Cite for the Hillary statement. If you want to nitpick the difference between being rich, being truly well-off, and having $100 million, go ahead.
Regards,
Shodan
I don’t see any “elitism”. It’s a question of definitions and perceptions. The term “middle class” in its most common usage doesn’t mean “middle or median income” but more typically refers to a set of assumptions about lifestyle. It’s entirely plausible to suppose that many people, regardless of their own income level, imagine that a much large number of Americans are in that class than there actually are, and TV ads and mawkish sitcoms tend to perpetuate the stereotype.
Bill Maher recently quoted a calculation of what it would take to support a couple with two children in what we would commonly regard as a “middle class” lifestyle. I don’t remember the precise details but the general idea was living in an ordinary mortgaged house in a decent neighborhood, having the usual suburban amenities, being able to send the kids to college, and taking one non-extravagant family vacation once a year. I think the income came out to something like $140K. If one is attuned to this reality, then it may indeed be surprising that the median household income is much less than half of that, especially when it’s common for both partners to be working. One can be surprised about this even if one is personally living in a cardboard box. It has nothing to do with elitism, but rather with beliefs about the prevalence of the stereotypical middle class.
So I guess her point was she doesn’t pay capital gains tax or have off-shore accounts? Not sure.
I disagree about those in the cardboard boxes, to say the least.
Being surprised by the realities of median-and-below life in the country–not being able to imagine how people get by on a median income or less, literally more than half of one’s own countrymen–is dramatically privileged, sheltered ignorance.
Yes, such privileged, sheltered people exist. All I’m saying is that I don’t believe that NPR listeners are in any way representative of them. To understand how the median household income figures in the scheme of things one need only have some general grasp of the middle class cost of living for a typical family with children.
But here’s an example of one of these uncomprehending privileged types – and I guarantee he’s not an NPR listener! …
President George W. Bush supposedly said, at one point in his campaign three years ago, that he “didn’t understand how poor people think.”
So according to the New York Times, he asked for the help of the Rev. Jim Wallis, who was director of Call to Renewal, a group of churches that fight poverty. At the time, Bush described himself as a “white Republican guy who doesn’t get it.” And he wanted to “get it.”
Wallis was initially taken with Bush’s “compassionate conservative” views, particularly the proposal to provide federal funding for faith-based programs. Wallis now labels Bush a failure.
What did he expect? Did he think that Bush, after serving up a few bowls of soup at a homeless shelter, would immediately understand the utter hopelessness that comes with being what my mother described as dirt poor? Bush will NEVER understand what it means to be poor.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/972106/posts
True - but being “middle class” in North America may well be a “dramatically privileged” existence. Depending again on how you define it, it is an existence well out of reach of half the country’s population.
Why not? Isn’t Bernstein’s “lot of people” overlapping with that set? Isn’t that why he put it in that familiar way?
You’re confused. One should be perfectly capable – regardless of one’s one particular situation – of recognizing that the median income is nowhere near enough to support a young family with two children who would need damn close to three times that amount to live a reasonably comfortable middle class lifestyle. I certainly recognize that, and I am by no means some rich old fart who is out of touch!
Someone is confused. That seems to barely relate to anything I’ve said here. (Also, I disagree.)
Ugh, they are on a roll now. I have been a sustaining member (five dollars a month, which is not insignificant for our family) for years now. But I’m really starting to wonder if they are even for people like me any more. Check out these two stories, which came out since my OP:
$140K kitchen renovation? :eek: And you can listen to that whole story, and it is not treated like this is a “lifestyles of the rich” type deal at all. I honestly wouldn’t mind a story about a tech billionaire and his crazy tricked out mansion, or a little detail like this in a story about a sports star. But this is just supposed to be some regular American family, getting their house fixed up. What on earth?
So if you own three or four car dealerships, you can arguably be “middle income” without the notion being laughed out of the room? What about someone with only one car dealership? They are just slumming or what?
I’m surprised in the other direction, too. Admittedly, my perceptions are colored by playing the Game of Life as a kid, at a time when the game listed a doctor or lawyer as making $50k. But even so, I’m reasonably certain that my household’s income has never been that high, and none of my circle of friends had significantly more in the way of luxury than we did.
