With roughly 67 percent of Americans living in an owner-occupied home, that's a pretty large focus group. And one in three households contain children. Gore's vagueness when it comes to defining working families is at play in his other grand populist theme. The people who Gore considers rich. The bottom 60 percent of taxpayers by income, according to the Congressional Budget Office, pay only 17 percent of total federal taxes, including Social Security and Medicare.
Many tax breaks phase out at quite low levels of income.
Given what average college graduates make in their first jobs, if two newly minted B.A.s marry and both work, they're already making too much money. She still considers herself working class, which I don't begrudge her, since class in America is as much a cultural condition and state of mind as it is a material phenomenon. But making those kind of bucks, she's not likely to be on the receiving end of any of Gore's help, no matter how hard she and her family work. In fact, she's much more likely to be forced to pay extra for it.