can we please replace the meaningless phrase "Middle class" with "average working Americans?"

[librechik]

thank you.

[nadinbrzezinski]

1. Working Americans will suffice

[Avalux]

2. I vote for "indentured servants".

We have no power and are beholden to our corporate masters.

[The Magistrate]

3. Hear Hear, Ma'am!

The pretense everyone is 'middle class' is one of the greatest problems we have in this country, economically and politically.

[byeya]

4. I usually use wage earners or similar. Middle Class, to me, means ownership of a business

however small.
I don't even like middle income.

[badtoworse]

5. How is that any different?

One of the big problems is that regional differences can skew what is middle class or average working. $100K doesn't go nearly as far in northern NJ as it would in Mississippi. I don't think there is a "one size fits all" word you can use that solves that.

[Agnosticsherbet]

6. It is not meaningless. It just doesn't carry the classical meaning.

Language is a living medium and words/phrases change their meaning all the time.

The Wall Street journal seems to say that the "median Income" qualifies as middle class, though the article admits the definition is hard to nail down. But, the Wall Street Journal is Full of Shit.

Mitt Romney and the Washington Post (Both full of shit) put it at incomes less than $250,000.00 a year. Full of shit they may be, but at last it has more meaning than the WSJ.

In an article from USA today (wow, also full of shit) they actually say that it is based on income. These four paragraphs are illuminating.

Middle class a matter of income, attitude
Strictly speaking, the median, or middle, household income in the United States today is $50,054. That's easy. The hard part is figuring out how far above or below the middle someone's income can go and still be considered middle class.
Plenty of smart people have taken a stab at that question. In the past few years, the "middle class" income range has been described as between $32,900 and $64,000 a year (a Pew Charitable Trusts study), between $50,800 and $122,000 (a U.S. Department of Commerce study), and between $20,600 and $102,000 (the U.S. Census Bureau's middle 60% of incomes).

Psychologist Ken Eisold, a contributor to Psychology Today, said, though, that the way people describe their social status has more to do with what's going on in their heads than their wallets.

"It's really more about identity," he said. Even families making six figures are "much more comfortable calling themselves 'upper middle class.' They might have a lot of money, but they don't want to feel different."

So, as best I can determine, the middle class is based on income. The Lower level may be as low as $20,600 a year, while it could go up to $250,000.00 in Romney's dreams.

So, as a phrase it has meaning and that meaning is based on (1) income; and (2) what the individual thinks he is. If you think you're working poor, you probably are. If you think you're middle class, ditto. If you think you're rich, you'd better have an elevator for your car to prove it, otherwise they won't let you in the high rollers club.

So, no, we should not get rid of it. We should just be ready to define what we mean when we use it.

[Spider Jerusalem]

8. No, it's meaningless

because it's been decoupled from any meaning. "Middle class" does NOT mean "middle of the income distribution". It means "the intermediate social class between the working class and the elite". The middle class, traditionally, are professionals; executives, managers, lawyers, doctors, accountants. It doesn't mean "the broad middle of the country". The term was co-opted by American politicians doing their damnedest to eliminate any class-consciousness in the American people by telling them they were middle class when they were actually working class (because class consciousness leads to socialism).

[Agnosticsherbet]

9. Dictionaries are snap shots of a language at a moment in time.

Language is a living thing that evolves as long as it speakers live.

Middle Class in America is coupled to income with the median income at the middle of the middle. The upper and lower limits are fuzzy, but they are real. Change that definition was one of the big efforts to create a consumer society.

I agree with the validity of your classical definition of middle class, and even you evaluation of why it was changed within the broader culture to have a different meaning.

Change doesn't make it meaningless.

Some years back the word Gay meant happy. The "Gay 90's" were a wonderful economic period. In modern culture and language, the word gay has been decoupled from its original meaning.

If I write the sentence, "John Eliot felt particularly gay that morning." Many people would be confused. Some think the movie "Gay Caballeros!" is homosexual porn from Walt Disney. When it was made in the forties, gay was, at most, a slang word for homosexual and not widely used. Its reference to homosexuality is now its primary meaning, and happy is as antiquated as most of the words in an H.P. Lovecraft story.

