For instance, during the 2008–10 crisis, the Obama administration encountered great difficulty in rolling back regressive tax cuts of the previous administration, because it had equally invested in the ludicrous language of “not raising the taxes of the middle class.” They became bogged down in a game of guessing where the upper tax boundary of that elusive middle class might be found: $100,000, $200,000, $250,000, $1 million? This was occurring when the median household income in the United States (2009) was $51,221 and the average per capita annual money income was $27,041; the public discourse was consequently conducted in a pristine fact-free zone.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 335