記事の翻訳お願いします。
中間層についての記事ですが、上手く英訳することができず、困っています。
米国の子供の世代について述べられていますが、表現が難しく、苦戦しております。
長文ですが翻訳お願いします。
The American middle class is worried-and with reason. Middle-class workers have long been the foundation of American society. In recent decades, they have seemed more prosperously buoyant than ever, living in bigger houses with a panoply of utilities, gadgets, and entertainment systems. So why the angst?
The roots are primarily economic. Even in these boom times, anxiety levels rival those of the early Reagan recession years. In particular, people have great and growing fear about losing their jobs. And we are at one of the rare points in our history when Americans have stopped dreaming of a better life for their children. Now the hope is negative: that their children won't be forced into a lower standard of living. Americans used to feel sure each generation would do better than the last—but someone has run away with the ladder. Now the middle class lives with the same uncertainties that dog the poor. So close do many feel to the economic margin that they fear they're but one illness or one job loss away from catastrophe.
The paranoia is not idle. In the 1970s, a family had a roughly 7 percent chance of its income dropping by half or more. Today the odds are 17 percent. Almost two thirds of workers believe that it is harder to earn a decent living now than it was 20 or 30 years ago, according to the Pew Research Center. Workers with fewer years of formal education feel it most, as earnings of the college educated have about doubled compared with high school graduates. Yet the public education system, once the great equalizer, is perceived to be deteriorating, even as it has become dramatically harder to finance a college education.
The economy as a whole is performing well, but most people are not sharing in it. In 2005, the average income of those in the "bottom" 90 percent of the economy dipped from the year before. That's just one broad indicator of the problems confronting many of the groups within that 90 percent—no college education, single parent, minority. Meanwhile, at the top end of the economic spectrum, the gains have been spectacular. Just look at CEO pay, for example, which has risen in the past decade at triple the rate of the median worker's pay.
What is clear is that our richest 10 percent have gained the most. That top slice now receives 44 percent of pretax income, the highest since the 1920s and 1930s, and up from 32 percent between 1945 and 1980. The richest 1 percent has done even better, with pretax income growing from 8 percent of national income in 1980 to 17 percent in 2005. Another way to look at it is that the richest 1 percent of Americans took in 21.8 percent of all recorded income in 2005—double their share in 1980. This means that the 300,000 Americans at the top made almost as much money as the 150 million Americans at the bottom.
