The stock market may be high, but the state of the American middle class is anything but, and as talk of more budget cuts dominates the conversation in Washington, millions of families are still recovering from the economic crisis, just trying to make ends meet.
Today, over 48 million Americans now live in poverty, 4.8 million have been unemployed for six months or longer, and the safety net isn’t exactly getting stronger.
A new documentary from HBO, American Winter, chronicles what’s happening in the lives of working families who have slipped from the middle class into poverty.
The directors of American Winter, Joe and Harry Gantz, joined the NOW with Alex Wagner panel on Wednesday to discuss why they created the film and the implications of our rapidly declining middle class. “We were seeing that there were more families struggling,” Joe said, “more people out of work than at any time in the last eighty years and yet all the discussion was on cutting budgets and cutting services, and we thought that we needed to show this subject from a human standpoint.”
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