Check out the following quote, then guess where the authors were working when they wrote these words: “Mark Twain, upon reading his obituary in the New York Journal, famously quipped that the reports of his death were greatly exaggerated. The same could be said today of reports from the scholarly world, the media and even the White House about the shrinking of the middle class.” Now, where did the authors hang their hats during the day? The quote certainly sounds like something somebody working at the conservative Heritage Foundation would say. Or maybe somebody from the libertarian Cato Institute.
The correct answer, however, is the liberal Brookings Institution, which published the study from which those words were taken Dec. 22, with the title of “The exaggerated death of the middle class.” The authors were Ron Haskins and Scott Winship, and what they found in their research is especially relevant in view of President Obama’s Galesburg speech earlier this week. In his address, the chief executive asserted that “the income of the top 1 percent nearly quadrupled from 1979 to 2007, but the typical family’s incomes barely budged.” Further on in the speech, he described America as having a “winner-take-all economy where a few are doing better and better and better, while everybody else just treads water.” Obama would not have said those things had he read Haskins and Winship beforehand.
