Middle Class

The 2012 presidential campaign was fought over one big issue: which candidate and which party would be better equipped to help and protect struggling middle-class Americans. Since then, political leaders in Washington have done nothing to make good on their promises. The latest economic figures confirm what has been a reality now for almost the entirety of President Obama's tenure in the White House. The economy is continuing to recover, but not rapidly enough to make a major dent in an unemployment rate...

AUSTIN, Texas — Offering a more upbeat view of the economy, President Barack Obama resurrected his jobs proposals Thursday, advancing modest initiatives as he pushed for action on more ambitious efforts that face resistance from congressional Republicans. "We're poised for progress," he declared. The president chose the bustling Texas capital as a backdrop to refocus on higher wages, education and a manufacturing-driven agenda that had been eclipsed by his struggles over gun control...

For a generation, the men of this town have headed north to the land of the mighty dollar, breaking U.S. immigration laws to dig swimming pools in Memphis and grind meat in Chicago. In the United States, they were illegal aliens. Back home, they are new entrepreneurs using the billions of dollars earned "on the other side" to create a Mexican middle class. The migrants "did something bad to do something good," said Mexican economist Luis de la Calle. Where remittances from El Norte were once mostly used to help hungry...

I agree with Eugene Robinson's May 3 op-ed column, " Flinching from the pain ": Sequestration is making Head Start students suffer, the folks depending on Section 8 housing subsidies suffer and the elderly suffer, and yet we are getting relief only for air travel. I am disappointed, disgusted and embarrassed that the president and Congress can't do their jobs. Mr. Robinson sums it up nicely: Negotiate a proper budget deal or live with the pain. But don't expect the children, the poor and the middle class to suffer...

Saving the middle class has become a battle cry in the 2012 presidential campaign — and it's no wonder. According to a recent Pew Research Center study, the percentage of Americans considered middle class has dwindled to 51 percent from 61 percent in 1971. But the Pew report does not explain the political and economic forces behind this decline. That's a task Hedrick Smith sets for himself in his new book, "Who Stole the American Dream?" Long before most reporters and social scientists took note, Smith had established...

We are passing through something more than a period of disappointing economic growth and increasing political polarization. What's happening is more powerful: the collapse of "entitlement. " By this, I do not mean primarily cuts in specific government benefits, most prominently Social Security, but the demise of a broader mind-set — attitudes and beliefs — that, in one form or another, has gripped Americans since the 1960s. The breakdown of these ideas has rattled us psychologically as well as politically and economically.

The vise on the middle class tightened last year, driving down its share of the income pie as the number of Americans in poverty leveled off and the most affluent households saw their portion grow, new census data released Wednesday showed. Income inequality increased by 1.6 percent, the Census Bureau said in its annual report on poverty, income and health insurance. This was the biggest one-year increase in almost two decades and suggested that a trend in place since the late 1970s was picking up...

We middle-class Americans are in a funk. "The overarching economic narrative of the 2008 campaign is the idea that life for the middle class has grown more difficult," writes Paul Taylor of the Pew Research Center, which recently published a massive report on middle-class anxieties. By its survey, more than half of Americans believe they either have not moved ahead in the past five years (25 percent) or have fallen behind (31 percent). Pew pronounces this "the most downbeat short-term assessment of personal progress in nearly half a century.

QUERETARO, Mexico — A wary but tenacious middle class is fast becoming the majority in Mexico, breaking down the rich-poor divide in a profound demographic transformation that has far-reaching implications here and in the United States. Although many Mexicans and their neighbors to the north still imagine a country of downtrodden masses dominated by a wealthy elite, the swelling ranks of the middle class are crowding new Wal-Marts, driving Nissan sedans and maxing out their Banamex credit cards.

MUMBAI — As thousands of young Indians thronged New Delhi's streets to protest a brutal gang rape last month, 25-year-old Pooja Patil said, many of her friends in this seaside metropolis held candlelight ­marches instead of new year's parties. Others replaced their Facebook profile pictures with a single black dot as a symbol of mourning. They were part of what news media reports heralded as an Indian middle class jolted into action by the shocking assault that led to the young woman's death.

We are passing through something more than a period of disappointing economic growth and increasing political polarization. What's happening is more powerful: the collapse of "entitlement. " By this, I do not mean primarily cuts in specific government benefits, most prominently Social Security, but the demise of a broader mind-set — attitudes and beliefs — that, in one form or another, has gripped Americans since the 1960s. The breakdown of these ideas has rattled us psychologically as well as politically and economically.

The 2012 presidential campaign was fought over one big issue: which candidate and which party would be better equipped to help and protect struggling middle-class Americans. Since then, political leaders in Washington have done nothing to make good on their promises. The latest economic figures confirm what has been a reality now for almost the entirety of President Obama's tenure in the White House. The economy is continuing to recover, but not rapidly enough to make a major dent in an...

Arne Duncan is secretary of education. Source information about studies mentioned in this column has been posted at www.ed.gov/early-learning/research . P resident Obama put forward a plan last week to make access to high-quality early learning a reality for every 4-year-old in America by making full-day preschool available to families with incomes at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty line. Parents, teachers and principals nationwide agree that we need to do more to...

In its six decades, the World Bank has helped rebuild Europe and expanded its anti-poverty efforts to the most remote parts of the planet, but today it may be wrestling with its toughest issue yet: irrelevance. The developing world is succeeding faster than expected, and the countries that are among the World Bank's biggest borrowers and best sources of profit — including Brazil, Mexico and China — don't really need the money anymore. So as World Bank President Jim Yong Kim ...

People talk about transformational politicians. But watching Margaret Thatcher take down the British class system was an education in how it's really done. It required the radical vision and iron will of someone who genuinely abhorred the status quo. Thatcher demolished the two conservative pillars of British society: the labor unions that held the parliamentary Labor Party in bondage, and the upper-class Tory leaders who resembled the benign but hapless relics of "Downton Abbey.

As income inequality in the United States has soared and median wages have flatlined since 1980, economists have spent a lot of time debating why the top 1 percent has done so much better than everyone else. Is policy to blame? The decline of labor unions? Technology? An equally pressing question, though, is what the hefty incomes of the top 1 percent mean for the lives of the bottom 99 percent. A new paper by the University of Chicago's Marianne Bertrand and Adair Morse...

As politicians compete to prove who loves the middle class more, they're missing the elephant and the donkey in the room. The middle class needs not just tax breaks and jobs but also marriage. This is the finding of a new University of Virginia and Institute for American Values report, "The State of Our Unions," which tracks the decline of marriage among the nearly 60 percent of Americans who have high school but not college educations. This has far-reaching repercussions that are not only societal but economic as well.

The tendency of young adults to put off marriage has taken a harsh toll on Americans without college degrees, according to a new study by a group of family researchers. The study, titled Knot Yet, belies the mythology popularized on shows such as "Girls," with characters spending their 20s establishing careers and relationships before deciding to settle down and have children. While that scenario portrays the experiences of many college-educated Americans, women with only high school degrees or a year or two of...

Policy aimed at promoting economic opportunity for poor children must be framed within three stark realities. First, many poor children come from families that do not give them the kind of support that middle-class children get from their families. Second, as a result, these children enter kindergarten far behind their more advantaged peers and, on average, never catch up and even fall further behind. Third, in addition to the education deficit, poor children are more likely to make bad...