$9K liquid.
Heh, there’s a graduate thesis in this somewhere … 
Does that mean you actually think you’re poor?
In a “rich/poor” dichotomy, yes.
And in a context that has some relation to actual life as it is experienced by humans?
I concede that housing prices around Toronto must be higher than those of Texas. Just being pedantic, my apologies
In a “rich/poor” dichotomy, yes.
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Hahahhahahaa!!!
So you have $9K in cash that you can blow on anything without affecting your current or future lifestyle and you think you’re poor? That’s rich.
I think it would be better to look up average and median salaries and select the top 5% of median salaries. Average can be a little misleading, since there are some earning extremely low wages and living ten to a room and some earning extremely high wages and having ten rooms per person, but the vast majority of people don’t live like either of those extremes.
You might say why 5%, and I’d say the cut-off has to be somewhere; at that point, the person is very likely to be able to live without working for a year or two if they use their savings, make some cutbacks, rent out one of their spare bedrooms, put their private-school kid into public schools and stop spending more on groceries than many people make in net salary.
‘Has to work to lead a comfortable life’ is completely unworkable without a universally-agreed definition of ‘comfortable,’ which we’re never going to get. I mean, your definition of ‘basic’ includes private schooling and an enormous house, so your definition of ‘comfortable’ must be way out there.
I agree - but some people on here seem to think that ‘very rich’ and ‘rich’ are the same thing. Are ‘very tall’ and ‘tall’ the same thing? It’s a weird way of thinking.
It’s different if the person makes 200k one year and 10k the next, of course, like some actors - average income over five years might be fairer, but not many people have an income that fluctuates as wildly as that.
Well, I earn less than a tenth of what you do and I live in central London. If you’re poor, what the hell am I?
The same exact thing can be said of someone who’s at the 5.1% level. Why is he not “rich”?
Poor.
He included your 3.5% and 4% in his 5% line. Now he has to include 5.1%? Does this argument continue until everyone is considered rich?
I didn’t include FICA, but $200K is way above the cap. Sorry, you don’t get to deduct 401K contributions. “Please give me welfare, ma’am. I put all my money into savings and I’m broke.” If you are in Austin, you may pay high property taxes but you don’t pay income tax. You can’t sum the highest tax rate for each state in this calculation.
We go shopping once a week, so I have a good handle on this. I doubt your food is more expensive than mine. I suppose if I shopped at the really high end grocer I might make it this high, but, as I said, anyone can spend everything they have.
In Austin you don’t pay income tax, so it doesn’t count. In any case, time for a tax revolt. My house is worth around $750K, and I pay maybe $300 a month thanks to Prop 13.
You need to talk to the Gecko, man. Around here those with long commutes do it to be able to buy cheaper houses far from Silicon Valley. But I don’t deny that you can shoot yourself in the foot by buying an expensive house far away.
In arelativistic fallacy, you mean.
At $750K, I think I do. In some places you can get a mansion and a ranch for that money - just not around here.
You think your income is basically the same as mine? Heh. Like others have said, then, it wouldn’t matter if taxes took away 90% of your income then, would it?
How can rich/poor not be relative, anyway? In comparison to an Ethiopian famine victim, I am rich. In comparison to most of the world, I’m rich. In comparison to others in my country, I’m not. ‘Living comfortably’ within the same country is also relative - it would cost a lot more to buy a 5,500 sq ft house in NYC than in Kansas City.
Normally, I’d agree - but I brought up the Roman example in response to a direct challenge. 
Actually, what the cut-off level for 'rich" has been in various times and cultures would make a fascinating study - as I said upthread, graduate-thesis stuff (and I’d be surprised if it hasn’t been attempted).
My point, upthread, is that in our particular society (unlike the Romans) there isn’t any firm figure for "upper class’ or “rich”, because it tends to be measured functionally rather than by income or assets.
But if there was, I would argue, it would be closer to the Roman notion of owning a lump of dependable assets in the multiple millions, rather than the proposed measure of having a salary in the top 3%.
I think this measure is reasonable not only because it appears to have an elegant cross-time-and-culture uniformity (:D) but because it indicates a pool of assets sufficient to live on without the necessity of wage-slavery, and it is congruent with upper-class type occupations such as investment and money-management.
Say “somewhat rich” if you have $4 million and “really rich” if you have $10 million. That eliminates those who are “millionares” on paper but whose “million” is mostly tied up in their house.
Not really. He’s commenting on the forcing of the debate into an artificial dichotomy, which itself implies a fallacy - the “exclusion of the middle”. If the middle is excluded, we are all “poor” if we are not “rich”.
The “middle has been excluded” when all you are allowed to classify someone is as either rich or poor.
Amusingly, the prototype of the false dilemma emerged from an argument very similar to the present:
Except that he’s the one doing that.
I’m sorry, but not everyone who makes more than $20K a year but doesn’t have a private island is middle class.
This thread makes me a little sick to my stomach.
If you have more than you need, then you are rich. Not a subjective “need”, but a physical “need” to maintain life.
I’m willing to bet that everyone in here has something that they don’t strictly need, thus we are all rich. It doesn’t matter that someone is making $200,000 a year and someone else is making $20,000 a year. If you have enough clean food and water and a safe place to sleep at every night, then you have it a lot better than the truly “poor” in this country who regularly have neither of these things. (Assuming, of course, that you aren’t getting these things on credit that you can’t pay for)
I make much, much, much less than $200,000 and, at the end of the month, I barely have a penny in my bank account. But I can cancel Netflix and my wife and I can skip our bi-weekly “out of the house” dinner and pay that money in taxes if needed. For a person to insist that they can’t give up one or two of life’s finer things for the greater good is simply sickening, no matter your income. For a person who has a higher income to give up more makes perfect sense in that they have more finer things to give up. But, despite that, I am all for raising taxes across the board. Do I agree with everything my taxes are spent on? Hell no. Not by a long shot. But it’s not about me, it is about my country and everyone in it.
(This isn’t to say that I don’t think that wasteful spending shouldn’t be curbed, but I don’t see that ever happening. The argument over what the definition of “rich” is went on for pages by normal people. I don’t see a bunch of politicians agreeing on what is “wasteful” before the sun goes dark.)