Market Correction

These data are from my friend (and EconLog's) Arnold Kling.

(My apologies for my inability to get the formatting on the data portion of this letter correct.)

.....
19 October 2007

The Editor, New York Times
229 West 43rd St.
New York, NY 10036

To the Editor:

Judith Warner writes that "More and more people are being priced out of a middle class existence" ("The Clinton Surprise," October 19). This statement is true, but only because more and more Americans are getting richer. Consider the percentage of American households in each of these different annual-income categories in 1967 and in 2003 (all reckoned in 2003 dollars):

1967 2003
$75K and up 8.2 26.1
$50K - $75K 16.7 18.0
$35K - $50K 22.3 15.0
$15K - $35K 31.1 25.0
under $15K 21.7 15.9

If the middle class is disappearing, it's doing so by swelling the ranks of the upper classes.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Chairman, Department of Economics
George Mason University<