Biden Comforts the Comfortable

DURING HIS CAMPAIGN for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, Joe Biden repeatedly insisted that his primary goal as president would be to help the struggling American middle class.

- By Peter Suderman

"Ordinary middle-class Americans built America," he declared during a June 2019 Democratic primary debate. Under President Donald Trump's policies, he said, "too many people who are in the middle class and who are poor have the bottom fall out."

In defining the "middle class" and the "poor," a good place to start is the median household income. In 2020, the year before Biden became president, the U.S. median was about $67,000, down from about $69,000 the previous year. The poor presumably make less than that, and people in the "middle" class, particularly those who feel the economic bottom falling out beneath them, presumably don't make much more.

As president, Biden's attention has often been elsewhere. Under Biden, Democrats consistently have focused their energies on policies designed to benefit households with stable employment and six-figure annual incomes-not the super-rich, but the affluent upper-middle class.