While that is true to an extent, it drops some very important context. What happened / is happening, is white and asian middle class households have continued

While that is true to an extent, it drops some very important context. What happened / is happening, is white and asian middle class households have continued to climb into the higher economic tiers over the last 40-50 years. In their place, hispanic households that have rapidly expanded in numbers in the US since the late 1970s are taking over an ever larger share of the middle class demographic. When people claim the middle class has seen no economic gains in the last 40-50 years, they're either lying or painfully ignorant of what's actually occurring: a dramatic and rapid demographic shift. It takes a mere few minutes to dig up the relevant economic data and see how the middle class of ~1980 was nearly entirely white, and many of those formerly middle class whites have now shifted upward in the economic tiers (which you can spot today by looking at the median or average white household net worth vs the national median or average). So what some of that middle class disappearing into the upper classes represents is an ongoing bifurcation by race among the classes. The US middle class will soon be overwhelmingly hispanic, in other words. That's tremendous progress in a sense, given the people it represents often came from third world countries with nothing to their names and speaking little to no English. Will they see continued progress or will their position ossify there? That's the next issue for the new, vast US hispanic middle class for the coming decades. And what about black households over that time? They're being left behind by hispanic household net worth growth and are not seeing nearly the same progress in moving into the middle class. That is going to cause significant political ramifications as hispanic political power in the US continues to expand.