The American middle-class may be battered, but it can’t be knocked down.
Over the past 15 years, the U.S. economy has weathered the dot-com bubble and bust, the housing bubble and bust, the financial crisis and two recessions with shallow recoveries, yet the vast majority of Americans continue to identify as middle or working class, according to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.
To gauge the health of middle-class America, the poll revived a series of questions about middle-class identity from 1998.
Today, 41% of Americans identify as middle class, 17% as upper middle class and 29% as working class. Only 9% identified as poor. In 1998, 46% were middle class, 16% were upper middle class, 29% working class and 6% identified as poor. The changes were mostly within the survey’s 3.1 percentage point margin of error.
The survey’s findings underscore why President Barack Obama has begun focusing so much of his political rhetoric on “middle-class economics”: Many Americans identify with the term.
But the numbers also undercut the notion that the middle class feels increasingly out of reach for the poor and working class.
via American Class Perceptions Weather Economic Storm – Real Time Economics – WSJ.
