More Americans See Class Conflict Than in 2009

NEW YORK (MainStreet) — The rich get richer, the poor get poorer and the tensions between the two only gets worse.

Two-thirds of the country now believes there are “strong” or “very strong” conflicts between wealthy and poor Americans, a significant increase of 19 percentage points from those who felt the same way in 2009, according to a new survey of more than 2,000 adults from the Pew Research Group.

To put that into perspective, Pew found that people were less likely to feel that there is a conflict between age groups, races or people of different immigration status. In fact, the percentage of the population that thinks there is conflict has declined in all three of these cases in the past two years, while the sense of class conflict has increased. As a result, class differences may now be the primary cause of tension in the U.S.