Income Leveling U.S. To Middle-Class Nation
The controversial Harvard professor, John Kenneth Galbraith, made one point in his testimony before the Senate Banking CommitteeÛªs stock market inquiry which nobody quarreled with:</br></br>That the economy is much less vulnerable to a stock mar-keLcollapse today because less I of the income is concentrated in the hands of people who are likely to be playing around in the market.</br></br>Last week the Commerce Department released a remarkable- study of just how evenly income is distributed nowÛÓ-a study which confirms in figures what some sociologists have been saying on Ûªother grounds: that the United States is becoming one vast middle class.</br></br>The figures, arranged in a bewildering array of charts and tables, cover the year 1953, but the department said the patterns were the same in 1954.</br></br>There are about 50,500,000 ÛÏconsumer unitsÛª* in the countryÛÓcounting 35,600,000 nonfarm families, -5,500,000 farm families, and 9,400,000 single individuals. For various reasons, farm families and single individuals have lower cash incomes than the great bulk of us who are in non-farm families ^(without necessarily indicating a lower standard of living). So the crucial figures are those for the non-farm families. And this is what they show: