Beneath the positive headlines Bloomberg's Joe Brusuelas notes that there is evidence that a good portion of consumers continue to face a difficult adjustment to the $125 billion tax hike in January and the 15 percent increase in gasoline prices during the past four months. Spending among the upper quintile of income earners is masking weakness elsewhere but it is jobs headlines that are really hiding the dismal reality in America. As the following chart shows, confirming our earlier discussion [4], the middle-class income-earner is becoming an endangered species (with no 'conservation group' willing to stand up for them) as the government holds the lowest income earners' hand and Bernanke the highest.
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Charts: Bloomberg