This tracks... "middle class" is an income band encompassing those who fall between 2/3 and 200% of median. The US is a terribly unequal society where something like 40% of the population falls within this band, with high degrees of wage compression near/at subsistence-level... the distribution of those within the technical "middle class skew to the low end of the range. Because poverty is best conceived in relative versus absolute terms, it's fair to say that the "Middle America/the average person" in the US lives in poverty.