Furthermore, we here do not have the power to make that word go away. It has powerful cultural significance. We just have to be aware of what we are talking about when we use it.

[Spider Jerusalem]

11. No, it isn't

"middle class" doesn't mean "median income". It's not merely about income; it's about social status and relative power and influence. A degreed professional is middle class; a factory foreman paid an hourly wage is working class. (A majority of Americans would define themselves as "middle class", which shows how essentially meaningless it's become.) "middle income" would be a better term in the sense you're talking about; "bourgeoisie" would probably still just about work for the more traditional definition.

[Agnosticsherbet]

13. You are trying to stick with strict definitions set out, more or less, by Marx

If we were discussing his work, or the 18th and early 19th century, it would make sense to use his definitions. The world and culture have moved on. Language has changed.

You could equally complain with considerable validity that Conservatives aren't really conservative in accordance with the classic definition and so Conservatism doesn't exist. That movement would more accurately be defined as radical from classical political science or even fascist. Cultural concepts evolve over time and language evolves with it. The Middle Class as Marx or Adam Smith understood them does not exist. Culturally, we changed the definition of the word in the US. The American Middle Class is defined by income not by the type of work they perform. We envisioned ourselves as a classless society, and this new definition of Middle Class based on income works within that concept. A working class Union Man making 60,000 a year doesn't think of himself as working class, he is middle class within the American cultural concept.

It would be convenient if we change words when we evolve definitions, but that isn't the way language works.

[Spider Jerusalem]

15. Except "middle class" still means the same thing everywhere else in the English-speaking world.

America is the only exception, for some reason. And the idea of "a classless society" is self-deluding nonsense. If the average American thinks of himself as "middle class" and not "working class"? It doesn't mean he's "middle class". It means that he's been successfully deceived by sixty plus years of politicians lying to him and telling him he is. Which is not the same thing at all. (And is part of the reason why socialism was never successful in the USA.)

[winter is coming]

7. How about "the dispossessed"? n/t

[Cleita]

10. Working class really is no longer middle class.

The professional working class may still be, but the working class of my day, like the worker in the supermarket, were the union workers and they could aspire to economic middle class but this no longer seems to be true.

[geek tragedy]

12. Can we replace one meaningless phrase with another meaningless phrase?

This seems like a classic distinction without a difference.

[kickysnana]

14. No.Two different things.

Average Working Americans used to be the entire Middle Class now they have become the Working Poor due to governmental changes that allowed businesses to ruin the country.

There were middle classes forever. It denotes a lifestyle that allows for something at the end of your working life besides poverty or slavery, a bettering of lifestyle for people if you work hard, get education and are careful and the ability to help each other ride out disasters.

No matter how much education you have, no matter how careful you are with your money in America today they will take everything you and your descendants have no matter how you try to save or invest. Until we all work together to bring back America at its best, protections for workers, attainable education, companies allowed only to operate for the good all of the people, not perfect but hopeful and workable and moving in the right direction working poor will swallow more and more people with blinders on.

[librechik]

16. Thanks for all the comments. I'm just saying the words WORK and AMERICAN be used

when talking about the vast numbers of people who can't game the system due to wealth or politics.

I'm sick of the right wing co-opting patriotism for their own selfish purposes and the fact that WE WORK and they slide like con men and thieves while our tax dollars support their excesses is UNACCEPTABLE.

And I believe the media and propaganda mills over use the phrase middle -class since it has CLASS in it, which is evil socialism and anyone in that group is a mooching socialist. All done on a subliminal basis (mostly) so people don't realize they are being programmed to hate themselves.

Of course we should also avoid the word "worker" since that too is socialism. But "work" itself hasn't yet been spoiled by the neocons
by my reckoning.

[Puzzledtraveller]

17. No, there's plenty of well off people riding the "middle class" coattail

at least in terminology. They may be working, but they are not average.