Middle Class

ATLANTA - By now, Karl Rove and his minions had expected that improved jobs reports would have boosted the president's election prospects immeasurably. After all, the stock market is doing just fine and corporate profits are going gangbusters. How come so many workers are still worried? Well, most workers don't get to share the bounty of those corporate profits. Even with the popularity of 401(k)s, which are replacing traditional pensions, only about half of all Americans own stock. The average American is still feeling what John Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards, call the "middle-class squeeze."

PLYMOUTH, Mich.-- President Bush, barnstorming the battleground Midwest on a two-day train trip, vowed yesterday to "blow the whistle" on what he called Bill Clinton's "secret" plan to raise taxes on the middle class."

Suburbs and shopping malls. Condos and computers. Station wagons and stair machines.All conjure images of the middle class in America.But it's a group more easily defined by marketing than by math.When President Clinton says the middle class will benefit from his new agenda, who is he talking about?Don't ask the Census Bureau, the nation's repository of government statistics, to define "middle class."It can't."We try to stay out of those subjective areas," Census Information Specialist Larry Hugg said.

I clasped my hands and bowed my head so that I looked as hangdog as I could. "These days," I said in a confessional whisper, "I don't consider myself a member of the middle class."But my friend has seen such theatrical displays of humility before. "So just what do you think you are?" she demanded impatiently."The working class?" I suggested tentatively."Oh, please!" sneered my friend. "Be for real! You're about as middle class as they come!"In my mind, middle class people own their home, have at least two cars in the garage and send their children to karate class on Wednesday nights.

WASHINGTON -- With the Clinton White House intensifying its attacks on the Republican "Contract with America," the country is being treated once again to competing accusations of waging "class warfare."The Republicans want to cut school lunches to give more tax cuts to the rich, the Democrats say; the Democrats want to soak the rich to pay for shiftless welfare recipients, say the Republicans.It's a refrain heard in politics ever since the days of the robber barons of industry on one side and the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt on the other.

WASHINGTON -- Laying down an election year challenge for President Bush, House Democrats united yesterday on a bill to squeeze the rich and cut taxes for just about everybody else.In an effort to break into Mr. Bush's political support, Democrats also sweetened their capital gains tax cut and added provisions to make their package more attractive to business."I just hope after corporate America and the middle class read this bill, they'll be as enthusiastic about it as we are," said the House Ways and Means Committee chairman, Dan Rostenkowski, D-Ill.

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. -- There is nothing subtle about Bill Clinton's campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. The underlying premise is that the middle class is ready to rise up after 12 years of Republicanism in the White House.To some extent, this is making a virtue of a necessity. The Democratic Party cannot hope to regain the presidency unless it reverses the flow of middle-class voters who have come to see the party as a captive of such special constituencies as blacks, organized labor and welfare clients.

NEW YORK -- A tremendous tussle is about to take place, between the middle class and the poor. They'll be fighting over whatever is left of the Medicaid program, once Congress and the president come to terms over how to cut its soaring cost.The middle class normally doesn't think it has a stake in Medicaid. This program, financed jointly by the federal government and the states, pays the medical bills of the poor. The feds write the program's rules, but the states have some discretion over who's covered.

The U.S. middle class shrank markedly between 1969 and 1989, as the number of Americans who were rich and poor increased.In 1969, 71.2 percent of Americans were "middle class." Twenty years later, 63.2 percent were middle class, a new Census Bureau study found. The study defined middle class as anyone with income ranging from 50 percent to 199 percent of the national median, or midpoint, income level.High-income individuals -- those with incomes two or more times higher than the median -- increased from 10.9 percent of the population to 14.7 percent.

The Joseph and Harvey Meyerhoff Family Charitable Funds, a Baltimore-based philanthropic organization that for years aided high-profile causes in Israel and cultural institutions in the United States, has turned its focus to a problem closer to home: Baltimore's struggling middle class. The organization's disbursements - currently at $5 million a year - will soon pay for better computer access at public libraries, improvements at city parks and college tuition for students from families with good jobs.