The Agenda: Placing Blame for Middle-Class Doldrums

By DAVID LEONHARDT

We are in the midst of examining the major causes of the income slowdown over the past decade and beyond. As it happens, the Pew Research Center asked a more pointed version of this question in its recent poll on the middle class: Who's at fault?
@import url(http://graphics8.nytimes.com/projects/assets/agenda/agenda-inline.css);To the 85 percent of respondents who said that middle-class families were having a harder time maintaining their standard of living, Pew then asked how much people blamed each of the following groups “for the difficulties the middle class has faced in the past 10 years.” The possible answers were: a lot; a little; not at all; don't know.