It's great to have you here on the Clark Howard Show. You know our mission is to serve you with advice and information that empowers you so that you can make better financial

decisions in your life and in today's show there are so many things being talked about in an election year and we don't do politics here

but you're going to hear so many perspectives of whether people are doing better or worse than they were

doing years ago and you're going to hear this across the political spectrum and I want to try to cut through the clutter

and tell you what's really going on

in people's lives across the country

in a Clark economic segment. And also what's more American than a

one dollar bill? Well you may find that more and more places tell you your dollar is no good here.

What's going on?

We're going to talk about that.

So it's hard.

There are a lot of Americans that look through everything, particularly in a presidential election year, through a political lens.

You can hear it sometimes on our Friday Clark Stinks segment. We'll have another new one for you tomorrow.

Where people think that I've got some kind of hidden political agenda when I talk about something involving the economy.

I've seen it the most with angry posts about inflation.

People feel that I'm giving a slanted view of inflation.

Let me tell you when I talk about this stuff I got no hidden agenda.

My agenda is you. And so now I'm going to step into something

so raw right now in our society.

And that is the class divisions in the United States and the Pew Charitable Trust did extensive research

on what's happened going in the way back machine from the post Vietnam War era, the early 1970s,

to last year.

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