President Obama has found a new distillation of his messaging on the economy: “middle-class economics.”
That is the phrase the president used five times in his State of the Union Address Tuesday night to describe his economic agenda, one heavy on programs and tax relief aimed at middle-class families and tax increases on high-income earners.
Middle-class economics is “the idea that this country does best when everyone gets their fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules,” the president said.
It’s a refinement of past formulations the president has used.
In a major speech on the economy and inequality in December 2013, Obama said, “We know from our history that our economy grows best from the middle out.”
In that and other speeches, Obama has tried to reverse the logic of “trickle-down economics,” the approach that Democrats frequently ascribe to Republicans.
The focus on phrasing like “middle-class economics” is one favored by left-of-center policy analysts. Democracy Magazine, in its summer 2013 issue, featured a symposium on “middle-out economics by many liberal policy experts, including strategy that has later worked its way into Obama’s rhetoric.
The language moves the framing of Democrats’ economic agenda away from inequality, which can lend itself to accusations of class warfare.
It also appeals to the widest possible swath of the electorate. Fully 55 percent of Americans identify themselves as middle class or upper-middle class, according to a Gallup poll, and 31 percent identify as working class.
