The main reason why people go to work is to make money in order to make a living, pay bills, and to have some money set aside for future needs and events. In today's society, pundits like to point out how the unemployment rate has come down significantly since the "Great Recession" so that in October, 2017, it had dropped to just 4.1%, which is considered to be an unemployment rate that is even below the natural rate of unemployment, but the proof is in the eating of the pudding, and despite low unemployment rates, the savings rate in America, is far below historic norms.
In 1960, as reported by nerdwallet.com, America's personal savings rate per that year was 10%, in which, personal savings is defined as a given person's income less personal outlays and less personal taxes, of which the amount remaining is for investments and such, designated as savings, and this number is calculated as a percentage against that personal income. This means, for example, a person that earns $40,000 but has outlays of personal expenses and taxes of $36,000, leaves that person with $4,000 as their disposable personal income, equating to a savings rate of 10%. It was not until 1979, that America's personal savings rate dropped below double digits when it was just barely below such at 9.8%, while also in 1983 it slipped to 9.4%, this left 1984 as being the last year of a double-digital personal savings rate at 10.7%, in which, since then in over twenty years, it has not hit 10% or better, and in the new millennium its highest rate was 7.6% in 2012, with the 2016 rate being just 4.9%.
All of these above numbers are the averaged American savings rate, in which, obviously, there are people that exceed that average and those that do not. Businessinsider.com then broke down American income groups into five equal quintiles, in which the bottom two quintiles had an average savings rate of a paltry 0.12%, or virtually nothing. The middle quintile had an average savings rate of 11.1%, whereas the fifth quintile had an average savings rate of 23.6%, in which the top 5% savings rate was 37.2%, and the top 1% savings rate was an astonishing 51.2%, in which, remember, the savings rate is a person's income less personal outlays and personal taxes, of which, in the decades of the 1950s through the 1970s the highest personal tax rate for high income earners was around 70%, signifying that today's superrich don't pay close to that amount in taxes, let alone expenses, allowing them to easily accumulate more and more money.
The reason that the savings rate matters so much, is that when one retires, or is unable to work anymore, or to find gainful employment, than that person must live off of their Social Security benefits, or their 401K, or their pension, or any of those equivalencies, along with any monies that has been saved up. When you have 40% of the population that have saved essentially nothing, then you have a massive social problem of a significant amount of people that will not be able to make ends meet without permanent governmental assistance. Yet, clearly, there is money that is being made in America, and clearly there is money being saved in America, but that money has since 1985 been more and more concentrated within the rich and the wealthy.
The decline of the American savings rate from double-digit growth, to today's single digit stagnation, despite unemployment being low, signifies that the rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer, while the divide between the two is getting larger. In addition, the fact that the bottom two quintiles of Americans have no savings whatsoever, indicates, that the middle class is being inexorably decimated, with more and more people each year becoming essentially wards of the state, having at one time, been part of the middle class through a previous generation, but now, instead, are an integral part of the lower class, with the trend between rich and poor getting wider and wider by the day, and the middle class struggling valiantly just to hold their own.