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Sunday, April 24th, 2022

Are you in the American middle class? Find out with our income calculator

Author:     JESSE BENNETT, RICHARD FRY, and RAKESH KOCHHAR
Source:     Pew Research Center
Publication Date:     JULY 23, 2020
 Link: Are you in the American middle class? Find out with our income calculator
Stephan:   As I noted in the previous article the American middle class is shrinking while the richer are getting much richer, and he poor are getting poorer, a clear measure of the Republican dismemberment of American democracy. Click through, answer the questions, and see where you stand.

Our latest analysis shows that the share of adults who live in middle-income households varies widely across the 260 metropolitan areas examined, from 39% in Las Cruces, New Mexico, to 67% in Ogden-Clearfield, Utah. The share of adults who live in lower-income households ranges from 16% in Ogden-Clearfield to 49% in Las Cruces. The estimated share living in upper-income households is greatest in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, California (34%) and the smallest in El Centro, California (7%).

Lower-income adults, already under significant financial pressure, have been especially vulnerable to the economic fallout from the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted April 29-May 5, 2020. The survey found that 36% of lower-income adults and 28% of middle-income adults said they had lost a job or taken a pay cut due to the coronavirus outbreak, compared with 22% of upper-income adults. In a Center survey conducted in April 2020, only 23% of lower-income adults said they had rainy day funds that could last three months, compared with 48% of middle-income adults and 75% of upper-income adults.How we did this

How the income calculator works

The calculator takes your household income and adjusts it for the size of your […]

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2 Comments

  1. Rev. Dean on Sunday, April 24, 2022 at 1:51 pm

    I never made it up into the middle class, as much as I have tried; working two jobs a day in many years which made no difference. I am now Permanently Disabled, and the Social Security Department is my only income and my only true friend in the government. I feel the Billionaires should be taxed to help all the poor people in the country and the world. It would take me 4,000 LIFETIMES to make just 1 Billion dollars.

  2. Dariel Garner on Sunday, April 24, 2022 at 5:08 pm

    I am always amazed at the torturous logic used to describe the existence of the US middle class. Here they look at a median income amount, then arbitrarily define the middle class as being a range of one-third less to two times more than that income.
    The result is to define incomes that range from 35%-95% of the distribution as middle class…a clear distortion of political reality and disempowering to many.