Anyone here NOT middle class?

My husband and I had a discussion about this and I was surprised to discover that he considers us to be poor. I look around at our house, two cars, nice stuff and, knowing our annual income, think we are easily middle-class. Hub deals in absolutes, though… you are either rich or poor. To him, we are not rich; therefore, we are poor.

Looking at the most recent U.S. Census figures on income, we are above the median income level for married couple family households nationally. We are considerably above the median household income level for our region.

Wait, what is the established poverty line level? I thought it was $7500K for one person, in which case I would be lower middle class (subdivision college student). Maybe it varies per state?

Well, I found this Census information about poverty for 2007, and I have to admit that for almost all my adult life, I’ve made (or been given) less than that per year, so I do qualify as poor. But seeing that I’m dirty cheap (really), some years I’ve been frugal enough to save enough money for trips to Europe, Puerto Rico, and Brazil. Heck, I could go to any of those places this summer except that I need money to move to GA.

So I was going to say I had been either poor or lower middle class, but turns out I’m just poor. I’m not surprised nor bothered by that, since for what I need it’s been enough most of my life. Yea, I cannot afford many fancy toys, so what? I’m young, I’ll get them someday. And a belly full, a roof over my head, occasional nookie, and a faithful healthy dog is what I most need, over other material things. :slight_smile:

According to this, the per capita income (page 6 of manual, or 14 of PDF document) is about $26K. I would guess the closest you are to that number the closer you’re for “middle class”. There are way, way more pages and info there.

Interesting, I’m poor even for a Hispanic (which I am). Also, starting this July, instead of making $10K and around, I’ll be making triple, thanks to my residency. So I’ll be moving on up to slightly above median income for one person (and roughly double that of Hispanic). I’ll be wealthy! :smiley:

[English Toff ON]Now look here chaps. There’s rich (which some of you Americans certainly are), educated (ditto) and **well mannered ** (have a nice day!).
But none of that makes you Upper Class. :confused:

First of all, you don’t have Royalty. :eek:
(It’s not your fault - I agree that taxation should be accompanied by representation.)
Nevertheless, this means you don’t have Knights, Barons, Earls and Princes - who are definitely Upper Class.
Next you don’t have enough history. (We’ve got buildings twice as old as your country!)
Upper Class is inherited.
Finally you don’t have private schools (confusingly called Public Schools over here).
This is another good indicator of Upper Classness.

So there we have it. Americans are either Middle Class or Lower Class (trailer trash, gang members, rednecks etc).
[English Toff OFF]

It’s hard to argue against a country that has an established date for Time Immemorial. We can’t fight the weight of that much history. :slight_smile:

Between (roughly) 1870 and 1960, the United States had a de facto hereditary aristocracy, and their school system still survives. While our upper class may not be quite as visible as yours, we still have one.

I’m confused by that. Certainly I’ve seen (and even attended two) private schools all around, in all states visited and territory lived (Puerto Rico). Sure they may not be dating back to the 13th century, but I bet most of your public schools over there don’t trace back that far either. :wink:

I guess I’d classify myself as upper middle class. According to 2007 numbers, my family income is a bit more than twice the average for this county. Still, we drive two used vehicles and my need to spend $120 for a new tie-rod end on the van has to be considered and scheduled among our other expenses. I can’t just write a check for anything I feel like.

I have a 27" TV, used furniture, and don’t in any way, feel upper class. Certainly I have very little in common with those Denver citizens on the society page.

I do feel I have some culture… at least a bit more than a common cup of yogurt.

And we have the Greenwich Date Line. :wink:

De facto?! Look, you chaps have an elected President.
Fair enough - but we have a hereditary Monarchy, which gives people titles and makes them Upper Class. :smiley:

I consider myself upper middle class. Barely. “Lower upper middle class” I guess. :slight_smile:

America doesn’t have an upper class. Well, maybe the Boston Brahmins are useless enough to be considered a sort of upper class. Other than that, you have the bourgeoisie with a lot of money, the bourgeoisie with less money, the poor, and the seriously poor. There’s nothing upper class about Bill Gates or Warren Buffet; they’re as middle class as they come.

I’m not poor, so I’m middle class. Middle class with a fair amount of money but no so much that I don’t have to worry about it all the time.

We’ve had this discussion on the board before. Social class isn’t about money. It’s about taste and attitude. (Although without the right income level it’s hard to sustain your pretensions past a single generation.)

