New research rebuts President Barack Obama’s recent claim that the poor are getting poorer while the rich get richer. The president’s claim, during a speech about the deficit, didn’t take health benefits and federal data into account, according to a report at
DailyCaller.com.

Although the rich have been getting richer over the past three decades, the financial status of the poor and middle classes also has been improving, according to the findings, which economists from Indiana University, Cornell University, and the Joint Committee on Taxation published in “The Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.”
“This isn’t a zero sum game, where one group wins at the expense of others,” Cornell’s Richard Burkhauser told DailyCaller.com. “The growth in productivity of Americans in the top 20 percent of tax units increased the size of the economic pie sufficiently to register major gains across the entire distribution of after-tax income.”
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.