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KARACHI - Pakistan Peoples Party chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari has said that poverty and hunger are the biggest threats to peace and harmony among the human race adding that his Party has introduced revolutionary initiatives in Pakistan aimed poverty reduction.

In his message on the eve of International Day for the Eradication of Poverty being observed on Wednesday under the aegis of United Nations, he said that PPP was struggling for a vision of a peaceful, prosperous and progressive Pakistan for all our people and freeing them from hunger and helplessness under the philosophy of Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto that "freedom is not an end, it is beginning."

Bilawal Bhutto Zardari pointed out that PPP launched a massive Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) in 2009-10 for eradication of poverty and elevating the status of marginalized and under privileged sections of society, especially women, through establishment of comprehensive Social Protection Net.

People's Federal government led by President Asif Ali Zardari had initiated BISP with an amount of nearly Rs 40 billion, which has now crossed Rs125 billion.

The PPP chairman further said that People's government in Sindh started Union Council Based Poverty Reduction Programme (UCBPRP) in collaboration of non-profit organizations extending interest-free loans to women in the selected districts.

The number of families who were benefitted and have been taken out of poverty rose to 600,000. They are now generating their own incomes through beginning small businesses, he added.

Zardari pledged that PPP would continue to assign priority to reduction of poverty through its poor-friendly policies by extending UCBPRP to more districts in Sindh province.

"We shall replicate this programme in other provinces, whenever PPP comes to power there," he added.

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Poverty, hunger biggest threats to peace, harmony among human race - Bilawal

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KARACHI - Pakistan Peoples Party chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari has said that poverty and hunger are the biggest threats to peace and harmony among the human race adding that his Party has introduced revolutionary initiatives in Pakistan aimed poverty reduction.

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Who's to Blame?

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Reuters

Barack Obama is expected to devote much of his State of the Union address next Tuesday to poverty and inequality, themes that will no doubt bring to the fore broad differences in how Americans think the government should tackle both issues. The Pew Research Center has a new survey out today, in partnership with USA Today, confirming what you may already suspect: Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to believe the government should try hard to reduce both problems.

Part of this gap is explained by basic differences of belief in what the government can do (never mind what it should do). If you don't believe Washington is very effective at a lot of what it tries to accomplish, then you're not likely to think it can pull many impoverished families into the middle class, or lift up the entire bottom end of the income spectrum.

But there's another underlying difference of opinion here, too, not over the competence of government but the causes of poverty itself. Here is another set of questions posed by the Pew survey:

Here is a breakdown of the answers by political leaning:

And by income:

The belief that people are poor more through their own lack of effort than their circumstances is widely held by large segments of the population, including 51 percent of Republicans, and 46 percent of people in the highest income group (which is not that high). If you fall into this category, then it clearly doesn't make sense for society to try to solve a problem that it had little hand in creating.

This difference is important, although the survey question itself feels unsatisfying. I'd love to see a survey that gets much more specific about what those circumstances might be: If a child born into poverty remains poor as an adult, how much do you believe failing schools, neighborhood crime, and poor job access contributed to that outcome? I wonder if the answer would change for some people if the concept of "circumstances" weren't quite so abstract, if it weren't posed simply as the alternative to personal responsibility. Surely Obama is choosing his words very carefully right now.

Top image from Lynn, Massachusetts earlier this month: Brian Snyder/Reuters

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Americans Are Deeply Divided Over What Causes Poverty in the First Place

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Barack Obama is expected to devote much of his State of the Union address next Tuesday to poverty and inequality, themes that will no doubt bring to the fore broad differences in how Americans think the government should tackle both issues.

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Some say no.

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It's no surprise that working couples in big cities are struggling to raise children while paying off mortgages and student debt. What is surprising is that they're lumped in with the so-called "wealthy" if they jointly earn $250,000 a year.

Pierre Desrosiers | Photographer's Choice | Getty Images

The "fiscal cliff" has added a new sense of urgency to the tax hikes that President Obama plans to impose on America's wealthiest citizens. Obama starts the meter at $250,000, and it goes up from there. The tax increases on high-income earners would deliver about $42 billion in 2013. They would create a small 0.1 percent drag on GDP, according to the Congressional Budget Office, but their real cost might be much steeper.

Those tax increases aren't the only ones that would kick in next year. In California, new tax propositions will create four new brackets for earners making $250,000 or more. Those taxpayers will see their state income taxes jump between 10.6 percent and 32.2 percent, depending on their bracket. Other states in fiscal straits could follow suit, and Republicans, among others, worry that soaking the rich could weigh on consumer spending and leave the entire economy under water.

Discretionary consumer spending is the engine that drives the U.S. economy. And high-income earners drive it more than middle- and low-income earners. Gallup's daily tracking of consumer spending showed a dip last month among upper-income consumers - an average of $116 per day, down from $126 in September. If that dip continues into the holiday buying season, the economy could suffer a setback.

I'm Wealthy? That's Rich

By most measures, a $250,000 household income is substantial. It is five times the national average, and just 2.9 percent of couples earn that much or more. "For the average person in this country, a $250,000 household income is an unattainably high annual sum - they'll never see it," says Roberton Williams, an analyst at the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C.

