Obama returns focus to America’s struggling middle class
As President Obama prepares to make a “major” speech on the economy today, our past reports describe the challenges the middle class has faced in the past decades.
Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
As President Obama prepares to make a “major” speech on the economy today, our past reports describe the challenges the middle class has faced in the past decades.
Chapter 1: Overview Second-generation Americans—the 20 million adult U.S.-born children of immigrants—are substantially better off than immigrants themselves on key measures of socioeconomic attainment, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data. They have higher incomes; more are college graduates and homeowners; and fewer live in poverty. In all of […]
Americans are famous both for being weight conscious, and at the same time unable to come to terms successfully with their bloated waistlines. The same paradox has applied to how the public looks at budget deficits for a very long time.
The public has generally been supportive of affirmative action programs, but is decidedly opposed to the idea of providing preferential treatment to minorities.
The plight of Middle Americans has been much invoked by candidates from both parties this election year. Who are these folk? Here’s a self-portrait painted in statistics.
But candidates’ perceptions on economic growth and tax cuts diverge from overall public priorities.
African Americans see a widening gulf between the values of middle class and poor blacks, and nearly four-in-ten say that because of the diversity within their community, blacks can no longer be thought of as a single race.
The gap between the wealthiest and poorest people in affording basic items is much wider now than it was during the 1992 economic downturn; more than six-in-ten (62%) self-described “working class” people now say their incomes are falling behind the cost of living
Over the past two decades, the number of Americans who see the country as divided along economic lines has increased sharply, and twice as many people now see themselves among the society’s “have-nots.”
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