Obviously Rand Rover would still be in the top 1%.
Honestly, until now I had thought that the stuff about Romney being out of touch with ordinary folk was basically populist rhetoric as usually employed by left wing parties (the British equivalent is not knowing what the price of a pint of milk is) against their right wing opponent.
But this is cartoonishly bad. How can anyone honestly think that such amounts of moolah are middle income? I wouldn’t think that even 10% of other super rich people actually think this way - certainly I bet Buffet could tell you the median American wage to within a thousand dollars. Even Mr Burns would have a better idea. I am completely incapable of understanding the kind of incompetence implied by these remarks in a presidential candidate.
This basically says that not only has he lived an insanely privileged life (usually, frankly, a good thing in a political candidate) but he hasn’t even a theoretical understanding of how normal people live. He’ll be suggesting everyone eat brioche next.
I mean, I can see saying something like 200k give or take doesn’t make you “rich”, particularly if you have a large family and or live in a pricey city. But Jesus Christ on a cracker Mitt.
Yes according to Romney’s statement we learned a few things:
If you make $100,000 per year you are not middle income. (Hence the “no” part of his answer)
If you make up to $200,000 possibly up to $250,000, you are a middle income earner. Anything above that range you are DEFINITELY above middle income earning level… so, upper class I guess.
Evidently, the boundary between middle and low income earners is somewhere between $100K and $200K. So essentially he was implying that virtually all Americans are low income earners.
This is a man who suggested that young people who needed money to start a business should borrow it from their parents, and whose wife related that when they started out in their first home, they were using an ironing board as a table for a while, as a way of suggesting that they “got it”, they knew what it was like to struggle.
No, they don’t get it. And every time he opens his mouth, there’s another small reminder of that.
He meant to say that “middle class” is $250k and lower, which is consistent with Obama’s “middle class” tax cut concept.
What he actually said was that people making $100k were NOT middle class. That’s how the language works. When someone asks “Is $100k middle class?” and you say “No.”, you’re saying that $100k is not middle class.
People still bring up Obama’s 57 state thing, so Romney gets to eat the fallout from his misstatements, too. Trouble is, he’s getting more than enough shit from the things he means to say.
Please explain it to us. Explain it to us at a level that we stupid lazy working class people can understand it.
Are individuals or households that earn $250,000 each year middle income?
Are individuals or households that earn $250,000 or less each year middle income?
If the second is true then the answer to Steph’s question about $100,000 would be “yes” but Romney answered “no”.
Of course neither is true, but don’t let that stop you from nitpicking about the or less.
It’s yet another confusing statement from a candidate running on his economic credentials that can’t seem to answer economic questions in even the barest detail.
I’d like to know what Mitt would say about the actual median income in the US. Apparently that’s not even close to his concept of middle class. I just did a quick search and it looks like it’s reported in many different ways – by state, by indiidual, by household, by race – but I’m guesing that for the most part it’s under $50,000 per year. Even on that scale, my husband and I are still a little bit on the low side. And yet, I think ALL of the Bush tax cuts should be allowed to expire.
And, his misstatements so often follow a pattern – that of someone who is unfamiliar with even the rudiments of most peoples’ reality. (I concede there is a bit of confirmation bias going on here, but that can’t explain all of it.)
Maybe Mitt was just referring to the middle class of Lake Wobegon.