And $250,000 is a lot of money - especially if you live in, say Peoria, Ill. But if you live in or around New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago or Dallas, you're not rich - you're simply what's known as "upper middle class." It all comes down to cost of living, a metric that is not considered when the Census Bureau or the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates the mean earnings of working Americans.

The cost of living in New York, for example, is 105.7 percent higher than that in Peoria, according to Salary.com. New York employers make up some of that difference by typically paying 29.9 percent more than employers in Peoria for the same job with the same type of company.

Meet the Joneses

Two years ago, The Fiscal Times asked BDO USA, a national tax accounting firm, to compute the total state, local and federal tax burden of a hypothetical two-career couple with two kids, earning $250,000. To factor in varying state and local taxes, as well as drastically different costs of living, BDO placed the couple in seven different locales around the country with top-notch public school districts, using national government data on spending.

The analysis assumes that this hypothetical couple - let's call them Mr. and Mrs. Jones - are each on company payrolls, with professional positions. They take advantage of all tax benefits available to them, such as pretax contributions to 401(k) plans and medical, childcare and transportation flexible-spending accounts. They have no credit card debt, but Mr. Jones racked up $40,208 in student loan debt in undergraduate and graduate school, and Mrs. Jones borrowed $22,650 to get her undergraduate degree (both amounts are equal to the national averages for their levels of education). They also have a car loan on one of two cars, and a mortgage for 80 percent of the value of a typical home in their communities for a family of four, which includes one toddler and one school-age child.

The bottom line: It's not exactly easy street for our $250,000-a-year family, especially when they live in high-tax areas on either coast. Even with an additional $3,000 in investment income, they end up in the red - after taxes, saving for retirement and their children's education, and a middle-of-the-road cost of living - in seven out of the eight communities. The worst: Huntington, N.Y., and Glendale, Calif. These are followed by Washington, D.C.; Bethesda, Md.; Alexandria, Va.; Naperville, Ill.; and Pinecrest, Fla. In Plano, Texas, the couple's balance sheet would end up positive, but only by $4,963.

Consider the tax profile of the Joneses when based in Huntington, a suburb of New York City. Thanks to all of their smart pretax contributions and a fat deduction for mortgage interest and state and local taxes, the couple's federal income tax is only $29,344. But what often goes overlooked is the toll taken by state and local taxes. In this case, it exceeds the federal income tax bill: $31,066.

State income taxes, taken alone, are just $10,557. But factor in the gas tax ($2,679), property tax ($15,222), phone service taxes and surcharges ($350) and sales tax ($2,258), and the picture looks very different. Their total tax bill, including the alternative minimum tax and payroll taxes: $78,276.

"When most people think about taxes, they think first about federal income taxes, then maybe about sales taxes, but there are a lot of taxes out there," says Mark Robyn, an economist with the Tax Foundation, a nonprofit tax research group in Washington, D.C. "It's eye-opening to step back and take a look at the whole picture."
Where Does It Go?
The $250,000 threshold was first mentioned in a campaign speech by President Obama in 2008. "It's an historical accident," Williams says. "I don't think there was any thought given to why $250,000 - (but) it became a mantra." Whether $250,000 represents affluence "depends a great deal upon where you live," he says.

Consider, for example, the grocery tab for the same assortment of ground beef, tuna, milk, eggs, margarine, potatoes, bananas, bread, orange juice, coffee, sugar and cereal. In Twin Falls, Idaho, $23.41. In New York City in December of 2010, you would have had to shell out 72 percent more, $40.29, according to The Council for Community and Economic Research. That higher percentage carries across all expenditures, from child care to haircuts.

Of course, housing costs are one of the biggest variables. In Glendale, Calif., the Joneses can live reasonably well - but not extravagantly - in a three- or four-bedroom home valued around $750,000. In Twin Falls, you would only spend about half as much on an equivalent home.

After covering taxes and only essential expenses for housing, groceries, child care, clothing, transportation, and the dog, the Joneses would still be in the red by $1,787 in Huntington. In Plano, Texas, they would have $27,556 to spare. Factor in common additional expenses for a working couple with two children - music lessons, day camp costs, after-school sports, entertainment, cleaning services, gifts, and an annual week-long vacation - and the Joneses get deep in the red in Huntington to the tune of $23,178. In Plano, the best-case scenario, they would still have money to spare, but just $4,963.

Some of the expenses incurred by couples like the Joneses may seem lavish - such as $5,000 on a housecleaner, a $1,200 annual dry cleaning tab and $4,000 on kids' activities. But when both parents are working, it becomes nearly impossible to maintain the home, care for the kids and dress for their professional jobs without a big outlay.

And costs assumed by the Joneses could be significantly higher if their circumstances change. For example, if they worked for themselves, they would have to foot the bill for all of their medical insurance premium, which averages $14,043. As it is, they pay 30 percent of the premium and their employers pay the rest.

Bottom line: For folks like the Joneses who live in high-tax, high-cost areas, who save for retirement and college, pay for child care to enable two incomes, and pay higher prices for housing in top school districts, $250,000 does not a rich family make.

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Is $250,000 a Year Rich? Let's Break It Down

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It's no surprise that working couples in big cities are struggling to raise children while paying off mortgages and student debt. What is surprising is that they're lumped in with the so-called "wealthy" if they jointly earn $250,000 a year. Fiscal Times reports.

