Hillary Clinton has essentially adopted one of Barack Obama’s major policy thrusts in her nascent presidential campaign, identifying a large swath of the country’s population, assuming that this large group has the economic deck stacked against them, and then promising to help them gain economically in the future. CONT. Frank […] Read more »
The Promise and the Peril of an Improving Economy
Americans are feeling better about the economy today than they have in years. For the first time since early 2013, more Americans approve of the job Obama’s doing on the economy (48 percent) than disapprove (47 percent). That’s good news for Hillary Clinton and Democrats heading into 2016. Yet, Americans […] Read more »
Unequal, Yet Happy
… Despite soaring inequality, worsened by the Great Recession, and recent grumbling about the 1 percent, Americans remain fairly happy. All of the wage gains since the downturn ended in 2009 have essentially gone to the top 1 percent, yet the proportion of Americans who say they are “thriving” has […] Read more »
How Poor Are the Poor?
There is a consensus among poverty experts that over the past 50 years there has been some improvement in the condition of the poor. … Despite the rising optimism, there are disagreements over how many poor people there are and the conditions they live under. There are also questions about […] Read more »
American Class Perceptions Weather Economic Storm
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 […] Read more »
Belief in the Middle Class Unshaken by Economic Shifts
Neither the Great Recession, nor the sluggish recovery, nor a widening wealth gap has shaken many Americans’ belief that they are solidly middle class, a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows. Despite a rapidly shifting economy that’s largely hollowed out middle-class jobs and deepened inequality in the last generation, […] Read more »