Americans struggling to make ends meet probably don’t care to know how many billionaires there are in the United States, where most of them reside or how much the size of the “billionaires club” has increased since 2020.

Struggling Americans today do want to know the prospects for more and better jobs and their prospects for markedly improving their lives.

Unfortunately, it appears that for the “struggling crowd” more disappointment and frustration awaits them, as well as deteriorating confidence in general.

It is not what people in this country have been anticipating and, individually, they now need to figure out a way to weather what the Wall Street Journal, in its Sept. 6-7 edition, described as the “crawl” that has begun afflicting the nation’s labor market.

The picture that the Journal painted does not depict a pleasant, welcoming landscape, and it’s anyone’s guess how long that “portrait” will be dominant on the national front.

Suffice to say it already has over-extended its presence.

The Journal began its report by observing that U.S. job growth continued to slow down in August, with just 22,000 new jobs added.

The Journal called the slowdown “a sign that the labor market is deteriorating markedly and all but sealing the case that the robust hiring of the postpandemic years is over.”

According to the Journal, the Sept. 5 federal report dealing with August hiring “adds to a summer of slow hiring and points to a stagnant job market that has lengthened job searches, shut young people out of employment and increased unemployment for Black workers.”

Meanwhile, the Labor Department report on which the Journal article was based also highlighted troubling information from earlier in the year, such as the fact that the government had revised its numbers from previous months and indicated that the economy lost a net 13,000 jobs in June.

That was the first such decline since December 2020, the government reported.

The Journal quoted Rebecca Patterson, an economist and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who said, “The labor market is continuing to slow to stall speed. The economic outlook is incredibly uncertain. Companies are being very cautious about adding personnel.”

The jobs numbers for August, meanwhile, defied the predictions of economists polled by the Journal — the main prediction being that the economy would gain 75,000 jobs last month.

What a curveball the labor market delivered.

Then there’s the “other side” that has no personal job worries and doesn’t have the make-ends-meet challenges that most Americans have — the nation’s approximately 1,135 billionaires, the richest 100 of whom, the Journal says, account for nearly $3.86 trillion in wealth.

Collectively, the Journal said, based on data from Altrata, a wealth-intelligence firm, the 1,135 billionaires are worth about $5.7 trillion.

By the way, for the benefit of anyone who might be interested, the biggest concentration of billionaires was said to be in California, and the “billionaires club” consisted of “just” 927 members in 2020.

From the standpoint of that group’s own lives, they probably couldn’t care less that home prices rose to a high in June, causing the spring sales season to fizzle.

Matthew Hennessey, the Journal’s deputy editorial features editor, wrote an opinion column in late August calling back-to-school the “cruelest time of the year.” This year the labor market is adding another kind of validity to Hennessey’s return-to-classrooms view.