The old “Edwards Center” at UNC-Chapel Hill ? the “Center on Work, Poverty, and Opportunity” that has yet to live up to its pledge to find “innovative and practical ideas” to fight poverty ? is having a conference:
Deadline for Conference Registration for “Wealth Inequality and the Eroding Middle Class”
While wealth inequality is not new, reports of the rapid polarization of income and assets in the United States and abroad are dramatic and remarkable. To explore the ramifications of this trend, the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity and the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy are co-sponsoring a conference that will engage distinguished academics, policymakers, nonprofit organizations and other stakeholders in a discussion about wealth inequality in the United States within a global context.
As if trotting out socialist canards about the minimum wage and socialist medicine wasn’t enough, now this group without its dashing figurehead is going forward on the half-truth about the declining American middle class. (The middle class? Weren’t you rent-seekers supposed to care about the poorest among us?)
What half-truth? This one (forgive the class-envy rhetoric): the American middle class is declining, with the suggestion being everyone’s getting poorer. The American middle class is declining, but that’s because more and more of them are moving into the upper class.
Per Cato, for example:
If we define the middle class as households earning between $35,000 and $75,000 a year, the middle class in America remains a huge demographic group. According to the Census report, Table A-1, the middle class made up 33.3 percent of U.S. households in 2005. That share is indeed somewhat smaller than in 1980, when 38.2 percent of households earned between $35,000 and $75,000 a year in real (inflation-adjusted) 2005 dollars.
Aha, so the middle class really is shrinking if not exactly disappearing, the alarmists might respond. But the Census numbers also show that over the past 25 years, the share of U.S. households earning less than $35,000 a year has also shrunk, from 44.5 percent in 1980 to 38.4 percent in 2005. Meanwhile, the share of households earning more than $75,000 a year has jumped from 17.4 percent to 28.3 percent.
In other words, if the middle class in America has shrunk, it is only because so many formerly middle-class households have moved to the upper-income brackets, while a significant number of households previously in the lower brackets have moved up to the middle class and beyond.
Alas, such things are not the stuff of academic conferences. The Procrustean bed of socialists’ handwringing about the economy means they need to chop off the reason why the “middle class” is shrinking (because they’re moving upward).
