The law is built for the edges, and the middle pays for it

Spend enough time around the law and a pattern becomes hard to ignore. The rules seem to be written with two groups in mind: the very top, and the very bottom. The people at the top get structures, carve-outs, and planning tools that are hard to justify as rewards for productive investment. The people at the bottom get protections and aid that are, at their best, a mark of a decent society, and at their worst, overcorrections that strip ordinary people of rights that should be obvious. And everyone in between, which is most of us, is left to navigate a highway that is increasingly not built for them.

Most people are in the middle

By Pew Research Center’s measure, 51 percent of American adults lived in middle-income households in 2023, down from 61 percent in 1971. The middle is shrinking, but it is still the majority. These are people with jobs, mortgages or leases, kids, aging parents, a small business on the side, and a legal problem every so often. In a 2021 national survey, two-thirds of Americans reported at least one legal problem in the previous four years.

Yet when you look at where the law’s attention goes, the middle is rarely the point.

The top: rewards that look less like investment and more like privilege

A tax system can reasonably encourage people to start businesses, build things, and take risks. But some of the largest breaks in the code look less like incentives for productive investment and more like rewards for already being wealthy:

• The estate tax exclusion. Beginning in 2026, an individual can pass $15 million, and a married couple $30 million, free of federal estate and gift tax, indexed for inflation and with no sunset. A middle-class family will never come close to that line. The families who benefit are the ones who need the help least.
• The step-up in basis. When someone dies holding assets that have grown in value, their heirs generally take a new tax basis at the date-of-death value, so the gain is never taxed. Combined with borrowing against assets instead of selling them, it lets the largest fortunes grow and pass down without income tax ever reaching much of the gain. Even analysts who think “buy, borrow, die” is overstated call the step-up hard to defend.
• Carried interest. Investment fund managers can have much of their share of a fund’s profits taxed at long-term capital gains rates rather than as ordinary income, a break that has survived repeated attempts to end it.

None of these is a secret, and each has defenders. My point is narrower. These rules are built for a sliver of people, and the complexity that serves them is paid for, in time and in tax, by everyone else.

The bottom: protections that can overshoot

At the other edge, the law offers real protections: legal aid, fee waivers, tenant protections, and public benefits. Most of them exist for good reasons. But protection without balance can turn into something that makes no sense to an ordinary person.

Squatting is the clearest example. Across the country, owners have found strangers living in a house they own, refusing to leave, and police telling them it is a “civil matter.” The owner, often a family or a small landlord, then has to hire a lawyer, file an eviction suit against someone who never had a right to be there, and wait, sometimes for months, while paying the mortgage, the taxes, and the insurance on a home they cannot use. Someone with zero right to a place should not be able to hold it hostage because the process was designed for a different situation.

To its credit, Texas acted. In 2025 the Legislature created a faster path for owners to have unauthorized occupants removed through the sheriff or constable after verifying ownership, and it overhauled eviction procedure for cases filed in 2026. But notice how it happened: only after the stories became impossible to ignore. The middle gets fixed after the outrage, not before.

Where the middle loses, on both sides

Put the rules side by side and the pattern gets concrete. Here are examples where the tax-paying middle class comes out behind, either the people at the top or the households that qualify for aid.

Compared with the top

• Payroll taxes stop at $184,500. In 2026, Social Security tax applies to wages up to $184,500. A worker earning $80,000 pays 6.2 percent on every dollar, or $4,960. Someone paid $2 million in wages pays the same $11,439 maximum, less than 0.6 percent of their pay. Investment income pays no Social Security tax at all.
• Working is taxed more heavily than owning. Wages face ordinary income rates up to 37 percent plus payroll taxes. Long-term capital gains and qualified dividends top out at 20 percent, plus a 3.8 percent net investment income tax, and no payroll tax. Most middle-class income comes from a paycheck, while a much larger share of income at the very top comes from owning assets.
• The mortgage interest deduction mostly helps people with big mortgages. You only get it if you itemize, and only about 1 in 10 filers itemized in 2020. By the Joint Committee on Taxation’s estimate, about 78 percent of the deduction’s benefit in 2025 went to households earning $200,000 or more. A middle-class homeowner taking the standard deduction gets nothing from it.
• Inheritances skip the tax that wages never do. The $15 million estate exclusion and the step-up in basis, described above, let large fortunes pass down largely untaxed. A middle-class worker pays income and payroll tax on every paycheck as it is earned.

