Firstly and perhaps worst of all, zoning laws, community leagues and neighbourhood covenants deliberately try to keep poor people and racial minorities out of their neighbourhoods.
Secondly education. Upper middle class folks attend exclusive schools from pre-school to post-secondary and do everything they can to make sure their money never goes to anyone else’s school.
And thirdly is home ownership. There are tones of laws on the books that ostensibly promote home ownership but in practice only hand out money to those who already own them. Even better if you own more than one. These benefits do nothing for anybody who will never be able to afford a house.
And lastly, and possibly most importantly, they are the ones who are going to have to drive less, fly less, and consume less if we are going to do anything about global warming. People in this category love to talk about how important global warming is but they will fight like hell to make sure they don’t have to give up anything.
The separation of the upper middle class from everyone else is both economic and social, and the practice of “opportunity hoarding”—gaining exclusive access to scarce resources—is especially prevalent among parents who want to perpetuate privilege to the benefit of their children. While many families believe this is just good parenting, it is actually hurting others by reducing their chances of securing these opportunities.
Convinced of their merit, members of the upper middle class believe they are entitled to those tax breaks and hoarded opportunities. After all, they aren’t the 1 percent.
In January 2015, Barack Obama suffered an acute political embarrassment. A proposal from the budget he’d sent to Congress was dead on arrival—but it was the president himself who killed it.
The idea was sensible, simple, and progressive. Remove the tax benefits from 529 college saving plans, which disproportionately help affluent families, and use the money to help fund a broader, fairer system of tax credits. It was, in policy terms, a no-brainer. You can easily see how the professorial president would have proposed it. But he had underestimated the wrath of the American upper middle class.