Mother Jones
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Hillary Clinton’s campaign has spent much of the past week trumpeting her pledge to protect the middle class from tax increases. Clinton has “proposed a bold, aggressive agenda,” campaign press secretary Brian Fallon said in a statement this week, “but when it comes to paying for it, she will make sure the wealthiest Americans finally start paying their fair share, not force the middle class to pay even more than they already do.”
The former senator and secretary of state hasn’t been shy about using that pledge to bludgeon her Democratic opponents, Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Gov. Martin O’Malley, as too eager to take money away from the middle class. “If you are truly concerned about raising incomes for middle-class families, the last thing you should do is cut their take-home pay right off the bat by raising their taxes,” Fallon said. “Yet Bernie Sanders has called for a roughly 9-percent tax hike on middle-class families just to cover his health care plan, and simple math dictates he’ll need to tax workers even more to pay for the rest of his at least $18-20 trillion agenda.” Twitter accounts affiliated with Clinton’s campaign have eschewed subtlety to attack Sanders and O’Malley on this point.
At the #DemDebate, only one candidate pledged to raise middle-class incomes and not their taxes: Hillary Clinton. pic.twitter.com/6LdKjWyx8N
— The Briefing (@TheBriefing2016)
There’s a problem with Clinton’s line of attack: She is promising to exempt a lot indisputably rich people from paying more in taxes. Clinton pledged last week that, should she become president, she wouldn’t allow taxes to be raised on households earning less than $250,000 per year—by any measure a very high ceiling for the middle class.
The middle class is one of those nebulous terms with no clear-cut definition. But a glance at the distribution of income across the country makes it hard to argue that that anyone earning close to $250,000 a year could be considered part of the “middle” of the income range.
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