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Can't pay my kid's private school

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$100,000 and up is not enough - even the 'rich' live paycheck to paycheck

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Private schools, divorce and basic necessities - about 25% of people making six-figure salaries say they are struggling

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The Rich and the Poor?

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"Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."

President Ronald Reagan uttered those words in his 1981 inaugural address to the country. He was referring specifically to the government's role in helping bring the US out of an economic crisis. But since then, it's become a kind of blanket truism in Republican circles. The government is a perennial boogeyman, and the main policy objective on the right has been to reduce the role of government in public life.

But there's a problem: Many who accept this dogma are the very people who need the government the most. Research shows, for instance, that Republican states are disproportionately dependent on federal aid. Yet many Republican voters appear blissfully unaware of this contradiction.

In her new book The Government-Citizen Disconnect, Cornell political scientist Suzanne Mettler investigates this paradox. She looks at historical government data as well as surveys of Americans' experiences with 21 federal social policies, including food stamps, Social Security, Medicaid, and the home mortgage interest deduction.

And what she found was fascinating:It turns out that people's attitudes toward welfare are a strong predictor of how they'll vote. But even more interesting, the types of federal benefits people get - and whether they're "visible" like food stamps and Medicaid or "invisible" like tax breaks - influence how they perceive their own personal dependency on social welfare programs.

I called Mettler to talk to her about her findings and why she thinks the government-citizen connect is a genuine threat to American democracy. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Sean Illing

Your book focuses on a contradiction at the center of our politics: the disconnect between citizens and the government they rely on. How did this paradox evolve? How did people become so alienated from their government?

Suzanne Mettler

We're in this weird situation in which people have to come to rely on government more and more, and at the same time government has required less and less of people. Now, you'd expect this to mean that people's attitudes toward government have become favorable, but the opposite is true. And this is the paradox I'm grappling with in the book.

It turns out that how much a person actually benefits from government services matters very little in terms of shaping their attitude toward government. And that's true even when controlling for all sorts of other factors.

Sean Illing

But there was one factor in particular that did make a big difference in terms of predicting someone's view of government, right?

Suzanne Mettler

Right, and that was people's attitudes about welfare. About 44 percent of Americans have unfavorable views of welfare. And the people who have very unfavorable views about welfare have strong attitudes about government that are shaped by this view. They believe that welfare is unfair, or that undeserving people are receiving it, and that deserving people like themselves are not getting anything.

There's a lot of resentment out there from people who have this deeply negative perception of welfare, and this perception determines their view of government more than anything else. They're blind to their own relationship to government, and so they assume welfare is something "other" people get.

"If individual citizens withdraw from public life, the only people in society who have power are those with lots of economic power"

Sean Illing

I have to address the giant elephant in the room. When we're talking about welfare and people's perceptions of it, we're talking about race. And what you often find is that people don't necessarily object to welfare; they object to welfare going to the out-group, to the "others." Is this consistent with your findings?

Suzanne Mettler

Yes. Race is significant, and many other scholars have discovered this as well. Across the board, whites had more unfavorable views of welfare than people of color, in large part because they considered welfare something that people of color primarily benefit from.

I also found that income matters a lot, too. Every group throughout the middle class had very unfavorable views toward welfare. Even African Americans, if they were middle-class, were more resentful of welfare than African Americans who were low-income or high-income.

So we've got these parallel patterns going on at once. There's the racial bias, as you mentioned, and then there are the views of middle-income people. The past several decades have been particularly rough for the middle class. Productivity is very high, people are working more hours than ever, and incomes are stagnant. Many of these people feel like they're trapped between the poor, who receive lots of benefits, and the rich, who don't need any help.

Sean Illing

Can you give me a sense of how public attitudes toward the government have evolved over the last three or four decades? And how does this break down on the left and the right?

Suzanne Mettler

If you go back to the middle of the 20th century, there are all kinds of survey questions that have been asked in the same way over time, like from the 1940s or so onward. It used to be that majorities of Americans, like over 60 or 70 percent in the 1950s and 1960s, had very positive responses to questions about trust in government.

But then it begins to deteriorate with the Vietnam War and Watergate and you see a downward slide. There was a slight uptick during the 1980s and a little bit of up and down movement in the 1990s. After 9/11, the country briefly comes together, but basically it's a downward trendline on all of these indicators.

Today, about one in five Americans holds a positive view toward government. About one in five believes that public officials are responsive to people like them, and this more or less holds across party lines. I think there are different reasons why people on either end of the political spectrum don't like government, but there's a lot of antipathy to government across the board.

"We have to find a way to recapture that sense of the government as an instrument of good in our lives, and we have to stop thinking of it as the enemy"

Sean Illing

In the book, you cite Mitt Romney's famous "47 percent" comment from 2013, in which he claimed that 47 percent of the population are dependent upon the government and will vote for the Democratic candidate no matter what. But data shows that it's the so-called "red states" that contribute the least to the federal coffers and rely the most on federal services - and of course, nearly all of those states voted for Romney. What the hell is going on here?

