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The announcement by the Obama administration that they were launching a Task Force on Middle Class Working Families has created a huge surge in the number of people asking themselves how middle class is defined.  The goals of the task force, cited on their A Strong Middle Class website are as follows:

• Expanding education and lifelong training opportunities
• Improving work and family balance
• Restoring labor standards, including workplace safety
• Helping to protect middle-class and working-family incomes
• Protecting retirement security

While these goals sound great, middle class isn’t defined anywhere on the site.  That really shouldn’t come as a big surprise because “middle class” is a social term with ambiguous meaning.  In their thorough discussion of the topic, Wikipedia defines the American Middle Class as anywhere  between 25% to 66% of all households in the US.  Even that broad range doesn’t answer the question completely, however, for two very good reasons.

First, defining class in terms of income is troublesome because households with a single wage earner may be better (or worse) off than a multi-earner household with the same income.  Also, as I’ve said many times before, income is much less important than cash flow.  Their are families hovering near the poverty line who save a significant percentage of their income and others with six-figure salaries who live gigantic paycheck to gigantic paycheck.

The second reason gets to the heart of why politicians love to use an arbitrary term like middle class:  most people consider themselves middle class.  Some of the statistics cited on the FactCheck.org discussion of middle class show that as many as 90% or more of Americans think of themselves as middle class.  By using such an identifiable term, programs claiming to be helpful to the middle class are simply using a backhanded marketing technique to make everyone think the program will help them.  If a politician came out and said their program was going to help families making between $50,000-$100,000 it would only appeal to those families.  Saying a program helps the middle class makes almost every American think they’ll be getting a piece of the pie.