现在美国低收入成人达4890万，相比2008年的4320万人和1971年的2160万人增加了。

Kathryn Edin, a Johns Hopkins University sociologist who authored a recent book about those living on less than $2 a day in the US, argues that the shrinking social safety net after landmark 1990s welfare reforms has made the US a harsher place to be poor than it was.

约翰霍普金斯大学社会学家凯瑟琳·艾丁，最近负责编写一本书，关于在美国每天生活费不足2美元的那群人。他认为在具有里程碑意义的20世纪90年代福利改革后，萎缩的社会安全网让美国成为一个对待贫穷更残酷的地方。

The offshoring or automation of many low-skilled jobs has also made rising out of poverty harder than it once was, she says: “The bad jobs of yesterday were just much, much better than the bad jobs of today.”