Suzanne Mettler

Yeah, this is quite frustrating. I spent a lot of time looking at the state of Kentucky to try to make sense of this. Kentucky is a very poor state. And when you look at congressional districts there, you find a bunch of them where the average person gets more than 30 or 40 or 50 percent of their income from federal social benefits.

Yet those same districts are electing very conservative members of Congress who promise to introduce work requirements for food stamps and repeal the Affordable Care Act and so forth. It's really puzzling.

I think there are a couple of things that might explain this. One is that I found that people who benefit from more visible social programs, like food stamps, are much less likely to vote.

This is not a big surprise. We've know for some time that people who are higher-income and have more socioeconomic status tend to vote more. They tend to be mobilized more by groups and public officials and they participate more, and they tend to be less cognizant of the ways in which they benefit from social services.

Sean Illing

We should explain this participation gap a little more. So we know that people who are aware and appreciative of government's role in their lives through social benefits are least likely to participate in politics, and those who use social benefits but show no cognizance of government's role in providing them are much more likely to vote. What accounts for this?

Suzanne Mettler

The people who participate the most in politics, usually people with more education and more resources, rely on plenty of social benefits from government, but these benefits are often hidden in the tax code or are disguised in other ways. So they don't think of government as having done much for them personally.

But the people who are most aware that government has helped them tend to be people who've used more visible policies like food stamps or subsidized housing or Medicaid. The reasons for this are fairly straightforward.

People with more resources have more time and are part of social networks that encourage them to participate, and they're asked to participate by public officials and organizations. We just don't see these sorts of incentives for low-income people.

Sean Illing

A big part of this story is the relentless efforts of organizations and political activists like the Koch brothers, who spend a lot of money convincing people that government is their enemy. The people they're targeting have almost nothing in common with the special interests manipulating them, but the propaganda is effective.

Suzanne Mettler

As a political scientist, I would have thought that people's personal experiences might interfere with that. If the government helped you afford college or health care or prevented your grandmother from falling into poverty when she was a citizen, you would think that would overcome the messages people are getting from the special interests.

But I've found that those personal experiences don't matter much, unless somebody is connecting the dots, unless someone is pointing out these connections.

Sean Illing

Well, that's precisely my point: There are countless forces, many of which operate behind the scenes, that are invested in obscuring these connections, in making sure that people don't connect the dots.

Suzanne Mettler

You're absolutely right about that. There is a lot of obscuring, and there's also a lot of distraction. People are encouraged to focus on all kinds of side issues or culture war issues or anything that draws their attention away from these fundamental connections.

Sean Illing

I often feel like we're locked in a brutal self-fulfilling cycle here. What we've seen time and again in states like, say, Louisiana and Kansas, is that Republican administrations have deliberately undermined social policies like Obamacare and then pointed to the subsequent dysfunction as proof of the government's inherent badness.

Suzanne Mettler

Right, and there's another story there to be told, and that is that the government has actually helped people out in lots of ways and is doing so every day through all of these social benefits. But this story is not told, and so we end up in this place with many Americans are philosophical conservatives but utilitarian liberals.

Sean Illing

Can you explain what you mean by that?

Suzanne Mettler

When people are asked broad questions about how big government should be, or if they approve of larger taxes, they reflexively sound pretty conservative. But when they're asked more concrete questions about funding for Social Security or unemployment insurance, they sound pretty liberal.

So when you really drill down, you find that people like these benefits, but when the game of politics is played in a way that draws people's attention to abstractions, conservatives win. And when liberals can manage to draw attention to specifics, they win.

"If we become more and more anti-government, we're against ourselves. We're against our own collective capacity to do anything."

Sean Illing

Do you think this is mostly about information? If we could take all these people who are confused about what government actually does to and for them and sit them down in front of a screen and educate them about the reality, do you believe that would change anything?

Suzanne Mettler

I think information can help, but I think we shouldn't exaggerate how much it helps. New information only helps those who are actually open to it, and the truth is that many people aren't. We're in this very partisan environment where it matters to people who is conveying a message, and there isn't a lot of trust.

I've come to the conclusion that relationships are more important. And I think organizations need to be making these things much more clear to people in their everyday lives. I also think that, as a citizenry, we need to rethink how we talk about our lives and the role that government has had in it.

Sean Illing

I see the government-citizen disconnect as an existential threat to our liberal democracy, because it's destroying the very basis of citizenship and making it near impossible to respond to rising income inequality. Is that how you see it?

Suzanne Mettler

I agree that this government-citizen disconnect makes it really difficult for government to do anything constructive about economic inequality, but it's not just that. It actually undermines government's capacity to do much of anything.

Government is what we have in common, our shared capacity to do something to overcome what political scientists call "collective action problems"- that is, inherent disincentives to work together for the common good. These are problems that cannot be solved by your church, your family, businesses, or other organizations. They require government action.

In the United States, we have this history and this aspiration for government to be democratic. It's about all of us and what we can do together. So if we become more and more anti-government, we're against ourselves. We're against our own collective capacity to do anything.

So it really doesn't matter what it is. It could be economic inequality, it could be climate change, it could be restoring the infrastructure. We can't solve any of these problems without government. And if individual citizens withdraw from public life, the only people in society who have power are those with lots of economic power. That's why I find this profoundly troubling.

Sean Illing

So where does that leave us? How do we bridge the gap between citizens and government?

