As did I.
Nah. Upper middle through and through. He works too hard to be upper.
His kids will probably be upper if he sends them to the right schools.
British notions of aristocracy don’t apply over here. You’re welcome to disagree, of course, but we’re not going to be convinced. For the record, we do have boarding schools as well (Exeter, St. Paul’s, Madeira, etc.).
IIRC, there are some boarding schools in existance in the US.
Most of the rest of your post is coherent and cannot be debated (US doesn’t have royalty).
That one is just silly. 
I definitely have a poverty rating. Get seriously ill and wallah there you go.
I think I sort of said that. I left out NYC old money, though. It’s hard to draw a line, oftentimes, too. We people down here in the ditch can have a hard time telling the really rich from the upper class. Are the Rockefellers upper class? I don’t think so. They just made a bunch of money off industry. Same for the Vanderbilts and DuPonts. No one in their right mind would consider the Fords upper class. The Lodges, on the other hand, certainly are.
The Census divides people into brackets, which the NYT and other sources segregate into quintiles based on dollar amount (not on how many are in that range). Wiki article using census info (since census is linked to).
QUINTILES (lowest income [1st] to highest [5th]) with average household income range and percentage of individuals and percentage of households in that range. The final number is the percentage of households and individuals UNDER the bottom number of that rung.
1st Quintile (Lower Class):
$25,000 and less
28% of households
35% of individuals
2nd Quintile (Lower Middle):
25K to 50K
23% of households (28% under)
36% of individuals (35% under)
3rd (Middle Class):
50K-75K (51% under)
18% of households (51% under)
16% of individuals (71% under)
4th (Upper Middle Class):
75k-100k
11% of households (69% under)
6% of individuals (87% under)
5th (Upper Middle Class):
100K+
17% of households (80% under)
7% of individuals (93% under)
There’s an error of about 3% somewhere in the above regarding household income percentages (probably my error in copying).
Anyway, personally, I live in a household of one and I fall into the 2nd bracket most years, which means I’m somewhere between the 35 percentile ($25,000 and under) and the 71 percentile ($50,000 and over) for individuals, thus I’m middle class. (I’ve been in all 5 quintiles (though the fifth quintile was only one year, “by the skin of my teeth”, and even then “on paper only”.)
I’m currently “lower middle” by household income and “middle middle” by individual income.
We had a pretty good thread a while ago about how and why you shouldn’t ask people how much money they have. From what I remember the concensus is that you could trigger lots of competitiveness and piss people off if you let them know you have a lot of money.
So I guess no one is going to stand up and say “I’m rich!”
Also, as pbbth said, it’s all relative anyway.
By that standard Bessie, our Labrador retriever is Upper Class (she gets boarding when we’re away, and she was first in her class (obedience school)).
Being so high-toned, why she tolerates us is a mystery. 
I went to a U.S. private boarding school that was founded in 1799. I definitely have an Upper Class education, but my family isn’t rich.
If you want to put a different sort of spin on things, try to figure out how Karl Marx would have characterized our current society. If the bourgeoisie “own the means of production” then you’d probably have to sit on the Board of Directors of a large corporation to be in that group. Owning a small business would make you petit-bourgeois, I guess, and everyone else is a proletarian.
Of course there are. There are several in my state alone. When I worked in the area I actively dislike the Phillips Exeter Academy brats because they’d dart into traffic instead of deigning to use the crosswalks. Driving by Phillips Academy Andover this weekend was a nice surprise, however, since those kids actually used their crosswalks.
I always thought that a good test for the middle class was the mortgage test–if you could get a mortgage to buy an average house but couldn’t buy that house without one.
My income is in the top 10% nationwide (it just makes it, I think), but I would still call myself upper middle class. I have a mortgage, and I couldn’t have bought my house without it, but I don’t worry much about being able to pay it month by month.
Although last year I was solidly middle class at the moment I am watch-every-penny poor. So, officially, I am one of the non-middles.
(I am hoping that changes soon)
Ah, see, we make so little that we qualify for State Aid for health insurance (a partial reimbursement of our premiums - it’s a private policy), my kid gets reduced price (but not free) lunches at school. We have trimmed down to 1 used car, 'though we owned two used cars for a number of years. $120 would worry me without warning (although I dropped that at Target today on god knows what), we also have a 27" TV and used furniture. We rent, not own, because we can’t afford a down payment OR the kind of money I need to have in the bank to feel safe if the furnace goes or the dryer breaks. So it sounds like we’re living similar lifestyles on drastically different budgets.
According to Sampiro’s numbers, we’re Lower Middle class in income. But thanks to very generous relatives and the fact that we have nothing - NOTHING - saved in the bank and only about $9000 in gifts and about $2500 in income invested, we approximate a “middle class lifestyle”, with the large exception of not owning a home.
Actually, this chart from the wiki article is probably a better gauge. It’s the nation divided into quintiles by size rather than by income range. Each quintile represents 22,629,000 households of a total of 113,146,000 households in the U.S.A., thus each quintile equals 1/5 (20%) of the population by household. First = bottom quintile and Fifth = top quintile.
First
<18,500
Second
$18500-$34737
Third
$34,738- $55,331
Fourth
$55,331- $88,030
Fifth
$88,030+
Of the Fifth quintile, 3/4 earn between $88,030-$157,175 per year and the top 1/4 (5% of the nation) have a household income of $157,176 and higher.
I’m still in the third quintile, so pretty dead-even/mean/median middle class.
The top 1% of households had, in 2001, income of $355,000+ per year; I’m sure there are more recent statistics out there but I couldn’t find them. I do know from several sources that not just numerically but percentagewise the top 5% of incomes are the fastest increasing.
