Opinion | John Tsang's confused middle-class claim

This middle-class debate - an offshoot of the government budget unveiled last week - is a good one. Is Financial Secretary John Tsang Chun-wah a member of our middle class? Truth be told, there is yet to be one universally accepted definition of "middle class".

In the mid-1700s, the middle class was typically made up of those who were neither nobility nor peasants. By the 20th century, statisticians just grouped all who were neither the upper crust nor the working class under one big classification. It's a sweeping generalisation. So, for the here and now, I reckon "middle class" means anyone who doesn't own a private jet and isn't eligible for welfare benefits.

Precisely because it is vague, the term is often exploited by politicians; appealing to the middle class is politically efficient. The term is more valuable to politicians than to policymakers.

But Tsang turned that completely on its head. His reply to a reporter's question on whether he understands the plight of the middle class was based on illogic. He claimed understanding because he was "also middle class". But it doesn't take one to know one, surely. To say so would make all legislative councillors and members of the government unable to comprehend the life of the grass roots.

Unfortunately, for Tsang, he continued digging his middle-class hole with talk about the "middle-class lifestyle".

Former Harvard Law School professor and now US senator Elizabeth Warren wrote about the increasingly unattainable middle-class lifestyle by the middle class 10 years ago in a book co-authored with her daughter, from which some parallels can be drawn. Warren, an expert in bankruptcy law, had seen the rising prices of quality child care and quality education - with the latter requiring middle-class families to pay for increasingly expensive homes in nice neighbourhoods - running the American middle class into the ground.