First, it is important to realize that there is no official government definition of middle class. Any specification of the middle class as being people with incomes between two numbers is an arbitrary definition made by whoever is providing the statistics. While many reasonable definitions of the middle class can be constructed that show the number of people in the American middle class is shrinking, that is only half of the story. In fact, the middle class has shrunk because people have been escaping it by higher incomes; that is, they are getting richer. First, Walmart has seen the trend of a smaller middle class due to more upper income families.

Source: Forbes March 26, 2017 15:56 UTC