The Majority Of People Now Effectively Poor There are days I feel like I read dystopian statistics for a living. And then there are day when the dystopian statistics take even my jaded breath away.

Here’s one: 43% of American households can’t afford a budget that includes housing, food, childcare, healthcare, transportation, and a cellphone. Translation: nearly half of Americans can’t afford the basics of life anymore.

Does that take your breath away too? It should. And yet it might not come as a surprise. You might know it intimately. The statistics say there’s an even chance you’re…living it. What a grim and bizarre reality. Half of people are effectively poor in the world’s richest country. What the?

The folks that did the study above call this new class of people ALICE, for “asset limited, income constrained, employed.”

It’s a sharp way to think about American collapse. Let me translate this term, too: the people formerly known as the American middle class.