Vice President Joe Biden said at a campaign stop in North Carolina on Tuesday that the middle class “has been buried the last four years.” At last, a statement from Biden that is demonstrably true.

Here is The New York Times on Sept. 12 reporting on 2011 household income data: “All households in the middle of the scale saw declines, while those at the very bottom stagnated. ‘You’re really struck by the unevenness of the recovery,’ said Lawrence Katz, an economics professor at Harvard. ‘The top end took a whack in the recession, but they’ve gotten back on their feet. Everyone else is still down for the count.’”

The Times continued: “During the recovery, about 3 in 5 of the new jobs created have been low-skill and low-wage — taking people off the unemployment rolls and pulling some families out of poverty, but not providing a clear route to the middle class.”

Here is USA Today, from Aug. 22: “For the first time since at least World War II, middle-class families finished the first decade of the 21st century poorer and with lower incomes than they had 10 years earlier.”

Here is NBC News from Sept. 12: “On top of job growth that’s been weaker than any recovery in a half-century, wages haven’t budged since the recession ended.”

The Pew Research Center found that 62 percent of middle-class Americans said they cut back on expenses last year — two years after the recession ended — because money was tight. That is up from 53 percent in 2007, the year the recession began.

Obama and Biden keep blaming Republicans for the recession, but the recession ended the year Obama took office. Almost four years later, middle class incomes and wealth are still declining — because the Obama administration’s idea that economic growth comes from higher taxes and more government spending (“investment”) is flat wrong. As Obama spent and spent, the nation wound up $5 trillion deeper in debt and the middle class wound up poorer. For his second term, he offers more of the same. We aren’t really going to vote for four more years of middle-class decline, are we?