Tara Servatius, the blogger at the John Locke Foundation’s Charlotte blog, The Meck Deck, points to a questionable study on Charlotte’s vanishing middle class. The study, a collaboration of The Charlotte Observer and some eggheads at Stanford University who wouldn’t know Charlotte Uptown from Charlotte’s Web, claims that the evil rich are making the middle class poorer and poorer, increasing the number of poor within Charlotte’s municipal limits. Not so, says Tara:
The number of poor here HAS exploded, but it has nothing to do with income distribution among the classes changing or the middle class becoming poor. It is because Charlotte has become a national mecca for the poor, importing more of them over the last decade than almost anywhere else in the country, in part because our social services were so generous. …
So essentially what the Observer and Stanford have actually proved here is not that some insidious income gap is growing, but that Charlotte’s affluent, shiny-shoed liberals won’t live next to the only other group of people left in Charlotte — poor minorities.
