In that time, the middle class, the lower middle class and the poor, as he defines them, all shrunk as a share of the population; the share of the super-rich boomed. The answer, his research found, is that there might be more buying power in a particular group of consumers — people he calls the upper middle class — than other economists have estimated. The upper middle class grew from just less than 13 percent of the U.S. population in 1979 to nearly 30 percent in 2014, Rose found by using census data. He shows that the rich and the upper middle class, to a smaller degree, captured an increasing share of the gains from economic growth over that 35 year span. “What’s happening," Rose said, "is that’s where the money is.”Rose defines the upper middle class as households earning the equivalent of $100,000 to $349,999 a year for a family of three, in 2014 dollars.

Source: Washington Post June 21, 2016 11:03 UTC