So if $200 000 - $250 000 is middle income...

Really? You ask for a cite, then act as if I can’t provide one, in the same post?

Your comments make you out to be an elitist prick. Do you see why?

Seriously, how on earth is this person even in with a sniff of the presidency?

I though Sarah Palin was scary but only in the abstract seeing there was no possible way they’d let her near the hot seat. But Romney? Idiotic *and *electable? He came over the to the UK and made an utter fucking cock of himself and the general reaction was that we all, on all sides of *our *political spectrum looked at each other with silent worried expressions.
None of our political parties even begin to approach the scale of fucknuttery this man is capable of and yet…and yet, he still has a chance?

If this board is left-leaning as it seems to be then I really hope you are all hands to the pump on this one.

Incidentally, if you want to get a little flavour of how income tends to skew self-perception then read this article and some of the comments. It may show how those who earn big simply can’t see themselves as rich.

I’ve probably mentioned this before, but my best friend has a household income that’s got to be over $300,000 and he complains constantly about how he doesn’t understand why the government considers him well off.

They live in a huge house atop a mountain, own two lovely cars that are paid off, and spend money lavishly on whatever they want. There’s a date night to an expensive restaurant on a regular basis and nice vacations every year. He has a coffee machine that costs more than an iPad. When I’m visiting, hardly a day goes by that new frivolous purchases from Amazon don’t show up at the door; I mean, literally, that at least six says in seven they get a package of DVDs, video games, books and what have you that they buy without thinking about it. His collection of Blu-Rays is so vast that half have never even been removed from the plastic wrapper. And his retirement plan is well funded; they are not going into debt to finance all this… He is easily the richest person I know on a truly personal basis.

Honestly, they simply don’t see it. Their wealth is completely invisible to them.

My sister and BIL are somewhere near that level of wealth (of Rick Jay’s friend), but they at least have the good sense to know they’re well off. I don’t know if they’d consider themselves “rich” (we’ve honestly never spoken about it), but they’re certainly not hurting.

Have never heard a word of complaint out of them about tax rates. I don’t think it’s ever come up.

Some numbers. Note that the figures are about 10 years old; if someone has some more recent ones, I’d love to see them.

Anyway, if “middle income” means “$250,000 and below,” then in 2005 “middle income” referred to 98.5% of the US population.

If “middle income” instead means “your household is in the middle quintile,” then we’re talking about a household range of $35,000-$55,000 in 2004 dollars.

You could support seven households at a middle-income level using the amount Romney considers to be middle-income.

I am reminded of a kid from Connecticut I knew when I was 14. He, too, was rich and woefully out of touch. At some point I asked him what he thought the poverty level was; he said, totally seriously, $80,000.

The difference, of course, is that he wasn’t running for president.

$10 says [del]Socrates[/del] Randy doesn’t come back with a viable explanation.

Hell I consider myself well off, and I still have a mile of student debt, car payments, and make much less than $100K per year.

Rich people are insane.

To be fair, I’m solidly in the middle quintile, and I end up feeling strapped for cash a lot, too. I don’t have a good explanation for it beyond the obvious style-to-which-you’ve-become-accustomed.

But because I’m where I am, I don’t begrudge my taxes a bit.

That reminds me of someone I know. She’s a stay at home mom with no job, kids in school all day and a husband who apparently earns about 300k. She’s constantly whining that her life is hard and they pay too much in taxes. She literally gives me the impression she has no idea what to do with all their money. The day after Obama was elected she was sputtering with rage over it.

Here is the full transcript of the interview.

It provides a little more context, but still does not explain the blunder. And it raises even more questions with this statement:

If so-called middle income earners are paying less, and upper income earners are paying the same percent they are now, how can they not have had their taxes lowered, too? And if you close loopholes for them, but don’t change the rate, then don’t they pay more?

His valet puts his pants on him one leg at a time.

Well done. 8.5. :slight_smile:

Your sub-$10,000 bets don’t belong in Romney threads, peasant!

That reminds me of a car dealer I know who’ll just randomly, while out playing golf, bet 10K or 20K on the next stroke or hole.

He can afford to do this, more or less. Most people can’t.

Romney, what a fucking douche.

Yeah, I don’t think he’s a douche. I don’t even think he’d be a bad President.

I DO think, though, Obama would be a BETTER one.

There’s no question that Obama is more in touch with the average American’s economic situation. He was actually raised by a single mother and her parents, in a middle-class home. He was also middle class for the first 15 years of his adult life.

Romney’s closest connection with the middle class is that he outsources their jobs to people making $2/hour in the Phillippines.

Romney seems to be under the impression he’s hiring us instead of the other way around.

I think that, for a lot of people who are wealthy but not super-rich (people like RickJay’s friend) the distinction, and their obliviousness about their own wealth and privilege, often boils down to an American (and Canadian) idea of what constitutes the middle class.

When we’re talking specifically about actual incomes, it’s pretty absurd to claim that someone in the $200-250K range is middle income. Any definition of “middle income” that encompasses people in the top four of five percent of the population is completely useless, or is being used, as it is by Romney, largely as a rhetorical device to push a particular political position.

But middle class has become, over the decades, a much more nebulous concept. It has stepped outside of its Marxian roots in the industrial bourgeoisie and has become, as much as anything else, about a state of mind, and a feeling of belonging. What a lot of wealthy-but-not-super-rich people see, when they look at America, is not the gulf between them and families getting by on the median income; they see the gulf between them and the people who are up in the top half a percent.

They see the gulf between people who drive Audis and Infinitis, and people who drive Lamborghinis and Bentleys; between people who vacation at Aspen and people who own a ski lodge at Aspen; between people who fly business class and people who have fractional ownership in private aircraft; between people who have a one-million-dollar house in the suburbs and people who have a four-million-dollar house overlooking the ocean. All of this leads (some of) them to think that they struggle to get by just like the people who truly are in the middle-income bracket.

Of course, there is one area where these wealthy people do have something of a point. Because many of them are professionals and managers on salary, or small business owners, they actually pay a higher proportion of their income in taxes than the people below them, due to progressive income tax rates, and they also usually pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes than the people above them, who benefit from things like the lower tax rate on capital gains, as well other mechanisms for relieving the tax burden on non-salary income.

I’m not feeling sorry for these folks. I have no problem with the taxes they pay, and wouldn’t mind seeing them increased. But they do bear a disproportionate percentage of the tax burden, especially compared to the truly rich. The main problem is that they often complain more about the people below them than about the people above them on the economic ladder.

Just curious, when talking about preserving “middle class tax cuts”, what income level do you think President Obama presents as the upper income range of middle class? :dubious:

Romney clearly misspoke since he basically said something that contradicts itself “no, $100,000 isn’t middle class” simply contradicts 100% him later saying “middle class is $200,000 to $250,000 and less.” I’d say he probably shouldn’t have said “yes or no” to the question about $100,000 and just said “I’d say middle class is anyone making under $250,000.” I think it obvious that’s what he meant to say, and it actually is pretty much the same definition President Obama uses for middle class.