People I know all over the country shit that my rent is more than a thousand dollars for what I have had here in the SF Bay, when my dad just bought a foreclosed house in Houston for $50K.
What exactly is the point of this? Yes, location matters.
Is there some reason SDMB hasn’t added a “like” button yet? 
You said , “their concerns are typically middle-class - housing, education for their kids, retirement savings. The difference is the ease of meeting these burdens.” You say this as if rich people don’t have the same concerns. Those are always concerns and they are not all that different from yours or mine. Concern is not solely limited to the ability to write a check. That’s where I think your thinking is flawed. You somehow think that having fewer financial constraints means finances don’t become an issue. That’s not true in the vast majority of circumstances. Your financial obligations just grow along side your income. Yes, you may reach a point where that is not the case, but even people in those situations don’t feel that way (eg. Howard Stern).
More importantly, the standard is competence, not excellence. Anybody making 200k/year can afford to have their kids in schools good enough that they don’t really need to worry about their education. That’s the point. The real difference is between insufficient and sufficient, not really good and great.
Not everyone . . . but expensive real estate (driven up by high incomes of the upper class) doesn’t mean that you’re suddenly just an average, middle class Joe. If houses in places you want to live cost $800k, it’s because there are enough rich people who want to live there who can afford to pay what for a sizable percentage of the population is more than 1/2 their lifetime, pre-tax earnings. That’s rich.
Not everywhere, but some places, perhaps. Using home ownership as a marker for class is problematic, because the value of property varies dramatically depending on its location. Saying, “earning enough to buy a home at whatever location a person wants to live, and not in too slummy a neighborhood either, makes a person middle class,” is just as useful as saying, “earning enough money to eat whatever a person wants for dinner makes a person middle class.” What if I want to eat lobster every night? If I spring for lobster every night and barely scrape by at the end of the year, am I middle class? What if I’m happy with rice and beans every night, and I end up with a lot of money left at the end of the year? Am I rich then, since I can afford way more than I choose?
The stereotypical ‘middle class,’ 1950s dream is still accessible to the middle class in some locations, but in others it is not. This doesn’t turn the wealthy into the middle class in expensive locations (nor does it turn the middle class into the poor in those locations); it means that the standard for the middle class has shifted.
Fair enough. 
Since these values are all well beyond anything I’ve ever had practical experience with, it’s easy to get carried away.
Wait, how about the free market and competition and all that?
I mean, if they’re already charging what the market will bear for their products, they can’t pass on additional costs without losing market share. And if they’re already paying as little as they can get away with for qualified workers, then paying less will hurt their productivity and their bottom line.
Besides, if you’re taxing corporate profits, remember that profits = revenues - expenses. Presumably they’re already maximizing profits, and if you tax profits at a higher rate, it doesn’t lessen the incentive to maximize profits: more profits ==> more after-tax profits, any way you cut it.
Did you know that only about 1/3 of working Americans work for businesses with <50 employees? Now you do. And the fraction of Americans who work at really small businesses (1-5 employees, not counting the self-employed) is probably down in the white noise of our economy. Of course they’re always going to be bellyaching that they shouldn’t be paying more taxes, but in this case, we’re talking corporate taxes. Well, if you’re the proprieter of a really small business, that one’s easy enough to avoid: don’t incorporate.
I guess this is an argument about what a small business is. From your link of 2007 data:
1-50 = 34.1%
51 - 249 = 13.2% (derived)
250+ = 52.7%
I think that having close to half of all jobs at companies with less than 250 employees is a fair amount of jobs out there. I don’t know how you define small business (kind of link the debate on who is middle class going on elsewhere), but I don’t consider my company of around 200 employees to be “big business.”
My sister and her husband live in Toronto with their 2 children on less than $50,000, and they are pretty comfortable. They rent a place, but it is nice and centrally located. They don’t have a car, but there is a great public transportation system there, so they just take a tram to work.
The point is that they have a pretty nice life. Their kids don’t go to special extra-curricular activities, but there are school activities they can join for practically free. Their lack of a car and home-ownership aren’t a major impediment to their lives. They seem and feel middle-class.
But should it? Let me preface all of this by saying that I think we are largely in agreement, but I think some of the problem is that everyone is more aware of luxury than they were in the past. Ferrari has been making car since the 40’s, but it only been recently that people of normal means can identify a model and know its costs. That sort of insight is obviously gonna make some people feel inadequate by comparison, but it doesn’t mean that objective standards have no meaning.
I know. I have a condo on the Petworth/CoHi border near the metro. Great area. I do miss it sometimes.
While I agree with your framing of the issue in general, the term “middle class” has to on some level reflect the reality of people in the middle. If that middle currently cannot afford to save money or respond to emergencies, then that is the new reality. Being above that makes you a defacto member of the upper class. Even if that title does not have the privilege it once had, it is still relatively enviable.
Well said.
A slight hijack but it already came up in this thread. Agent Violet said the more they pay in taxes, the less they have to pay their employees. But they don’t pay taxes on their gross revenue, they pay it on their profit. They are taxed on what they have left AFTER they pay their employees.
I’m sure I’m missing a detail somewhere. I see how regulations that add to the cost but can’t be passed to customers could be an issue, but not taxes.
Take a look at if from a reverse perspective. For a wealthy person, financial issues don’t have to be solved by writing a check, they can be solved by NOT writing a check. Expenses are too high, you make an effort to stop spending so much, own a cheaper car, own a cheaper house, use public school, take a cheaper vacation, etc. Those who are not wealthy cannot do this nearly as well, the cheaper car is an unreliable POS, the cheaper home is an apartment too small for your family, the cheaper vacation/school is nonexistent because you weren’t spending money on that in the first place.
