Most of them don’t vote. Or can’t vote, because they don’t have up-to-date identification, or a home address, or access to a polling place.
They’re as likely to have no job at all as a job flipping burgers (a career more and more often held by people with college degrees (PDF warning) ). Their 401 K is worthless, they have no pension, and Social Security isn’t ever going to be enough. They make money by collecting scrap metal to recycle, or mowing lawns, or selling plasma, or getting a doctor to write them a pain pill prescription and then selling the pills.
In some cases literally the best case scenario is for them to land a decent job with a good company, and get injured on the job and land permanent disability before they get laid off or replaced with someone younger.
75,948,000 people worked at minimum wage or below in 2013, according to the above PDF from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That is the people that had jobs on the books.
If those people lived in a red state, they were living without health insurance, since there was no Medicaid expansion available to them. Thus, if they had any sort of mental illness it went untreated, or self-medicated with cheap alcohol. They weren’t eating food that was conducive to mental and body health. They were living in unsafe neighborhoods. They were arrested more often than other white people and fined greater amounts of money and given harsher sentences. They had their kids taken away from them and their kids were abused in foster homes while they themselves were being called unfit parents because they couldn’t be home when the kids got off the school bus.
No, they’re not going to die out. For every poor white person that kills themselves, another is right behind them to take that minimum-wage job because they have no other choice. And the trend is moving toward more low-paying retail jobs and fewer unions.
so hold on to your middle-class income and enjoy it while it lasts. Any one of you could be next.