A University of Michigan study that followed a given set of working Americans from 1975 to 1991 found that 95 percent of the people initially in the bottom 20 percent were no longer there at the end of that period. Moreover, 29 percent of those initially in the bottom quintile rose all the way to the top quintile, while only 5 percent still remained in the bottom 20 percent.11 Since 5 percent of 20 percent is one percent, only one percent of the total population sampled constituted “the poor” throughout the years studied. Statements about how the income of “the poor” fared during those years
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