There’s a prolonged pause when I ask Lyft driver Gaby Oseguedaif her family is middle class. Her smile fades as she thinks about it for a while.

“Yeah, I think so. I don’t even know what the middle class is anymore,” says Oseguarda, who with her husband earns nearly $100,000 a year in the San Francisco area.

The majority of Americans - 62pc - identify as ‘middle class’, according to a Gallup poll conducted in June. It’s the highest percent of people feeling that way since 2003. But a lot of Americans are like Osegueda: They feel middle class, but they aren’t sure what it means.

Just who exactly is middle class is in the national spotlight again as President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress craft tax cuts for individuals and corporations that they say will primarily benefit the middle.

Vice President Pence called the plan, which is still being fleshed out, a ‘middle class miracle’ this week. But amid this discussion, the middle class has been defined in different ways.

Gary Cohn, President Trump’s top economic adviser, recently discussed how a ‘typical family’ making $100,000 a year would benefit. Trump has espoused the value of the plan to truckers, who make around $41,000 a year.

So what is the middle class? In America, an income of $59,000 a year is smack dab in the middle, according to the US Census. But it’s not that simple.

There is no exact definition of middle class, and a deep look at the data shows a wide variety of individuals could be part of it, depending on where they live and how big their family is. The middle class in San Francisco, where Osegueda lives, is not the same as it is in Peoria.

Osegueda and her husband are in their early 30s. Both have college degrees - she also has a master’s - and launched careers in San Francisco’s booming tech industry.

She worked in human resources and he’s an engineer. They love San Francisco, but a year ago, they moved to Pacifica, a suburb, where rent is more affordable and their young son has space to play.

Despite making nearly $100,000 a year, they aren’t sure they’ll ever own a home of their own, at least not anywhere in the Bay Area.

It’s not just San Francisco. A quick glance at the median income in these six American cities highlights how much it varies: Newton, Mass., $122,100; Washington DC, $70,800; Denver, $53,600; Dallas, $43,800; Birmingham, Ala., $31,200; Flint, Mich., $24,900.

Now take a look at how median income varies by family size. The median income for single people in America is just $30,400. For a household of two, it jumps to $65,600. For three, it’s nearly $77,000. For four, it’s $91,000 (not far from Cohn’s definition of $100,000 for a family of four). You get the idea. The more people in a family, the more money they typically need to live a comfortable middle-class lifestyle.

When Americans talk about the ‘middle class’, they are usually thinking about a range, not just the specific income dead in the middle. Pew Research says the middle class runs from $42,000 to $125,000. They define middle as a household of three with an income that falls between two-thirds and double the median income.

By Pew’s calculation, just over half of American households are truly middle class, far smaller than the 62pc who self-identify that way.

To dig further into the data, The Washington Post opted to define middle class as American households with incomes that fall between the 30th percentile mark and the 80th percentile mark.

It captures half of US households, but the range is skewed high enough so that someone would have to be well above the poverty line and earn at least $16 an hour in a full-time job to qualify.

America’s middle-class ranges from $35,000 to $122,500 in annual income, according to The Post’s calculation (The data is in 2016 dollars. You can see in the chart below how much the range varies by household size). Rakesh Kochhar, associate director of research at Pew, calls it a ‘fair’ estimate. He helped craft Pew’s definition.

The bottom line is: $100,000 is on the middle-class spectrum, but barely: 75pc of US households make less than that.

Others prefer to define middle class by the lifestyle you can afford. They think of middle class status symbols, such as being able to own a home and car and go on a family vacation now and then to places like Disney World or the beach.

Former Vice President Joe Biden headed up a Middle Class Task Force, which put out a report in 2010 classifying middle class like this: “Middle-class families are defined by their aspirations more than their income . . .[they] aspire to homeownership, a car, college education for their children, health and retirement security and occasional family vacations.”

In Beattyville, Kentucky, a place dubbed “America’s poorest white town,” median income is only $16,000 and a typical home costs only $53,000.

Deep poverty also exists on many Indian reservations, such as the one in Blackwater, Arizona, where the median income is just $18,000.

Bloomberg/The Washington Post Service

Published in Dawn, October 29th, 2017