Middle class is a swishy term
The modern populists in the Democratic Party have long argued that government has abandoned what their most ardent spokeswoman, Elizabeth Warren, has called the "vanishing middle class." They insist that a government owned by corporations is now skewed toward subsidizing the rich, while the middle class, a squishy term that in this case generally denotes families making something like $50,000 or less.
the mirror image of the Tea Party case. According to both ideological briefs, the middle class is being underserved. But in the Tea Party gospel, it's the poor who are absconding with a disproportionate share of the tax dollar, while in the left's, it's the wealthy. It just can't be that government is being generous with the guy earning $40,000 when that guy is a Tea Party sympathizer, but somehow it's behaving with negligent indifference when that same $40,000 earner is a union member.
-- Matt Bai