Here’s a little story to illustrate: Years ago I worked for a guy who was solidly middle-middle. He owned his own company, but even though he had good income he wasn’t used to the sort of ingrained casual affluence you find in the upper classes.

One of his employees came from old money. She was working as a commercial artist but she really didn’t need to work at all. She was engaged to another upper class trust-fund baby. He was a newly-minted lawyer and it was clear from his family connections that he was destined to go far.

The artist invited some of her closest work friends to her very upper crust country club wedding. I went and felt totally at home – I grew up in an upper middle household and although we weren’t as well off as my artist friend I’d been to similar affairs often enough to know the drill. One of my other friends had grown up in a working-class household and also had a great time – the whole experience was alien to her but she enjoyed the exotic appeal.

My boss however was a nervous wreck. He felt horribly out of place and was terrified he’d make some sort of faux pas. The fact that it was one of his subordinates who had invited him made it even worse. It set off all sorts of middle-middle insecurity alarm bells. Had he spent enough on his gift? Was he using the wrong fork?

The fact is … the upper class people throwing the shindig didn’t give a crap about what fork he used. Obsessing about the minutia of etiquette is a middle class characteristic. But he could sense that he was missing all sorts of little behavioural cues that are second nature if you grow up in that sort of environment. And it made him *very * uncomfortable.

I recommend Paul Fussel’s book Class. It’s a great dissection of the American class system – although unfortunately the various class markers it describe have shifted over the years as fashions have changed.

Sure we do, unless you’re using some definition other than “not run by the government”.

I grew up working class poor for most of my childhood. My mother used food stamps and public assistance to get herself through college, then she left a high paying engineering job to run her own business. My parents worked constantly, spent the night in sleeping bags on the floor of their office, and only took time off work to hunt. I have a farm-loving, factory-working mother who adores solving differential equations. In a way she was poor by choice, but we were definitely poor. I’ve lived in more trailer parks and seen more of that nasty fake wood paneling than I ever want to see again.

At my poorest I was 17, supporting myself, on Medicaid and working as a waitress after school. I was never homeless because I had no shortage of relatives who cared about me, but I was definitely living below poverty level.

8 years later, I can finally say I am middle class. I actually came damn close to owing taxes this year, even with my 0 exemptions. Next year as grad students we’ll have less, but we’ll still be lower middle class.

Sometimes I still think of myself as working class. It’s been a weird adjustment climbing the tax bracket slowly but steadily, knowing one day we might be upper-middle-class. I feel like I’ve experienced virtually every standard of living, from childhood weekends watching my Dad’s girlfriend, a mother of 8, shoot heroine inside her cockroach-infested home to attending black-tie dinner parties at 5 star restaurants in the Mediterranean with my husband’s grandparents. I don’t really feel like I totally fit in with any particular class bracket–in a way I feel classless, because my personal experience transcends all of those stereotypes.

I think class is a lot more than just income.

Bill Gates is really wealthy, for example. But a traditional view of “class” is that you can’t “elevate” yourself from one class to another just by virtue of amassing an enormous fortune.

It used to be nobility (and royalty) and high Church officials (who were, typically also part of the nobility in any case) were the “upper class.” Many of the nobles of the day had vast estates, but weren’t terribly wealthy. Often times they were far less wealthy than the wealthiest merchants, but no amount of wealth could blur the class barrier, the merchants and bankers, despite being fabulously wealthy, couldn’t change their heredity.

It used to be you could become part of the upper class if you were given a title, something that was typically not easy (although by the 19th century in many countries you could in fact, buy yourself into the nobility), but even then it only really meant something if you were given a hereditary title that passed on to your heirs. And then, they would be viewed as "lesser’ than other nobles with longer lineages.

I think you can make the jump from “low class” or “working class” to “middle class”, through amassing wealth, education et cetera. But I don’t think it’s that easy to get into the upper class.

For example, George Bush is definitely upper class. While we don’t have a nobility in America, we do have powerful families, both wealthy and politically connected, whose ancestry traces back to generation upon generation of wealthy and powerful persons. The Bush family is easily an example of such a family. The Rockefellers, the Astors, et cetera would also fall into that category.

Bill Gates is wealthy and successful because of the business he started and ran for many years. George Bush is wealthy and successful because of who his father was, even if George W. had never been elected President, he would still be wealthy and successful because of his father. And HIS father was wealthy and successful because of HIS father.

The Kennedys were sort of the same way, too. Even Joe Kennedy went to Harvard (the image of him as a self-made man is a bit different from the truth.)

