If someone earning 200k still has to live in a shared home and not own a car, even in Manhattan, then they must have absolutely enormous debts or some sort of expensive addiction.
200k is enough for someone to buy a home in London (mortgaged, not buy it outright) and I’m pretty sure London isn’t cheaper to buy a home in than San Francisco. There are a few areas where 100k wouldn’t get you a mortgage - those are where the super-rich live.
The top 3% in a country definitely are rich. People with huge assets (heh) but no income are also rich. It doesn’t have to be either/or.
And ‘rich’ doesn’t mean ‘filthy stinking rich’ or super-rich. It just means having more money and/or assets than the vast majority of the population. Is someone on 200k as rich as someone on 500k? No, but they’re a hell of a lot better off than someone on 50k.
A lot of people have been saying that $200k/year is’nt much in certain places. In fact, you’re hard pressed to buy a home in certain cities on that income.
Really? And what style of living do these people have? What kind of house are they getting? What kind of lunches do they eat? Nice dinners?
Just because they earn their money in Manhattan doesn’t mean they have to live in the 2 million dollar condo and eat at Tavern on the Green three times a month.
$200k/year buys you plenty, no matter the cost. If oyu spend it foolishly, you’re not able to earn interest on savings. If you spend it wisely, choose to live in a modest home, then yeah…you’re rich and getting richer.
I’ve never ever seen one person making $200k/year who dressed in three year old wal-mart clothes and drove a 1992 corolla. And I never will, and you can’t say they’re out there, these poor people scraping by to live on their $200k/year. It’s horse shyte.
I think people making $200K who claim they aren’t rich are just comparing it differently. If you run in the same circles as others with a high income, making $200K comes to seem normal, even low compared to a lot of your neighbors and co-workers. When your friends are taking a 2 month trip to Europe in the summer, your measly 2 weeks at Club Med in Jamaica seems meager in comparison. You compare yourself to the rich families on TV and feel almost poor in comparison. There is no way you could be considered rich!
But I think that just is symbolic of being out of touch with how most people live. Spend a week in a Section 8 apartment, or a small town in the Mississippi Delta, or even in military housing. This is MUCH more normal than even a modest loft in Manhattan or that gated community in a trendy suburb of Chicago.
Have we just decided simply to ignore the board’s motto when it comes to this issue? Has it been decided somewhere down the line that if we state something incorrectly enough times and with enough vehemence it will become true?
Income is not the same as wealth. If you want to ding people for higher taxes simply because they earn more money than you, then just say so. Of course then you’ll have to explain why that’s fair considering that for the most part they worked harder all throughout their school life including elementary school, that they made sacrifices and forewent good times in order to study and prepare themselves for challenging jobs, that they do work that most “average” earners wouldn’t be capable of on their best day, and many have pressures and difficulties to contend with on the job that the average wage slave couldn’t begin to handle.
There are reasons why people who make a lot more money than average do so, and they almost always boil down to a lifetime of hard work, discipline and an ability to deal effectively with the difficult demands of their profession.
And yet even at that, these people couldn’t begin to live the kind of lifestyles of the the truly rich, who could tip $200,000 a year and never feel it. People with above average incomes are just that - people with above average incomes. It’s both unfair and inaccurate to try to redfine that as rich in order to justify taking more of their money so it can be spent on other people who haven’t worked nearly as hard for it as they have.
I get that. It’s totally possible to think that you’re not rich if you can’t jet off to Club Med on a whim, if you’re completely retarded and not sufficiently literate to have read a newspaper in the past few years (or ever, really).
Just FYI to anyone who’s “just making it” on $250K… you’re a moron. Someone you know is supporting a family of four on $35K, and if you can’t figure out how to do that, then you’re not smart enough to justify your salary.
For real? Cite, please. I’m not passing any kind of moral judgment on wealth/riches/being rich, but I refuse to accept the assertion that income somehow reliably and overwhelming tracks with ‘hard work in elementary’ school, or that the rich (wealthy?) do work that the plebes aren’t capable of, or deal with pressures that are beyond the abilities of 97% of the population to handle. It is to laugh.
And, regardless, it’s a red herring. In this battle you’re waging across multiple threads, almost no one is arguing that the rich don’t deserve their money, and certainly no one in this thread is saying it. “Tax the rich” does not equal “they shouldn’t have more money than me.”
And I can’t begin to live the kind of lifestyle that of the truly [insert moniker for the $200k club here], who could drop $2,000 a year on a small vacation or a down payment on a used car without batting an eye. I’m not sure what your point is.
And again, with the “working harder” meme. And again, you’re wrong.
Let me be a contrarian on corporate taxes. I am a liberal who thinks that taxes are much too low. But when you tax corporations, who pays? Certainly not the shareholders or CEO. The customers pay of course. In other words, people pay, not corporations. If corporate taxes were minimized and all the loopholes removed, everyone would be better off. One more thing. High corporate taxes put exports at a disadvantage. And that’s not good either. If I were dictator, I would purge the supreme court (aka the judicial wing of the Republican party) and start over.
You continue to equivocate on the use of the world “rich” in order to make straw man arguments.
