"One in eight Germans lives in poverty!" was the heading in Bild am Sonntag for a recent interview with Federal Minister of Labour Olaf Scholz. The Minister stated that according to the EU poverty definition, a single who earns less than sixty percent of the medium income is poor and that 13 percent fit this definition. The same line is taken by a study of the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), according to which the share of Germans considered to be middle class declined by 3.8 percentage points between 2002 to 2005. And a study by the Institute for Labour and Qualification at the University of Duisburg-Essen asserts that the percentage of low wage earners in Germany (22 percent) now nearly matches that of the US (25 percent). Is there really a new poverty in Germany and are we losing our middle class?