Middle class at a crossroads, not for the first time

Friday, September 21, 2012 - 13:00 Zachary Hollcraft/Middle Class Photo Project "To me, nothing epitomizes the middle class like a white picket fence. We bought this house last year, and it came complete with the fence." There've been, by our very rough count, something like a zillion sound bites through the course of this campaign and we've still got a month and a half to go. The candidates have been talking about anything and everything they think will resonate with voters, including heavy use of a phrase that might affect the broadest chunk of Americans: "The middle class." So, um, who exactly is that?  There's no government definition. Economists generally agree it's households who earn about $40-120,000 a year. But that's a big range, and that's just the numbers.   When you close your eyes and picture a typical middle class American, what do you see? We went out on the streets of cities across the country to ask people to define middle class, and no matter where we went, they agreed ...

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