It is perfectly clear that those who want to “tax the rich” are referring to proposals to increase income tax rates on high earners. Other interpretions of the phrase, like perhaps raising sales tax rates on those with large savings accounts, or creating a new wealth confiscation tax, are absurd.
You know perfectly well what people are talking about when then propose increasing taxes on the rich: it primarily relates to changing the rates of the top income tax brackets (with some possible references to estate taxes or capital gains taxes). Just because you feign ignorance of what others are talking about doesn’t constitute a valid argument. It would be like me playing stupid if you were making an argument against the “death tax,” while I make facile attempts to disregard your views by narrowly arguing that there is no tax on death, only one on estates.
And what happened to your earlier comment that you didn’t want to turn this thread to GD? You seem obsessed with debating the difference between “has lots of income” and “has lots of assets.”
I find it hard to believe you actually think there are waiters who make 200k/year, even at high end places. Look at this list of the most expensive restaurants in America. Let’s look at one particular case I feel I can personally talk about. At Komi, in Washington, DC, the average bill is $439 per table. Sounds good, right? Except that Komi, like many super high-end places, is not open very much. Almost all of them don’t do lunch, and they are usually not open 7 days a week. Komi is closed 2 days a week, and only open for 4 hours on the days they are open. They usually (I think) have one or two seatings per night (meals are often ~3 hours), and have only a handful of tables. Any given person would only have 1-3 tables at any given time. So even in the unlikely event you have 6 tables per night, 5 nights a week, 52 weeks per year, with a 20% tip on every tab, you will “only” make roughly 137k/year. That’s given some really generous assumptions, and neglecting the fact that those tips will be split with several other people like sommeliers, etc.
Even just looking at some of these high-end places lets you know that many of them simple do not pull in enough money to remain profitable, let alone enough to employ waiters making 200k/year. El Bulli, the recently closed former best restaurant in the world was losing tons of money every year. Here is article about how many Michelin star restaurants are going bankrupt. The money is just not there in the vast majority of circumstances, and if it was, they certainly would not be giving it to waiters considering the market wage is far, far less.
Yeah, but the cites I posted on the 1st page of the thread take tips (presumably unreported tips) into account and don’t use tax filings to calculate the wages of bartenders & wait staff.
Somewhere there must be an upper limit - the highest-income bartender in the country. It’s possible, as you say, that this person makes over $200,000/year, but even the anecdotal evidence in this thread hasn’t produced an example of a waiter or bartender who makes more than $100,000/year. I certainly agree it’s possible someone could earn that much, we just don’t have any evidence it is actually occurring, just the supposition that it’s possible.
Even if we do assume that these $500 per prixe fixe menu places do pay over $200,000/year. How many such waitstaff could exist*? And is it a good idea for the OP to have advocated basing public policy on such few people?
*The Census Bureau Current Population Survey indicates about 2.5 million Americans out of 310 million Americans have incomes (including sources other than wages) over $200,000/year. Only 1 out of every 124 Americans has an income this high. How many of that 2.5 million is waitstaff vs. doctors, lawyers, engineers, stockbrokers, entrepreneurs, engineers, managers, etc…?
I debated whether to put this up or not. It seems like there are two different debates going on, one is whether people making $200k and up should be taxed more, the other is whether people making $200k are rich. On the issue of taxation, I absolutely think they should pay more in taxes. I also think corporate tax law should be rationalized so that corporations pay more in actual taxes. I am a life long Democrat from a pro-labor family.
On the issue of whether $200k a year is rich, all I can say is that my wife and I make a combined income of a little more than that and we don’t feel rich. We both had pretty significant student loans that we had to pay off (my wife is still paying hers off), and we drive a Kia Soul. While I don’t know if I have three year old clothes from Walmart, I can tell you that I have clothes that old from Target that I wear just about every day.
If we were to pay what we paid for our house in some other parts of the country, we would absolutely have a mansion, but here in DC, it bought a fixer upper in a neighborhood that is in no way fancy. In fact, I have seen postings on the SDMB warning people from coming into my neighborhood. I know that compared to national average income $200k is a lot, but when I am walking home from the Metro on streets that still have junkies as some of my neighbors, I don’t feel rich.
I am in no means complaining, but the term rich is subjective and abstract and is by definition arrived at by comparing your experience to other people’s experience.
I have a theory that rich is always a state of being that is roughly two times whatever you make, just like driving too fast is anyone driving faster than yourself.
I can agree with this . . . to me, $50,000 a year would feel ridiculously decadent . . . probably for a year or two, until I got myself saddled with (aka chose) a mortgage, property taxes and upkeep, and a car payment. At which point I’d be dreaming of the extravagances $100,000 a year could bring.
But, you can’t shape public policy this way, and you can’t really define rich this way. Under this definition, no one is ever rich, unless you’re the one guy at the top of the heap.
I think that’s the issue here; whether or not you feel rich has little to do with whether or not you are rich.
You may feel ‘average’ with your fixer-upper in the DC area, but then, what does that make the family bringing in $50k, or $60k? They live in your city too. And are in a completely different socioeconomic class than you.
