&gt; Plus, the US doesn&#x27;t really have classes the way the OP is concerned &quot;middle class&quot; will be interpreted.<p>The US (like other mixed economies, which retain a basically capitalist system of property and overall structure, despite some public policy measures to address some of the discontents of capitalism) does, in fact, have all the classical relations to a capitalist economy: it does have people who derive support primarily through returns on capital to which others&#x27; rented labor is applied (capitalists&#x2F;bourgeoisie&#x2F;upper class), it does have small business owners, yeoman farmers (though those are a dying breed), and managers and other elite wage laborers with substantial outside investments who live by a mix of capital and labor (petit bourgeoisie&#x2F;middle class), and it does have people who are principally dependent on wage labor for their sustenance with no significant capital holdings (proletariat&#x2F;working&#x2F;lower class).<p>And, while the income-based breakdown is common in the media, it also fairly consistently conflicts with people&#x27;s expectations of what &quot;middle class&quot; should mean in lifestyle terms, which is largely shaped by cultural associations with the &quot;middle class&quot; that are tied to the traditional middle class rather than any &quot;middle income&quot; group (and to a time when the middle income group was consistently progressing <i>toward</i> the middle class, making moving into the middle class a not-unreasonable aspirational goal for much of the working class.)<p>So, you also see lots of comments every time there is an article about the income-based &quot;middle class&quot; about how the income cutoffs conflict with what people perceive to be necessary to be &quot;middle class&quot;. Because those &quot;middle class&quot; expectations are increasingly out-of-line with any middle income group, because the progress which made &quot;middle class&quot; seem to be even within the reasonable aspirational grasp of the middle income group stalled decades ago.