Middle Class

Vice President Joe Biden said the middle class has been “buried the last four years,” not the most artful statement coming from the No. 2 in the administration in charge during that time. Biden's remark during a campaign rally Tuesday in North Carolina immediately provoked tart ripostes by Republican vice presidential candidate Paul D. Ryan and GOP surrogate John Sununu, who said the Democrat “finally got something right.” Sununu said during a conference call with reporters that the Biden comment will provide a nice entree for Mitt Romney to talk about the middle class in Wednesday night's debate with President Obama.

WASHINGTON -- President Obama today plans to begin pushing for an extension of tax cuts for the middle class, a message he and his surrogates are scheduled to push in events across the country.   Income tax cuts initially passed under President George W. Bush are set to expire at the end of the year. Obama favors extending the cuts for one more year for those earning less than $250,000 annually. Republicans favor extending all the cuts. Obama plans a White House announcement today, according to an official familiar with the plans, as well as a series of television interviews with local-station anchors from several markets in battleground and other states.

ASPEN, Colo. -- Holding up a report card that gave President Obama a string of red marks on unemployment, housing foreclosures, the deficit and other measures, Mitt Romney said Thursday that the president has failed to carry out the promises he made when accepted the Democratic nomination not from far where he spoke. “I know in a campaign talk can be cheap, you can say anything. But results, if they're not done the right way, they can be real expensive,” Romney told supporters in Golden, Colo.

The vast majority of middle-class Americans say their financial well-being has been crimped over the last 10 years by sagging home values and dreary job prospects, according to a new survey. About 85% of middle-class people say it's tougher now than a decade ago to maintain their living standards, according to the Pew Research Center report. “Since 2000, the middle class has shrunk in size, fallen backward in income and wealth, and shed some - but by no means all - of its characteristic faith in the future,” the report states.

TAMPA, Fla. - The conventional wisdom is that this week's Republican National Convention needs to make Mitt Romney more "likable" - to replace his image as a frosty billionaire with the warmer (and, friends say, more accurate) picture of a family man, devout Mormon and private do-gooder. And yes, the convention began on Tuesday with biographical tributes, testimonials to Mitt the mensch and an appealing speech from the candidate's appealing wife, Ann Romney, who said: "You can trust Mitt....

Moving to address rising voter anger over federal deficits and the tattered shape of their own pocketbooks, President Obama will propose a freeze on non-defense-related federal spending as well as expanded aid to middle-class families in his State of the Union speech Wednesday night, White House aides said Monday. To counter the soaring federal deficit, which polls show is a major factor in voters' discontent, Obama will announce that the budget blueprint he files next week will contain a "hard freeze" on discretionary spending that lasts through 2013, an effort his advisors liken to the fiscal discipline average families impose on themselves every day. Obama and Vice President Joe Biden unveiled the outlines of their relief package for the middle class at a White House meeting Monday.

The idea of a large, stable middle class is central to America's sense of itself. But the U.S. middle class has been steadily shrinking, dropping from 61% of all adults 40 years ago to a bare majority now, a new study finds. This middle tier of American society also has slipped downward in terms of its income and wealth in the last decade, according to the report released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center. And it has lost a share of its traditional faith in the future. "The notion that we are a society with a large middle class, with lots of economic and social mobility and a belief that each generation does better than the next - these are among the core tenets of what it means to be an American," said Paul Taylor, the Pew Research Center's executive vice president.