[ineedasername]

I'm a little surprised: Do you honestly believe that having a refrigerator, internet, and food makes a person middle class? For refrigerator & food it's hard to have one without the other unless you spend a heck of a lot more money on takeout etc. As for internet, that's pretty much a bare minimum of communicating these days, and in many cases of poverty the way people get their internet is through their cell phones, which absent home internet (which many don't have) is both the gateway to the internet and absolutely necessary to function in today's society.

Maybe we are talking about "welfare" in different ways? In the US, welfare is a constellation of programs, not just one single program that gives $$ each week/month. Everything from subsidized school lunches, medicaid (CHIP for additional care for children), SNAP... your comment about "without the job part" indicates that you might not be aware that a very large number of people are on one or more of these programs and work fulltime+ jobs. Where I live it was a real crisis during COVID school closures because the poorest children had parents with jobs that could not be done remotely and parents could not find or afford alternatives, at the same time that any internet they had was through cell phones (usually the parents phones) so the school district needed to send out wifi hotspots & chromebooks so that students at least had the basic tools to learn... but had to be left alone (if they were old enough) or parents quit their already low-paying jobs to watch over their kids.

None of the above sounds like middle-class without the job part. As you began your comment: I hear people bring up your sort of argument to scoff at the idea that significant % of the population may fall through the cracks or just get left behind. I don't understand the point of view except as lack of direct experience with people living in these not-middle-class positions of poverty on the brink of collapse.