Suzanne Mettler

We have to change the narrative. We have to think about the role that government has had in our own lives. We have to talk to friends and family members about what role government has played in their lives, and help them see the connections.

I have my students do interviews with a family member, preferably the eldest member of their family who has grown up in the United States, and ask them about government's role in their life through public policies. They come back having learned all sorts of things they didn't know about how a public policy like the GI Bill enabled that person to be the first in their family to go to college, and how that changed the fate of the family forever.

So we have to find a way to recapture that sense of the government as an instrument of good in our lives, and we have to stop thinking of it as the enemy. Otherwise, we cannot make reforms and move forward as a democracy.
This article was originally published on August 17, 2018.

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Why so many people who need the government hate it

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"Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." President Ronald Reagan uttered those words in his 1981 inaugural address to the country. He was referring specifically to the government's role in helping bring the US out of an economic crisis.

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Living Paycheck to Paycheck

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Courtney Mishoe and her husband are making more than $180,000 a year, three times as much as the median annual income in the United States. Still, the suburban Georgia couple doesn't "feel wealthy," Mishoe told Todd C. Frankel of the Washington Post, who is calling attention to the people in the upper middle class worried about losing out under the GOP's proposed tax overhaul.

"I don't have a bunch of money stashed away anywhere," Mishoe says.

The Mishoes, who have a mortgage and three kids, live in North Fulton, an area where homes sell for $500,000 to $800,000 and property taxes are relatively high, the Post reports.

They aren't the only residents earning six figures and struggling to set aside money for retirement, college and other major expenses. Some living in the area who earn $100,000 "are living paycheck to paycheck," the Post reports, and even families earning up to $250,000 "don't consider themselves to be high-earners."

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Couple earning over $180,000: We 'don't feel wealthy'

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Courtney Mishoe and her husband are making more than $180,000 a year, three times as much as the median annual income in the United States. Still, the suburban Georgia couple doesn't "feel wealthy," Mishoe told Todd C.

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How much is $250,000?

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Op-Ed Contributor

HILLARY CLINTON has vowed not to raise taxes on the middle class.

It's a pledge that has worked well for others on the campaign trail before her, a resonant assurance to voters who saw themselves as middle class or aspired to be. But it's a bad promise.

Mrs. Clinton is using a definition of middle class that has long been popular among Democratic policy makers, from her husband to Barack Obama when he was a candidate: any household that makes $250,000 or less a year. Yet this definition is completely out of touch with reality. It also boxes her in.

The most recent Census Bureau data showed that median household income - what people in the exact middle of the American spectrum earn - is $53,657.

Those families who make $250,000 a year, on the other hand, belong to an elite group: Americans who earn enough to be in the highest 5 percent of the income distribution. That top stratum captures anyone who makes $206,568 or more - not everyone in the so-called middle class that Mrs. Clinton says she is dedicated to protecting, but too large a chunk of it.

This doesn't matter just because the math is so off. In an era of deepening income inequality, those people in the top 5 percent who are being classified as middle class are pulling further away from the rest of us. Americans at the bottom or in the middle have experienced five years of falling or stagnating income; those in the top 5 percent have generally seen their incomes increase. Between 1967 and 2014, median household income went up by $9,400 while those 5 percenters are now making $88,800 more, all adjusted for inflation.

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People waited in line at the post office to file their taxes before the April 15 deadline. Credit Spencer Platt/Getty Images

A policy response should give those who are sliding backward a hand up, most likely funded by the people who are doing so well. But under Mrs. Clinton's pledge, some of the well off won't be called on to help out, and are in fact lumped in for receiving a boost. (I should note that my spouse works on the technology team for the Clinton campaign, but is not involved in policy.)

Mrs. Clinton's pledge also blocks her from backing policies that would almost certainly benefit middle-class Americans, even if it raised their taxes slightly.

Take paid family leave. As things stand, Americans are not legally guaranteed any pay when they take time away from work for the arrival of a new baby or to care for a sick family member. According to a 2012 survey, about a third of people who get no or partial pay when they take time off for a new child end up doing things like borrowing money, dipping into savings or putting off paying bills. Fifteen percent enroll in public benefits.

Senator Bernie Sanders also wants to help the middle class, but he wants to do it in a way that could mean raising its taxes, even if he promises that most of an increased burden will fall on the wealthy. This has made him a target of the Clinton camp, which is telling voters that Mrs. Clinton is the only candidate pledging to shield the middle class.

Mr. Sanders, as well as Martin O'Malley, who is also running for the Democratic nomination, have avoided any pledge against middle-class tax increases. The paid family leave program both support is designed as social insurance much like Social Security, funded by a 0.2 percent payroll tax increase.

Yet Mrs. Clinton's pledge rules out supporting such a proposal. While she has frequently talked about paid family leave, she says her plan will call on only the wealthiest to pay for it.

Mr. Obama, who also made a pledge not to raise middle-class taxes, has seen how limiting it can be. Early last year, he made an effort to levy some taxes on 529 college savings accounts, given that 70 percent of account balances in those and similar accounts are owned by families who make more than $200,000. The revenue from the tax would have been plowed into college subsidies that would reach low- and middle-income Americans.

