#upper income

[pewresearch]

An owned home is a sizable asset for most American families. But while a home is the single most important asset of lower- and middle income families, upper income families have a wider variety of assets. 

Chart: Comparing the assets owned by upper, middle & lower income families

[pewresearch]

5 takeaways about the American middle class

Americans in middle-income households have lost significant ground since 1970, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of government data.

The middle class has long been the country’s economic majority, but our new analysis finds that’s no longer true. Meanwhile, the middle class has fallen further behind upper-income households financially, which now hold a larger share of aggregate household income than ever before in the 44-year period examined.

[lmlos]

"Most of us, I suspect, will find it difficult to say yes to all four of these questions. (Even Nozick, in “Anarchy, State, and Utopia”, found it hard to say yes to Question 3.) In philosophical terms, we have a reductio ad absurdum. The Nozickian view implies what, from the perspective of common sense morality, is absurd: that a desperate person who sells her organs or body does so freely, that it’s fine to pay someone a paltry sum while profiting hugely off their labor, that people deserve to get rich because of accidents of birth, that there’s nothing wrong with walking by a drowning man. Thus Nozick’s view must be wrong: justice is not simply the unfettered exercise of the free market. Free market “morality” isn’t anything of the sort."