It provides high current income, and therefore is probably best thought of as a high-income asset class, perhaps a substitute or something that would go along with an investment in high dividend equities and obviously more high-quality bonds.

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During the same time frame high-yield bonds slumped 26% and bank loans fell 24%, while 5-year Treasuries gained 16%, according to our research (municipal bonds, another high-quality fixed income asset class, returned 9% over the same time span, as measured by the BarCap 5-year Municipal Bond Index).

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These results understate the relative impact on middle-income versus high-income families for the simple reason that middle-class families spend a greater share of their income than do those with higher earnings.

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Hug really just recognized very young into the inception of MLPs the favorable characteristics of the asset class: High current income, growing distributions, tax-advantaged income, and low correlation to broader asset classes.

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Mr. Cuomo cast the deal as the capstone on a year of victories that included the legalization of same-sex marriage and the passage of a plan to raise tax revenue from high-income New Yorkers while lowering taxes on the middle class.

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Perhaps most troubling, states with high income taxes tend to lose people, particularly in the middle class.

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What has handicapped the middle class in the last four years is not that higher-income earners did not pay a high enough tax rate, but rather, that job losses during the crisis were disproportionally high in traditionally middle class sectors, and accompanying gains during the recovery disproportionately low.

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