Not sure what you mean exactly but if you mean to give up some money to the govt then could you please expound upon how you see the govt expanding the middle class?
In a democracy, Good Government, has to defined by the people at the ballot box. This is why broad, compulsory education is essential to a democracy. Voters can be misled, and poor or insufficient education can result in mistakes at the ballot box. In retrospect, we made a mistake when we voted in government that would champion supply-side economics, but we did not realize it until the middle class had been seriously weakened. Now we have a chance to correct these past errors and return to demand-side economics. If we do, the middle class will slowly recover and grow in size.
We are also experiencing very fast technological change and consequent globalization. Commerce, education, and government too, has not been able to keep up with the pace of change. The pace is slowing, and a clearer picture gradually emerging. Over time the commerce-education-technology-globalization gap will close. The middle class will come back. But this can only happen if we abandon supply-side economics, which we have learned doesn't produce the results we expected.
Supply-side economics is sometimes referred to as "trickle down" economics. The idea behind it is that by increasing the amount of capital controlled by the wealthy class you can benefit
all classes, including the middle class. In practice, however, supply-side economics produced self-reinforcing transfers of capital from the middle class to the wealthy class, deficits, and cost shifting, all of which proved damaging to the middle class.
Those who benefited from the supply side economics of the past 35 years, emphasize contributory, secondary causes for the observed decline of the American Middle Class; secondary causes such as immigration, off shoring, globalization, free trade, fiscal profligacy, etc. The
root cause of the slow decline of the middle class, however, was the adoption of supply side economics that ultimately left too little capital with labor and too much with the capital class, where it was not as efficiently employed as had been hoped. The result is the imbalance we see today. It is government that determines these things and the people select the government.
The government has the option of altering course, so that the middle class will spontaneously regenerate over the next 35 years. An obvious way to do this would be to reverse the actions taken that shifted the economy to supply side stimulus. This would mean a return to a more progressive income tax with more brackets and a greater spread in rates, i.e., opposite in direction from a flat tax! Even if tax rates were not lowered in the lowest brackets, and they should be a little, the desired effect will be achieved over time through lower deficits and hence lower inflation* in boom times. Inflation impacts all economic classes of course, but the relative effect increases inversely with income. Naturally, initiatives aimed at rebuilding the middle class can be undone by imprudent fiscal policy. Suffice it to say, there are virtually endless demand side initiatives the government could take that would push the process of rebuilding the middle class along. Clinton and Sanders, have both included a few of these in their platforms (which see). Trump's platform on the other hand would amount to acceleration of the supply-side effect.
Above, I have outlined features of government initiatives and policies that affect middle class economics, for better or for worse. There is a curious phenomena that I have observed. Government policies and actions are virtually always initiated with good intentions. When it is later discovered that a particular policy helps one segment of society but harms another, the segment benefited opposes change, even if they do not understand the mechanisms underlying their benefits. They are innocent of any intention to harm another segment of society. Those harmed, however, want change, but since they have no better understanding of underlying mechanisms than those benefiting, they can be easily convinced to support policies that are actually harmful to them. The other side, however, the side that opposes change, knows what they want; they always want more of the same.
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*There is a connection between deficits and inflation that isn't easily understood; hence the politicians preference for inflation over direct taxation,
which is easily understood.
