Things I don't understand about Britain #431

As this Economist article so eloquently puts it:

In America these people would be called what they plainly are: middle class. They are around the middle of the national income distribution. They have jobs of middling status, perhaps in retail or self-employed manual trades. Their nondescript semi-detached houses are neither in the inner cities (from which they, or their parents, often migrated) nor in the kind of suburbs conventionally described as “leafy” (to which they aspire to move).
In Britain, though, “middle class” has come to refer to people who are actually well off, in part, perhaps, because a small aristocracy notionally occupies the top spot socially. Middle-class professions are taken to include medicine, teaching and the law. One newspaper columnist thinks a typical middle-class family might have a “combined income of £100,000”, or $150,000; in fact it is probably closer to £30,000. Rising school fees are supposed to be a middle-class worry, though only 7% of British schoolchildren are educated privately. And the term is just as misused in politics. Advocates of cutting inheritance tax say it punishes the middle classes; yet it is only charged on estates worth at least £325,000, fully £100,000 more than the price of the average home. The 40% rate of income tax is also said to affect them; in fact, it catches just 3.8m of Britain’s 31.7m income-taxpayers. 

My husband is guilty of this as well: The Middle Class is well-off; everyone else is working class.