Middle Class

More than 840,000 green card holders became citizens last year, the most in a decade. Over 10 percent of the American electorate was born elsewhere, the highest share in a half-century. All of Donald Trump’s huffing and puffing could not stop this demographic evolution; nor could an endless stream of stories about what an unequal, unfair, and no good place America has supposedly become.  read more »

In a new report from Urban Reform Institute edited by Joel Kotkin, J.H. Cullum Clark and Anne Snyder explore what happens when opportunity stalls. Pete Saunders and Karla Lopez del Rio tell the story of how homeownership enabled upward mobility for their respective families. Wendell Cox quantifies the connection between urban containment policies and housing affordabilty.  read more »

A common question I hear, particularly from middle class Black residents in the Chicago area who grow frustrated with the condition of their communities, is, "why can't we have the amenities that other neighborhoods have?"  read more »

Given the likely defeat of President Donald Trump, a functionally headless Republican Party is destined for a period of reflection. Trump himself, for all his rudeness and often unnecessary, divisive rhetoric, has transformed the Republican Party from being a bastion of the establishment to a voice for America’s working and middle class.  read more »

Influential political analyst Ron Brownstein thinks American politics is all about answering this question: “How long can Paducah tell Seattle what to do?”  read more »

California remains deep blue, but the good news from this week’s elections is that it has not yet achieved complete ballot-box unanimity.  read more »

Discussions about policies to help the multiracial American working class majority as a whole typically take a detour into the completely unrelated subject of how to help individuals escape from the working class.

Helping as many individuals escape from working-class occupations as possible is the goal of both the conventional center-left and the conventional center-right.  But the proposed escape routes differ.  read more »

In a new report, Upward Mobility, Charles Blain, Wendell Cox and Joel Kotkin examine examine housing costs, patterns of domestic migration and how they affect upward mobility for middle and working-class citizens, especially historically disadvantage minorities. An excerpt from the report follows below:  read more »

Fishing may be the world’s second oldest profession, but the industry is about as visible as a quiet cousin at a family reunion. Unassuming, keeping to itself, it is largely ignored in talk about work and the economy.  All of which belies its oddly large footprint in reality TV.   read more »

“No Bourgeois, No Democracy”
– Barrington Moore

Protecting and fighting for the middle class regularly dominates rhetoric on the Right and Left. Yet activists on both sides now often seek to undermine single-family home ownership, the linchpin of middle-class aspiration.  read more »