And I can certainly empathize about a poorly-designed kitchen, since we had one, too. But for us, “renovation” meant finding a cheap slab of particle board, scrounging for the formica to cover it, and doing all of the grunt work ourselves (which still left us with a poorly-designed kitchen, because there’s no room for the other appliances in the room with the kitchen sink, and there’s no way we’re going to redo the plumbing).
I can relate!
NPR will do pitying stories about very poor people who are homeless or on the edge of it. And they will kind of examine “blue collar” voters. But college educated folks who are public school teachers or social workers with modest incomes seem not to be on their radar, despite there being millions of such people, whom I used to think of as their core listener base!
If Bill Maher thinks you need $140K a year to be comfortably middle class, then Bill Maher is an elitist idiot. I mean, come on.
Regards,
Shodan
I suspect it has to do with welfare, which is skewing the numbers.
Many people are on various forms of social assistance, and all these people are technically below the median income. If you limited the measurement to people whose income is actual earned income I bet $50K would be a lot lower than the median income.
But most people don’t think of that when confronted with the stat, hence the surprise.
I heard those stories also and was similarly baffled. I’m well into middle-class, and my recent full kitchen renovation was 20K and we considered that a splurge without any cheap compromises. It sounded like similar ridiculousness as House Hunters, with young couples wringing their hands over that “800K starter home” stretching their budget because they might have to paint a couple of rooms themselves.
I agree that NPR seems now to be targeting high-end incomes, and the stories about poverty or working class come from an elitist ‘isn’t that quaint’ slant.
I agree that a 120K kitchen reno is absurdly high-end, but house prices vary to an extreme depending on the market - what seems reasonable in one place can seem like a ridiculous extravagance somewhere else.
In my city, for example, the average house price for a detached house was $1.28 million in May (the average for any house was $782K). Admittedly in Canadian dollars, but still.
CityNews | Local News | Top Stories
This has significant implications for the amount necessary to live a “middle class lifestyle”, which to many people means owning a detached house.
It could well be that those wondering how anyone can raise a “middle class” family on “only” $140K live in such an area, where the extreme housing costs are prevalent.
Americans do not have a clue as to what Middle Class is, nor do they know how much the cost of living varies across the country. This is not their fault, it is simply based on their experience. When I lived in a small midwestern farm town, owning (no payments) a functioning used car without any cosmetic problems put me in the upper echelon. Being able to fill up the tank as needed made me rich. I felt that the truly rich guy was the one who was President of the local S&L.
When I moved to California’s Bay Area - I started to learn what real money was.
But we all think we are Middle Class:
Well, to be fair, it makes sense that if living costs vary to an extreme across the country, so does the amount of money that falls within “middle class”.
To most people, “middle class” means living a middle class lifestyle - the parents have some sort of job, in which they earn a salary; they own a car; and they live in a house (probably detached, 3 bedrooms) with a yard; they have a couple of kids.
The amount of money this represents varies hugely from place to place, but it doesn’t make sense, I submit, to insist (using a Canadian example) that someone owning a detached house, working a job with a salary, owning a car, having a couple of kids in Toronto isn’t really “middle class”, because his or her income falls within the top 10%; it just takes a whole lot more to live that lifestyle there. Someone living the exact same lifestyle in (say) a small town in Nova Scotia could earn a whole lot less, and still maintain it.
I don’t know nothing about no middle class, but my middle name is Class. Comes right between No and Bum.
People exaggerate this though, or kind of elide some of the nuances of it. I lived in the NYC metro in the late '90s, and there were tons of people making six bucks an hour, shopping at inexpensive grocery stores that smelled atrocious, drinking at bars where Bud on tap was 90 cents a glass, and buying super cheap takeout from Chinese or Dominican holes in the wall where no one spoke English. But these are the people Barbara Ehrenreich has called “invisible”, and the people in that metro area who think of themselves as “middle class” believe you can’t get housing for less than $______ because the neighborhoods those millions of low income people live in are just not even considered an option.