Obama's Shrinking Middle Class

Since President Obama gave his first State of the Union Address, the percentage of Americans who consider themselves “middle class” has fallen from 53 percent in 2009 to 44 percent in 2014 – the most recent year the Pew Research Center asked this question. Team Obama has not forgotten the “shrinking middle class,” as evidenced by the fact that “security for the middle class” is a separate category on the White House website (located under the “Jobs & the Economy: Putting America Back to Work” opening webpage). Yet the President’s public polices do not match his rhetoric and concern for the working and middle class in the US: from his continued expansion of the federal regulatory state, to the reduction in economic freedom for entrepreneurs, to a nearly double digit “real” unemployment rate, to a GDP rate that has been less than half the 3 percent growth rate necessary to get the middle class back to work. Those economic realities are all indictments of Obama’s policies that have left the average American worse off today than when Obama became president in 2009, and those indictments will be discussed in greater detail below.