It was a doomed idea. Some families with closer to median income do use 529 accounts. So adding a tax would, technically, increase some middle-class people's burden, thus violating Mr. Obama's promise. Backlash erupted not just from Republicans, but fellow Democrats, and he dropped the idea less than a week after floating it.

Even Mr. Sanders, who often talks about income inequality, isn't entirely immune from the allure of the $250,000 threshold. He's ruled out middle-class tax increases except to fund paid family leave, promising to somehow get the needed revenue for his platform from banks and the very rich. And in other areas - top tax rates, Social Security payroll taxes - he adopts the $250,000 cap for no clear reason related to the policies themselves. That speaks to the spell this arbitrary limit has cast over the Democratic Party.

It's one it needs to break. The middle-class pledge has not just been outpaced by Democrats' policy ambition. It's been outpaced by voters' reality.

Over the last decade and a half, fewer and fewer Americans are identifying as middle class, and a growing share says it is working or lower class. Income inequality compresses many downward and lifts up the sliver already at the top.

That shifting identity should relieve candidates of the sense that there is a political urgency in spouting the phrase "middle class," and it demands a new framework - one that is honest about the class divisions in the country.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: $250,000 a Year Is Not Middle Class. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Opinion | $250,000 a Year Is Not Middle Class

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Op-Ed Contributor HILLARY CLINTON has vowed not to raise taxes on the middle class. It's a pledge that has worked well for others on the campaign trail before her, a resonant assurance to voters who saw themselves as middle class or aspired to be. But it's a bad promise. Mrs.

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Rep, Dem, or Inde

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Pew Research Center for the People and the Press

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54% Favor Taxing the Wealthy to Expand Aid to Poor

There is broad public agreement that economic inequality has grown over the past decade. But as President Obama prepares for Tuesday's State of the Union, where he is expected to unveil proposals for dealing with inequality and poverty, there are wide partisan differences over how much the government should - and can - do to address these issues.

The new national survey by the Pew Research Center and USA TODAY, conducted Jan. 15-19 among 1,504 adults, finds that 65% believe the gap between the rich and everyone else has increased in the last 10 years. This view is shared by majorities across nearly all groups in the public, including 68% of Democrats and 61% of Republicans.

Yet there is a sharp disagreement over whether this gap needs government attention. Among Democrats, 90% say the government should do "a lot" or "some" to reduce the gap between the rich and everyone else, including 62% who say it should do a lot. But only half as many Republicans (45%) think the government should do something about this gap, with just 23% saying it should do a lot. Instead, nearly half of Republicans say the government should do "not much" (15%) or "nothing at all" (33%) about the wealth divide.

More Pew Research Resources

The Pew Research Center's Fact Tank blog contains several posts exploring issues of poverty and income inequality. For more on this topic, including different ways to measure economic inequality and how the U.S. compares to the rest of the world, see our income inequality topic page.

The differences are somewhat less stark when it comes to views of government action in reducing poverty: Nearly all Democrats (93%) and large majorities of independents (83%) and Republicans (64%) favor at least some government action. However, more than twice as many Democrats as Republicans say the government should do a lot to reduce poverty (67% vs. 27%).

In part, these differences reflect divergent beliefs about the effectiveness of government action on inequality and poverty. Republicans are far less likely than Democrats to say the government can do a lot to reduce poverty and especially inequality.

When asked what would do more to reduce poverty, 54% of all Americans say raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations in order to expand programs for the poor. Fewer (35%) believe that lowering taxes on the wealthy to encourage investment and economic growth would be the more effective approach.

Three-quarters of Democrats favor raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations to expand programs for the poor as the better approach to lessen poverty. Republicans, by about two-to-one (59% to 29%), believe the government could do more to reduce poverty by lowering taxes on the wealthy and corporations in order to encourage more investment and economic growth.

Divisions are comparably wide when it comes to the effect of government assistance programs to the poor: By a 66% to 26% margin, most Democrats think aid to the poor helps because people can't get out of poverty until their basic needs are met. But by a 65% to 28% margin, most Republicans believe these programs do more harm than good by making people too dependent on the government.

Two current policy proposals backed by the Obama administration to address poverty and the plight of the long-term unemployed draw substantial public support, although partisan differences are evident here as well.

Overall, 73% of the public favors raising the federal minimum wage from its current level of $7.25 an hour to $10.10 an hour. And 63% back a one-year extension of unemployment benefits for those who have been out of work a long time. Both issues receive nearly unanimous support from Democrats and are favored by wide margins among independents but divide the GOP.

Among Republicans and those who lean toward the Republican Party, 70% who agree with the Tea Party oppose an extension of unemployment benefits and nearly as many oppose raising the minimum wage (65%). Yet 52% of non-Tea Party Republicans favor a one-year extension of unemployment benefits and an even higher percentage (65%) supports increasing the minimum wage.

The survey finds that more people think that circumstances beyond an individual's control (50%) - rather than a lack of hard work (35%) - are generally to blame if a person is poor.

Similarly, more say that factors beyond an individual's control have more to do with someone being rich. About half (51%) say having greater advantages than others generally has more to do with why a person is rich, while 38% say it is because they worked harder than others.

