The period 2018-2025 will not deserve to be remembered as a time of prosperity, but as the disastrous era of silent impoverishment and systematic of the Spanish middle class. This phenomenon is not a mere cyclical fluctuation, but a self-inflicted structural evil, an act of economic sabotage directed by the Government against the citizen who works hard, supports the Spanish economy and is a bastion of political and social stability…
The middle class today finds itself pulverized between three destructive forces, at the service of the state Leviathan: parasitic fiscal plundering, the relentless erosion of inflation and an uncontrolled cost of living that has made it a slave to its essential bills. The unwritten social contract that guaranteed that effort would translate into promotion and security has been broken.
The blatant contraction in the size of this middle class is a devastating indicator. If in 2018, using the OECD definition (income between 75% and 200% of the median income), this contingent covered around 53% of the population, by the end of 2024, that figure had collapsed to a meager 43%−45%; This is a net loss of between 8 and 10 percentage points in just seven years.
That’s not a statistical ‘decline’; It is a forced deportation of millions of productive citizens into vulnerability, relative poverty or, worse, direct dependence on the State. The base of the social pyramid that generates wealth and pays the bills for public waste has been dynamited. This flight into vulnerability is one of the tangible proofs of the failure of communist social policy.
To hide this social catastrophe, The Government and its media apparatus have cynically sold the narrative of nominal wage increases. It is a gross statistical fallacy.
The cumulative effect of the silent inflation tax has devoured, on average, up to 89% of all salary increases
The accumulated effect of the silent tax of inflation has devoured, on average, up to 89% of all salary increases received by the worker between 2018 and 2024. The average worker, the one that the Government claims to protect, has suffered a tangible and real loss of about 1,410 euros of accumulated purchasing power.
For the typical family, the net growth of their Real Available Income has been, for practical purposes, zero in the critical period from 2019 to 2023. The nominal increases have been nothing more than an insufficient palliative to mitigate the hemorrhage, not to generate real wealth or family capitalization.
The only palpable effect of these increases has been to justify, before public opinion, the surreptitious increase in the tax burden that follows.
If inflation is a white-collar robbery, the Spanish tax system is a machine for crushing income in broad daylight. The middle class, by definition, lacks enough poverty to be subsidized and the wealth necessary to indulge in sophisticated shirking. He thus becomes the forced and perfect collector of the State, the ideal victim.
The direct tax wedge—personal income tax and social contributions, which are essentially another tax on work—absorbs a scandalous 38.8% of the income generated. But the most perverse and immoral factor is the cold progressiveness of personal income tax, a deliberate planned plunder.
The average family is forced to dedicate around 34% of their income to the mortgage or up to an unsustainable 36% to rent.
The Government has refused to deflate the rate in line with the rising cost of living. The result is devastating: wage increases that barely compensate for inflation are automatically pushed to higher marginal rates. This is a hidden tax increase, executed without the need for a parliamentary vote and with a clear message to the homeland mesocracy: your effort will be my loot.
When adding indirect taxation (VAT on basic consumption, special taxes on energy), the total tax burden on the income generated by the middle class is close to 50%; That is to say, the State appropriates half of everything that the citizen produces before the family can even use its income to pay its unavoidable expenses. The confiscation is almost total.
From this position of financial weakness induced by a voracious State, the middle class must face a cost of living in which housing is the black hole that devours any possibility of stability or capitalization of assets.
Between 2018 and 2025, purchase prices have risen by between 35% and 45%and rents have risen between 35% and 50%. Sustainable debt thresholds are ancient history. The average family is forced to dedicate around 34% of their income to the mortgage or up to an unsustainable 36% to rent.
When the INE provides aggregate data of a savings rate that approaches 13.6%, a crude statistical masquerade designed for self-deception is being perpetrated. This savings is concentrated almost entirely in high incomes and consolidated assets.
For the middle class, which relentlessly consumes between 80% and 90% of its net income on unavoidable expenses (food, supplies, transportation), savings is a theoretical concept, an unattainable luxury.
The absence of a financial cushion condemns this immense portion of the population to systemic and chronic vulnerability, forcing them to live hand-to-mouth and in many cases forcing dissavings and purely existential debt, just to maintain a minimal appearance of dignity and a level of consumption that keeps it afloat.
The period 2018-2025 has marked the epitaph of the old Spanish middle class. The contraction of its size and the cancellation of its savings capacity have replaced stability with chronic vulnerability.
Despite the supposed “good data” of the GDP, the reality is that the Spanish economy has proven to be incapable of translating macroeconomic improvement in real and lasting family well-being.