Compared with households that qualify for aid

• The health insurance cliff. The enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies expired at the end of 2025, and as of this writing Congress has not restored them. Under the rules now in effect, a family of four earning just under 400 percent of the poverty line, about $128,600 under the 2025 guidelines used for 2026 coverage, gets help paying premiums. One dollar over that line, they get none, and they repay any advance credits they received.
• Benefit cliffs. SNAP, Medicaid and CHIP, child care subsidies, and housing assistance all end at an income line. Federal Reserve researchers have documented how a raise can leave a working family worse off once lost benefits are counted. The family just above every line pays full price for child care and health care with no help at all.
• A lawyer when you are charged with a crime. The Constitution guarantees appointed counsel to people who cannot afford a lawyer, and it should. But Texas counties set their own standards, and many presume indigence only at about 125 percent of the poverty line with less than $2,500 in non-exempt assets. Researchers at SMU’s Deason Center found that Texas eligibility standards are generally unrelated to the real cost of hiring a lawyer. A middle-class defendant who earns too much for appointed counsel often drains savings to pay for a defense.
• Civil legal help. Federally funded legal aid generally stops at 125 percent of the poverty guidelines. Above that, a tenant, a worker, or a family facing a lawsuit pays market rates or goes without, which is why most middle-class legal problems never get advice at all.

To be fair

The federal income tax is progressive. In 2022 the top 1 percent paid about 40 percent of all federal individual income taxes while earning about 22 percent of adjusted gross income, and the bottom half paid about 3 percent. And aid exists because some people genuinely cannot get by without it. The point is not that the top pays nothing or that help for the poor is wrong. It is that the specific rules at each edge are tuned for those edges, and the people in the middle, who pay payroll taxes on every dollar they earn and full price for nearly everything else, are rarely the ones the rules are tuned for.

The middle: too much for aid, too little for the law as it is priced

Here is the squeeze. Legal aid programs funded by the Legal Services Corporation generally serve households at or below 125 percent of the federal poverty guidelines, roughly $40,000 for a family of four under the 2025 guidelines. Earn more than that, and you are generally on your own. Many public benefits have similar cliffs, where a raise can cost more in lost help than it adds in pay.

Meanwhile, the legal system is priced for people and businesses who can absorb open-ended hourly bills. A $6,000 dispute with a contractor, a security deposit, a severance agreement, a will, an eviction of someone who never paid rent: for a middle-class household, these are significant, and the cost of handling them the traditional way can exceed what is at stake. So people do nothing, sign what they are handed, miss a deadline, or pay a settlement they did not owe. For the middle, cost is not a detail. It decides whether the law works for you at all.

Why the edges get the attention

I do not think this is a conspiracy. It is incentives. The very wealthy can afford lawyers, lobbyists, and planners whose job is to shape the rules and then use them. Advocates for the poor are organized, mission-driven, and often funded to push for protections. The middle is busy working. It has no lobby of its own, and its problems are individually small, so they rarely make the news until they pile up into something like a squatting epidemic or a housing crisis.

The result is a legal system that can look generous at both ends and indifferent in the middle. That skews what policies actually get written, and it leaves most people paying for rules that were not designed with them in mind.

Where Crawford Law wants to be of service

I cannot rewrite the tax code or the property code. What I can do is make the law work better for the people in the middle, one problem at a time. That means helping you find the most effective, yet most efficient, way to handle your legal issue: a straight answer on a free 15-minute call, a clear read on your deadlines and options, a fixed block of time quoted up front instead of an open-ended bill, a well-written letter when a letter will do, and a referral to the right lawyer when the matter belongs elsewhere.

If you are not sure whether your problem is worth a lawyer, start with 50 common reasons working Texans need a lawyer, or read why it is so hard to find a lawyer who will just talk to you. For more on the shrinking middle, see what happened in 1971. Or simply request a free call.