Moreover, by a 60% to 36% margin, most Americans feel the economic system unfairly favors the wealthy, as opposed to being fair to all.

Yet amidst these skeptical views, most Americans continue to believe that opportunity exists for those who make the effort. Six-in-ten (60%) say most people who want to get ahead can make it if they are willing to work hard. Some 38% take the more pessimistic view that hard work and determination are no guarantee of success for most people. While opinions about the nexus between success and hard work have changed little since 2011, a decade ago just 28% were of the view that hard work and determination were no guarantee of success.

Government's Role in Reducing Poverty and Inequality

There is a broad consensus that the government should do "a lot" or "some" to reduce poverty - 82% of Americans express this view, with 53% saying the government should to a lot in this area.

Most also believe the government should be addressing the gap between the rich and everyone else, but there is substantially less agreement in this area. While 69% say the government should do something, fewer than half (43%) say it should be doing a lot and roughly a quarter (26%) say the government should take some action.

Majorities of Americans believe the government cando at least something to reduce poverty and the gap between the rich and everyone else. But fewer believe the government can do a lot to lessen poverty (40%) than say it should take a lot of action to achieve this goal (53%).

While Democrats support a great deal of government action on both issues, Republicans see addressing poverty and addressing inequality as two different things. A majority of Republicans (64%) support at least some government action in reducing poverty. But only 45% of Republicans favor government action on reducing the gap between the rich and everyone else. Instead, 15% say not much should be done, while 33% of Republicans say the government should do nothing at all to address the gap between the rich and everyone else.

Independents also are more likely to favor a lot of government action to reduce poverty (56%) than the gap between the rich and everyone else (42%). Nearly three-in-ten independents (28%) say the government should do little or nothing to deal with inequality, almost double the percentage who favors little or no action on reducing poverty (15%).

Some of these partisan gaps reflect a difference of opinion about how much the government can do to address these issues. About half (53%) of Democrats think the government can do a lot to address poverty, a view shared by 37% of independents and just 25% of Republicans. Among Republicans, about as many say there is little or nothing the government can do to reduce poverty (26%).

These divides are similar when it comes to what the government can do about income inequality, though this is met with even greater skepticism in the GOP. Nearly half (49%) of Republicans think there is little or nothing the government can do about the divide between the rich and everyone else.

Opinions about the Rich and Poor, Economic Fairness

Republicans and Democrats have very different views about why some people are rich and others are poor, as well as about the fundamental fairness of this country's economic system.

Nearly six-in-ten Republicans (57%) say that hard work generally has more to do with why a person is rich; 32% say it is because of the advantages they had in life. Most Democrats (63%) say greater advantages have more to do with a person being rich, with just 27% saying it is because they have worked harder than others.

These differences carry over into attitudes about the fairness of the American economic system. Three-quarters of Democrats say the economic system unfairly favors the wealthy; just 25% say the system is generally fair to most Americans. About half of Republicans (53%) say the economic system is fair to most Americans; 42% say it unfairly favors the wealthy.

Meanwhile, Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to say that hard work and determination lead to success for most people. Fully 76% of Republicans say most people can get ahead if they are willing to work hard; just 20% say that hard work is no guarantee of success. Democrats are evenly divided: 49% say most can get ahead through hard work, but 48% say hard work is no guarantee of success.

Opinions about the factors that result in wealth and poverty differ across income categories. But higher and lower income Americans are in greater accord when it comes to their views of the fairness of the economic system.

Among those with family incomes of at least $75,000, more say hard work (51%) is a bigger factor in someone being rich than extra advantages (39%). Among those with incomes of less than $30,000, about twice as many cite more advantages than harder work for why someone as rich (59% vs. 29%).

However, majorities across income categories see the economic system as tilted toward the wealthy. Yet majorities also say most people can get ahead through hard work.

People with lower incomes express more positive views of government programs to aid the poor than do those with higher incomes. A majority of those with family incomes of less than $30,000 say aid to the poor does more good than harm (60%) and favor raising taxes on the wealthy to expand those programs (56%). Those with incomes of $75,000 or more are divided over whether aid to the poor does more good than harm and in opinions about raising taxes to expand programs that help the poor.

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Most See Inequality Growing, but Partisans Differ over Solutions

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54% Favor Taxing the Wealthy to Expand Aid to Poor There is broad public agreement that economic inequality has grown over the past decade. But as President Obama prepares for Tuesday's State of the Union, where he is expected to unveil proposals for dealing with inequality and poverty, there are wide partisan differences over how much the government should - and can - do to address these issues.

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The Rich or the Poor?

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Official website for U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE

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Does Welfare Deinsentivize Work?

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Republican efforts to make it harder for low-income Americans to qualify for government social programs could jeopardize the food supply of more than 4 million children and seniors, and potentially leave 22 million people without health insurance, according to a report released Monday by the Brookings Institution.

Researchers at the Washington, DC, think tank studied the potential impact of new work requirements that Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration have proposed for Americans who use food stamps (a.k.a. SNAP benefits) and Medicaid, government programs that subsidize groceries and health insurance for low-income Americans, respectively.

The idea behind the work rules is to shrink government anti-poverty programs by making participants work more if they can - and denying benefits to those who don't want to work.

