Leadership Quote by Eliot Engel

The line plays like common sense, which is exactly its political power: it flatters the listener’s instincts while quietly narrowing the terms of debate. By declaring the middle class “so important” that its value “cannot be overestimated,” Engel turns an economic category into a civic virtue. The middle class isn’t just a demographic here; it’s a stand-in for stability, legitimacy, and the promise that the system works for people who follow the rules.

The phrasing is doing careful work. “Cannot be overestimated” is an absolution from trade-offs. If you accept the premise, any policy branded as “middle-class” becomes self-justifying, while questions about who counts as middle class, or who gets sacrificed to protect it, are made to feel petty or ideological. It’s a rhetorical shield: the claim is too broad to falsify, too agreeable to oppose, and elastic enough to fit tax cuts, education spending, labor protections, or small-business subsidies depending on the moment.

Context matters because “middle class” has long been America’s preferred moral metric. In late-20th and early-21st century politics, it became the safest noun in the language: a way to talk about inequality without saying “poor,” to praise growth without saying “rich,” and to promise fairness without naming winners and losers. The subtext is anxiety management. When wages stagnate, housing costs spike, and social trust frays, invoking the middle class reassures voters that the center can hold. It also gently sidelines the uncomfortable possibility that a society’s health might be measured not by the comfort of the median, but by how it treats those far from it.