Wonkblog Why the upper middle class might be the real target of today’s anger
Why, he wondered, does Mercedes-Benz advertise on television?
.. It was a simple way of asking why luxury brands focus resources on appealing to a mass audience of U.S. consumers, particularly at a time when technology is making it easier to micro-target the very rich. 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.
.. 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. (For a single worker, that equivalent works out to just less than $58,000 a year.)
.. The upper middle class grew from just less than 13 percent of the U.S. population in 1979 to nearly 30 percent in 2014
.. The poor and the middle class are not so much angry at the top 1 percent, he says, as they are at the upper middle class — the people who used to be middle class like them but who now live in nicer houses and drive sports cars and, Rose says, maybe look down on the workers left behind in their rise.