Yet the new Brookings report shows what other research has also shown: Very few Americans enrolled in these programs don't work because they don't want to (an estimated 1.1 percent of Medicaid users and 0.3 percent of SNAP recipients). Instead, they don't work because they are elderly, disabled, caring for relatives, or recently lost their job.

Even more disturbing is the report's conclusion that the Republican work proposals could cut off food subsidies and health insurance to millions of Americans who can work but are in between jobs, or can't get enough work hours to qualify for benefits.

In short, the analysis suggests that the new work rules "will harm more individuals and families than they would help the small share" who might end up working more. So far, Republicans have made slow progress in their quest to shrink the safety net through tougher work rules, but they seem just as committed as ever to the idea.

Millions of children and seniors are at risk of losing food benefits

The federal safety net includes a range of programs, from Social Security to disability insurance and temporary cash assistance for needy families. But the Brookings report focuses on Medicaid and food stamps, the two programs that Republicans are targeting with new work rules.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, often known as food stamps, helps low-income families buy groceries if their monthly income is below (or slightly above) the federal poverty level, which was $12,060 for an individual in 2017.

The program, which served about 40 million Americans each month in 2017, already requires participants to work, if they can. Those who are not disabled, are younger than 50 years old, and have no children, must work at least 80 hours a month or participate in a regular work training program if they need food stamps for longer than three months.

House Republicans are trying to expand that group even more. As part of the House farm bill, which passed in July, Americans 50 to 59 years old would have also have to work, and so would all parents with dependents between 6 and 17 years old (unless the parents are elderly).

Based on the group of Americans who used food stamps in 2017, the Brookings report estimates that these new work rules would more than double the number of Americans who could lose their food subsidies if they don't meet the work rules - a total of 4.1 million people.

The House bill would punish people who are in between jobs or who work seasonal jobs, such as those who work in in the tourism industry. They would simply lose their benefits if they don't work enough hours in a given month, researchers say.

But these harsh rules wouldn't only impact adults who are struggling to make a living; they would also affect children and seniors who live with them. About 3.5 million children and 710,000 seniors live with adults who would be subject to the new rules, according to the report.

So far, efforts to impose the new work rules have stalled. The House and Senate have been unable to agree on what to include and leave out of the farm bill.

States are adopting work rules for Medicaid participants

After the GOP's failed efforts to repeal Obamacare, the Trump administration has gone after Medicaid, which provides government-subsidized health insurance to about 73 million low-income Americans. Unlike SNAP, there are currently no work rules to qualify for Medicaid. Anyone who lives below the poverty level can get it.

The vast majority of Americans who rely on Medicaid can't work because they are elderly or disabled. Most who can work, do. But that hasn't stopped the Trump from trying to make it harder for people to stay insured. The insurance program is operated at the state level, and funded by the state and federal government.

In March 2017, the US Department of Health and Human Services sent a letter to the governors of each state telling them they could apply for a federal waiver that would allow states to enact work requirement on Medicaid participants. Fourteen states have applied for a waiver to allow work rules; so far, four have been approved (Arkansas is the only state that has already imposed them). The rules vary by state, but several would require adults without young children to work at least 20 hours a week.

According to Brookings, about 80 percent of able-bodied Medicaid recipients without children already work, but about 25 percent have irregular work hours and would risk losing their health insurance because they can't meet a 20-hour threshold.

If every state adopted the 20-hour per week work rules, about 22.4 million Americans could lose Medicaid if they don't meet the monthly requirements.

Republicans really want to slash the safety net

The idea that welfare is keeping people from working is a deeply entrenched belief within the GOP. There is some truth to it, but research shows that the incentive to avoid working is actually quite small, and many of the federal government's biggest social programs already have work rules. These requirements were implemented as part of the 1996 welfare reform legislation signed by former President Bill Clinton.

But in regard to other programs that don't require beneficiaries to work, such as Medicaid - most of the recipients work anyway. Two out of three Medicaid recipients have jobs, and the rest are mostly people who are ill, disabled, retired, or taking care of a family member.

Vox's Alvin Changand Tara Golshan reviewed the research on the impact of forcing welfare recipients to work in exchange for benefits, which is something several states have tried. They say the rules did increase employment among participants, but only by very little, because most beneficiaries were already working. And they note that the requirements didn't do much to lift people from poverty:

Work requirements barely caused poverty rates to budge, partially because even people who found work weren't earning enough to lift themselves out of poverty. In addition, at half the experiment sites, work requirements caused more people to be in deep poverty.

The fact that work requirements don't seem to be all that effective in lifting Americans out of poverty hasn't discouraged Republicans from pushing for more work rules, or from trying to slash millions of dollars in spending on the social programs that seem most effective in preventing economic hardship. Federal safety net programs directly kept 44.9 million people out of poverty last year, according to data released last month by the US Census Bureau.

If Republicans are truly interested in lifting Americans out of poverty and off the safety net, here is one idea: Raise the federal minimum wage already. It's been $7.25 for nearly 10 years now.

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GOP plan to get Americans off food stamps puts 4 million children and seniors at risk

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Republican efforts to make it harder for low-income Americans to qualify for government social programs could jeopardize the food supply of more than 4 million children and seniors, and potentially leave 22 million people without health insurance, according to a report released Monday by the Brookings Institution.