Your financial obligations only grow when you choose to take on additional obligations.
Has that figure that the top 20% of the Americans controls roughly 80% of the wealth in the country just not gotten through to you? Why WOULDN’T we go after them for taxes? They have almost all of the money! In fact:
From the cite quoted above. Let’s tax the guys who own everything, not working stiffs struggling to get by.
Your anecdote appears to support my point - your sister and husband indeed cannot afford a house and a car (or at least, they don’t have them). They do not have extra-curricular activities for their kids. That they “have a pretty nice life” I do not doubt … but what does that have to do with what social class they are? Not all lower class people live miserably, and not all upper class people live well.
All those houses, cars, and other material goods will not grant anyone a “nice life” and their lack will not prevent anyone from enjoying a “nice life” (though to be sure, having money is easier than not having money).
My point is that if owning a car and a house is suddenly the indicia of the “rich”, we have effectively moved the definition of the term. What used to be solidly “middle class” is now being defined as “rich”.
I do not believe you know what you are talking about.
A few years ago, my wife and I simultaneously went through some job hell that knocked us right into the poverty zone for a time. She was working a job that paid about the same as the top rate for unemployment here and there were NO benefits. Especially no medical benefits. I was working at Target doing entry level stuff at even lower wages while I searched for better work. Target offered a medical benefit program but it cost more than I made. Literally, I would have brought no money home if I had taken insurance.
We had to do things like sit down one week and figure out if we were gonna pay for food or medicine cause we could not afford both.
Understand, we had income. We could just barely pay our bills, but any little upsetting of our boat, like an unexpected car repair, and we were screwed.
We’re doing much better now. We are not anywhere near the 200,000 mark or even the 100,000 mark, but we can pay our bills and handle adversity. We have not had any of those horrible “WTF are we gonna do?” moments that used to come up every so often.
If you’re making $150,000 and you do not think you are wealthy, I have to believe you are really, really, really out of touch. And you ought to be damn glad you are. America is not a happy place for a lot of people.
One problem with this analysis is that one’s income is often tied to where one lives. The big salaries are in the big cities. In Toronto, $800K isn’t outrageous for housing, but you cannot effectively take your $200K salary and simply decide to live in a small town, because you have to live within communting distance of a place like Toronto to earn it.
It seems meaningless to me to say ‘well, you have enough money to live like a rich person in Bancroft, Ontario, and that makes you effectively rich - why, you could if you chose live in a student basement apartment like my wife’s cousin, who raised three happy children in one, and save all your money, then you’d be rich, rich I tells you!’.
The really, truly rich can live rich without such strategems; moreover, and this is the real point, you can’t really get really, truly rich through wage-earning unless you are a famous actor or sports star. Being rich is a difference in kind of earning, not simply amount alone.
When I was earning a bare living, I would have thought as you do - that $200K is an unimaginable amount, luxury beyond dreams. But it really isn’t. Now I’ve met actual, truly rich people through work, and I know the difference.
Sure. But the thing is, lots of people in Toronto only make $50K, and still manage to find somewhere to live close enough to the city to work there.
I don’t think anyone here has said that. What they’ve said is that it’s more than four times the average household income, which makes you better off than approximately 97% of the population, WHICH MAKES YOU RICH.
Because you can’t factor the cost of taxes on your profits into your pre-tax revenues at ALL. 
Well there you go. Progressive taxation is nothing more than class warfare disguised as a benevolent act of punishing the “rich” for the poors so the politicians can address what is perceived as some sort of injustice being done. A poor man is only poor because the rich man stole from him. Thus he needs to be taxed for this theft of wealth.
Who cares who controls what? If Bill Gates gets taxed 10% more does that mean your slice of the pie is 10% more? You’re getting 1/8th of a table leg at best. So why does it matter since your slice of the potential tax pie amounts to virtually nothing?
Yes. But so what? That doesn’t thereby imply that those who can afford a house and a car are “rich”.
EVEN PUTTING IT IN ALL CAPS doesn’t make an argument based on simple assertion any more convincing.
Why 3% rather than, say, the top 10%? Are the top 10% not better off than 90% of people out there? WHY AREN’T THEY ALL “RICH”?
Point here is that any amount you choose by this method is simply arbitrary. That’s why a “functional” and “class-based” definition is to be preferred over simply grabbing a figure and declaring it as self-evidently “rich”.
Sure. You wanna argue for raising taxes on the top 10% I’ll back you up on that.
This thread is about income tax. A figure may be arbitrary, but it’s very measurable. I don’t think that they can tax you based on your perceived social standing.
For as long as I can remember* owning a house was a pretty good definition of glargleflargel.
*Born in '63.
The “middle class” are renters, they just have 30 year leases they can’t break and call their “landlords” mortgage companies and banks.
CMC fnord!
It reads as though people are getting too hung up on the use of the words “rich” and “upper class.” Americans are strongly culturally averse to using these terms to describe themselves.
Rather than worry about what’s “rich” or “truly rich” and what’s “upper middle class” vs. “upper class,” it might be more useful to determine what sort of incomes can afford to pay, say 3% more in their upper marginal rate.
So can someone earning $250,000/year afford to pay an additional $1,500 in taxes (not an actual tax rate, just randomly imagining a 3% marginal rate increase on incomes over $200,000/yr) and can someone earning $201,000/year afford to pay an additional $30 in taxes?
Where does it start to get silly? Is it just as reasonable to expect someone earning $18,000/year to pay an additional, say $60 tax, on the $16,000-$18,000 margin on their income?