As mentioned, it’s a mistake to tie social class to income.

Back in the middle ages, you were either a commoner or a nobleman. Nobles were rich, commoners were poor. But wealth didn’t mean what it means now, because the only method of generating wealth was to skim the commoners. You had lands, the commoners worked the lands, and gave you a cut in return for you not lopping off their heads with a sword. Being a nobleman wasn’t about wealth, it was about military status. A nobleman was a person who was a full time warrior. And his job wasn’t primarily about lopping the heads off commoners, because it was generally futile for a commoner who had to work for a living to challenge a nobleman, but rather fighting other nobles over who had the right to steal from which commoners.

Now, the feudal system lasted a while, but an interesting thing started to happen. Certain commoners started to amass wealth, except NOT at the point of a sword. They traded, or made stuff, or somehow mysteriously cheated their way into wealth. It wasn’t honest, like how noblemen attained wealth (by stealing), or how peasants attained wealth (by backbreaking agricultural labor), it was low, it was petty, it was grasping, it was cheating. These people were the new “middle class”. They weren’t peasants, but they weren’t nobles, they were something else.

Eventually, more and more peasants left the agricultural work force, and became proletarians, or working class. That is, people who owned no land or property, and lived hand to mouth as industrial workers. So a shopkeeper would be middle class, a teacher would be middle class, a professional like a doctor or lawyer would be middle class, but a guy who worked in a factory is working class.

But the distinction between the merely wealth bourgeois and the upper class has pretty much disappeared. Back before the civil war, there could still be a feeling that a man whose wealth came from owning a plantation was somehow superior to an equally wealthy man who owned a factory or engaged in trade. But that’s pretty much gone, even in Europe. The upper tier of the middle class merged with and/or absorbed the old upper class. The old upper class values and virtues were totally replaced by bourgeois values and virtues. Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Sam Walton, and Warren Buffet aren’t aristocrats despite being among the richest people in the world.

The biggest distinction between upper middle class and “rich” is that upper middle class people work for a living, while the rich own and manage property. But this is kind of an arbitrary distinction. Bill Gates certainly worked at Microsoft, he didn’t just sit back and collect dividends. There are plenty of “old money” people who work. And calling an executive who manages a company but doesn’t own it “middle class”, while the owner is “rich” is arbitrary, especially since so many businesses aren’t owned by one guy, but are publicly traded. So that hired manager doesn’t work for a rich guy, more typically he works for thousands of stockholders who are almost all less wealthy than he is.

And of course, the old distinction between the peasantry and the middle class is meaningless as well. Even migrant farm workers aren’t peasants, although they might have been peasants in their home country. So the only meaningful distinction would be between working class/proletarians and middle class. But that’s kind of slippery too. Is there a meaningful distinction between poor and working class, and between working class and middle class? A guy who works at McDonalds is working class, but so is the “assistant manager”. And the actual manager of that McDonalds isn’t exactly rich, and the owner probably isn’t either. It used to be that if you owned a business or were a professional you were middle class, if you worked at that business you were working class. But is the guy who owns a carpet cleaning business middle class? Just because he owns the vacuum and has a business licence, he’s suddenly leveled up? Is there a class difference between the guy who works at the car wash, and the guy who works at the car wash for twenty years and then buys a car wash? Because the reality is that many business owners don’t have a positive net worth…they took out a loan to buy that crappy business, and might take years and years to pay it all off, if ever.

I’d consider myself working class, blue collar. I have some college but no degree, come from a family of high school grads (my Dad worked in banking his whole career and did quite well without a degree), two siblings have 2 yr. degrees. Except for a six year stint in an office, I’ve worked labor type jobs.

Oh, they’re out there. They just don’t parade themselves in front of the middle class.

My wife went to Smith with a lot of girls from old money, east coast families. She got to observe the American upper class up close for four years. (For example, one of her college friends was heir to the 3M fortune.) They have their houses on Cape Cod and their boardrooms in Manhattan and a tremendous amount of wealth and power.

I should have said that a true Upper Class School includes boarding! Here are some early ones:

Kings, Canterbury 597

Kings, Rochester 604

Wells 909

Warwick 914

Salisbury 1091

St Pauls 1123

Camp Hill 1382

Eton 1440

King Edward VI, Stratford, 1482

King Edward VI, Bury St. Edmunds, 1550

Interesting - but, as I said, rich does not equal Upper Class. :slight_smile:
Is Bill Gates upper class?