Economist Bruce Bartlett administers a rather painful, if deserved, spanking to The New York Times for mishandling recent Census data in an attempt to prove the silly proposition that the middle-class is shrinking as more people fall into poverty.
Uh, not quite. The share of households falling below the threshold the Times uses to signify ?poor,? $25,000, has been going down. The share of households above $75,000 ? apparently considered ?the rich? ? has been going up. These thresholds are held constant against inflation, by the way.
It?s no wonder people end up with such a warped view of economic reality that they believe that the rich are getting richer (true), the poor are getting poorer (not true), and the middle class is disappearing (which is an incoherent statement in proportional terms, and a false statement in absolute, income-threshold terms).