The above data all around is surprising as I would have thought there were far more $150k per year households in the U.S.; I hardly move in ritzy circles and the vast majority of my friends are in my rough socioeconomic demos, but way more than 1% of the people I’ve known have had six figure incomes (both of my siblings, lots and lots of my co-workers in academia [the dean of libraries at my previous job had a $200,000 salary, most of the deans I’ve worked for were at least breaking $100k).
What’s alarming is that I’m almost on the fulcrum, meaning that about half of Americans earn more than me and about half earn less- and I know how many times I’ve just gotten by, and I only support myself. (Admittedly I piss away more money than I should, but I don’t jet off to Paris or have a heroin habit or drive a car that costs more than I make in a year or anything like.) Also, I am assuming this is gross income and not take-home pay of course, which makes this scarier for after taxes/insurance/SS/401k/other deductions most of us live on under 75% of what we earn.
Watching shows like Suze Orman where people routinely call in with “yeah, me and my husband are 50 and 45 years old and we have $300K in retirement and a $205,000 equity and were wondering…” only to hear “NO! YOU CAN’T REDECORATE THE KITCHEN!” always makes me feel “damn… does everybody out there have $500,000 more than I have in retirement and net worth?”
But then I remember that poor folks and median/middle class folks don’t call in because they/we dont’ have money to invest or consider redecorating the kitchen with, “and then I don’t feeeeeeeeeel… so baddddddd”.
PS to the above along the lines of the Disraeli attributed “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics” quote: that is all Americans in general. Break American households down by race/ethnicity, by size of family, by age/gender of the head of household, etc. (and you can pretty much break it down “into households headed by Asian-Hispanic lesbian couples over 60 living in Guam” on census.gov if you know the buttons to push) and you have totally different data. Whites, not surprisingly, still earn substantially more than blacks when broken into quintiles (though there are more whites on government assistance numerically) and men still earn more on average than women and those with college degrees still earn more than those who never finished high school, etc… (I’m actually lower class, for example, if you limit my demographics to white males with graduate degrees, or cruising into upper middle class if you limit it to Alabamians over 40.)
State with highest average household income is, surprisingly, New Jersey: $66,752. (I’d have thought Connecticut [due to wealthy metro NYC suburbanites] or Virginia [due to wealthy metro DC suburbanites].)Mississippi is, not surprisingly, lowest: $34,340. (For history buffs, it’s interesting to note that in the 1860 Census, Mississippi was the only state in the Union where the majority of white people came from slaveowning families- about 55%- you could probably do lots with that figure and their current status.) I’m slightly above average incomewise for my own state (Alabama), though probably moreso when considered I’m my only dependent since I stopped using those Cabbage Patch birth certificates.
I am probably, just barely by the tip of my toe, edging into upper. Two person household with no dependents and no debts other than one 2/5 paid mortgage, collective income over 100K, and anticipated inheritances, and retirement accounts over 100K. Or would real upper-folk laugh their heads off? I really don’t know. I don’t feel like I belong with the folk who draw down 770 million per annum but I’m also a long ways off from the privations of 22.5K with four dependents.
No one wants to say “yowza, I made it into top” and then be told “not even, your networth would not pay our butler’s salary for two days”.
Post-EDITwindow Edit:
It seems like an almost obscene amount of income to me. Not that I object, mind you, but I’m pulling more than 3x what I was making as an entry level professioanl, and around 7x what I ever made prior to my first professional job. And while I enjoy what I do more than I enjoyed what I did in nonprof employment settings, I’m not working harder, it feels like 90% sheer happenstance that I’m here and not still there, I certainly did not get smarter or start to work any harder, and not one smidgen of my education has any bearing on what I do now as opposed to what I could have done then. Just luck.
The McKnight money isn’t nearly old enough, they’ve only had it about three generations. Not to mention it was earned by a guy from South Dakota in Minnesota. Not exactly the Astors. Remember that the Vanderbilts and Carnagies were shunned - their money was “too new.”
I only say that because it gets to what glee is getting at. There is wealthy, and there is upper class - the upper class have a privileged club - in England its controlled by how closely you are related to whom (and how many whoms for how far back). In the U.S. it has more to do with how long you have had your money and when - and if - that money was ever deemed acceptable by those that control the lists - being rich isn’t enough to get you a membership to Augusta.
In both places having money now is not required, it is enough to have had money in the past - if your family line is good enough - or you’ve managed to gain admittance to the closed circle in some other form (marrying into it, or being Truman Capote).
I knew a McKnight or two growing up, and I don’t think the ones I knew saw themselves as upper class. They wouldn’t argue with you that they were rich - but they (the ones I knew who lived out near White Bear, Minnesota still) hung with middle class people and had middle class sensibilities.
Never have been there (middle class) and very likely will never get within hailing distance of there.
I was brought up very prole -= although, since both of our parents had jobs (coal miner and public-school teacher), my brother and me had it better than a lot of other kids where we lived.
Since I turned 18 I have generally been something close to flat-out poor, including bouts of SRO-living and the thrilling, fascinating :dubious: and educational experience of homelessness more than once. What employment I’ve had has always been of the marginal and evanescent sort.
At present, between me and my boyfriend (who has a pretty decent 9-to-5, as such things go) we are managing a certain value of comfort – we have a roof over our heads, albeit a small apartment in a run-down building, and we live in an interesting, non-stuffy 'hood in which gentrification has not been proceeding as smoothly as Mayor Gruesome and his supporters would like it to. We eat decent food, drink good booze, keep our pets well, take in the odd movie or museum, and even manage to get high and see a live rock’n’roll show every now and then 
.
I mean, really, what the hell else do you need? 