美國中產階級崩潰：五成美國人生活貧困或在貧困邊緣大綱

One in five US adults now lives in households either in poverty or on the cusp of poverty, with almost 5.7m having joined the country’s lowest income ranks since the global financial crisis.
五個美國成年人中就有一個生活貧困或是處於貧困邊緣的，全球金融危機以來，已經有570萬人加入美國國家最低收入保障行列中。

Many of the new poor, or near-poor, have become so even amid an economic recovery that is widely expected to lead the US Federal Reserve to raise interest rates next week for the first time in almost a decade. More than 45 percent of them — almost 2.5m adults — have joined the lowest income ranks since 2011, long after the post-crisis recession was ostensibly over.
許多新的貧困人口或接近貧困人口都期待美國聯邦儲備委員會在下週提高利率來實現經濟復甦，這是近十年來的第一次。在後金融危機經濟衰退結束後很長時間，有超過45%的人——近250萬成年人——從2011年就加入到最低收入保障中。

The findings, contained in data prepared for a new study of the US middle class by the Pew Research Center and shared with the Financial Times, put a stark human face on the economic legacy left by the crisis and reveal how uneven the recovery has been.
這些發現是美國佩尤研究中心爲其美國中產階級新研究準備的並與英國《金融時報》共享的數據，共同研究經濟危機後遺症這個嚴肅的事實，並揭示了經濟恢復的坎坷。

They illustrate how many Americans are being left behind even amid the strong jobs growth that, should the Fed move as expected, will be at the core of the argument its policymakers present for raising rates.
他們闡明瞭即使在強勁的就業增長趨勢下還是有很多美國人無法正常就業，如果美聯儲按預期實施措施，決策者們目前加息的決定將是爭論的核心問題。

They also help explain why any notion of a recovery still seems a long way off to many in the US and why the message of populist politicians such as Donald Trump that America is not working resonate on the eve of an election year.
他們還解釋了爲何美國經濟復甦還很遙遠以及爲何像唐納德·特朗普這樣的民粹主義政治家的言論，在選舉前夕並不能得到很好的共鳴。

“There’s a new American dream,” says Torrey Easler, a Baptist preacher who helps feed a growing population of poor in the town of Eden, North Carolina. “The old American dream was to own a home and two cars. The new American dream is to have a job.”
托裏·伊斯勒是北卡羅來納州伊甸鎮的一位致力於幫助解決不斷增長的貧困人口問題的牧師，他說：“現在有了新的美國夢，過去的美國夢是擁有一個自己的家和兩輛汽車。新的美國夢是有一份工作。”

A large part of the shrinking of the US middle class, which for the first time in decades now forms less than a majority of the country’s adult population, has surprisingly been due to the country’s growing affluence, the Pew study found.
佩尤研究中心發現。近十年來，很大一部分美國中產階級的萎縮導致中產階級不再是美國成年人口的多數，令人驚訝的是這是因爲美國日益富裕造成的。

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.
但美國最低收入羣體——佩尤定義的即三口人家庭年收入低於31402美元——在過去7年間，是中產階級增加速度的5倍多。現在美國低收入成人達4890萬，相比2008年的4320萬人和1971年的2160萬人增加了。

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.
約翰霍普金斯大學社會學家凱瑟琳·艾丁，最近負責編寫一本書，關於在美國每天生活費不足2美元的那羣人。他認爲在具有里程碑意義的20世紀90年代福利改革後，萎縮的社會安全網讓美國成爲一個對待貧窮更殘酷的地方。

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.”
很多低技術要求工作的離岸外包和自動化也使脫離貧困比以前更難了。她說：“過去所謂不好的工作，也比現在不好的工作要好的多。”

The educational make-up of the middle class has also changed significantly. In 1971, 76 percent of adults in middle class households had a high-school education or less. Today that figure is just 40 percent, according to Pew’s data analysis, while just 12 percent of adults in lower income households had a university degree.
中產階級的教育構成也發生了重大變化。在1971年，中產階級中76%的成年人有高中或高中以下學歷。現在根據佩尤數據分析，現在這個數據僅僅是40%，同時低收入家庭中只有12%的成年人擁有大學學歷。

“It’s a tough world out there when you get into these very competitive, knowledge-based, very up and down, transient businesses that are here today and gone tomorrow,” says Robert Doar, a former New York City social services commissioner and now a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “But that’s not what the problem is at the bottom. The problem for people at the bottom is that they can’t get up and be in that game.”
前紐約市社會服務專員、現美國企業研究所保守派研究員長羅伯特·多爾說：“世界很殘酷，要保住這些競爭激烈、基於知識、時好時壞、瞬息萬變的企業的飯碗尤其如此。但這並不是底層人的問題所在。底層人的問題是不能站起來參與進這個遊戲中。”

Vocabulary

cusp: 尖頭；尖端
offshoring: 離岸外包