A central goal of the Middle Class Taskforce is to identify public policies that will help middle class families by improving their living standards. This taskforce goal is an especially important one, because even in normal times of economic growth in recent years, the middle class has not gotten very far ahead. In fact, even during the economic expansion of the 2000s, as we show below, the real income of working-age, middle-class households actually fell by about $2,000. In this current period of widespread economic hardship, a key tool for helping these families is the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or ARRA. The Middle Class Task Force released a staff report today focusing on how the ARRA helps middle-income families. Some of the key findings from the report include:

• Jobs created by the ARRA are predicted to lower the unemployment rate by about two percentage points. We expect this change to increase middle-class incomes by $1,300, or 2.3%;
• Depending on family-type and circumstances, the tax benefits from the ARRA provisions can add $2,000 or more to after-tax family income;
• Combining job and tax effects, the ARRA will lift incomes by around $3,000 for many middle-class families, significantly offsetting their income losses over the recession; and
• For middle-class families hit with spells of unemployment, tax credits and safety net expansion in the ARRA, combined with existing unemployment insurance programs, can replace much of the income loss that occurs when a wage-earner in the family loses his or her job.

The full staff report is available here.