There’s a way to help the middle class that President Barack Obama should consider, even as he pushes for minimum wage hikes and higher taxes on the wealthy.

We can cut payroll taxes for working Americans.

“The payroll tax imposes, by a wide margin, the largest federal tax burden on middle-class families,” writes economist James Capretta in National Review. “As Social Security and Medicare spending commitments rose over the last half of the last century, the payroll contribution climbed dramatically. As recently as 1972, the combined employer-employee payroll tax rate was 7.5 percent. Today, it is 15.3 percent.”

President Obama should support a payroll tax cut; he supported a payroll tax “holiday” in 2010, during the Great Recession, and he supported an extension of the holiday in 2012. The holiday ended in January 2013, and to most Americans, it felt like a tax increase.

Capretta makes another point about payroll taxes — they’re unavoidable.

“The payroll tax is a tax on work, not consumption,” he writes. “Of course, middle-class families generally spend what they earn, and so when they pay taxes, they spend less. But these families can’t avoid the payroll tax by consuming less.”

The argument against cutting the payroll tax is that it’s the way we fund Social Security — and that’s already going broke.

“Continue the payroll tax cut, and you only increase the burden on our already strained trust fund balance,” notes Forbes magazine. “It’s foolish to ignore the fact that the payroll tax reduction came with a sizeable price, costing the government nearly $240 billion in tax revenue over the two-year period. And since Congress did nothing to pay for these cuts, the bill simply got added to the country’s tab, further driving up the already bloated deficit.”

The answer to this is tax reform, not keeping taxes on the middle class high.

Indeed, Obama’s latest theme is “middle class economics,” and a new commitment to helping those hard-working Americans who are neither poor nor wealthy.

“In my State of the Union Address last week, I focused on making sure middle-class economics helps more Americans get ahead in the new economy,” Obama wrote in January. “As a country, we need to do more to make working families’ paychecks go farther, give Americans of every age the chance to upgrade their skills so they earn higher wages, and build the world’s most competitive economy for our businesses.”

He’s right, and cutting payroll taxes is the right way to do that.

Reducing payroll taxes would go much further to help Americans than increasing the minimum wage. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only about 2.5 percent of American workers make minimum wage, and most of them are young. Only a fraction of American households would benefit from a hike in the minimum wage.

But nearly every working household in the nation would benefit from a cut in payroll taxes.

Obama is right to focus on helping the middle class. And the most effective way to do that would be to cut payroll taxes.