But since we’re here and I like organic derails to… rerail? Underail? I’d point out that in discussing Bernie’s message we can see how it was Actually Good and ever-so-slightly turned off people like myself.
You notice how he always said billionaires and not hundreds millionaires or tens millionaires? That wasn’t an accident. If I held the reins I’d be tempted to also tell the petit bourgeois to give away every excess penny and pray for atonement. That might not have the same effect.
If you live in NYC and make 100k nobody would call you rich. If you live in rural parts of the south and made 100k people would call you rich. My whole point was putting everybody in a giant bucket and picking out the median isn’t all that helpful.
The rich are one of the "at least 3 " genders that joemomentum talks about.
The cutoff is whatever you make a year plus $1. Everybody happy?
You’ve said this a few times and I’ve been meaning to ask: Does this mean paying taxes? Going off-grid?
I took it to mean participating in capitalism. Not trying to speak for JT, just trying to be right on the internet.
Right, I imagine that overlaps with ‘off-grid’ a bit but there are distinctions.
Right Hard for me to see “off-grid” and think of anything other than solar and batteries. I didn’t really get to - outside the normal economy or something like that.
Yeah, that’s sort of the point I want to make. Middle Class should consist of, you know, the middle. But the way we actually define middle class socially would be far more accurately named ‘Aspirational Class’, one that most people will never reach. The language we use reveals some really ugly aspects of our society, and the socially accepted notion of what middle class is implies that the bottom 3rd of the country are so unimportant that we don’t even bother including them in the stats.
-James Garfield
I’ve recently been promoted from petite bourgeoisie to self-unemployed.
Same!
What happened? No freight to broker?
I think for the most part, people spend what they have, and certain brackets creep up on you. I make >$100,000 a yr as my base salary (but lol CDN). I manage people, and sometimes get a bonus at work. Without looking it up my personal best year was ~$135,000 ish. My wife has fluctuated, but makes ~$60,000.
Are we doing well? Sure. I definitely wouldn’t argue that. Have I ever thought of myself as rich? No. I would probably consider myself upper middle class if I had to place myself in a category.
When we first started dating we rented an apartment and made a bit more than minimum wage. We bought our first house when I was 21. I was making ~$30,000 a year at the time, and my wife slightly more than me. We both slowly worked our way up in our respective companies via promotions etc. We moved provinces for work about 7 years ago, for work promotions. Neither of us have university education.
Over the years we slowly bought a bigger house, and nicer cars, and ate at more expensive restaurants. It’s not like we tripled our income overnight, or anything. We live in a very suburban type neighbourhood.
My biggest customer shut down because of the beer virus. They’ve reopened but the quantity of freight has been… well let’s just say it’s super slow. It’s so bad I’m doing produce again this year. I can honestly say I didn’t expect to ever go back, but here I am lol.
I’m grunching but this is lol. Very few individuals make six figures in this country and the majority of them vote republican. Your persecution complex is out of control and you should try to stop making such garbage posts
I think it’s absurd to pretend that the guy making 80k is basically living the same sort of life as the guy making 40k. At the same time, I’m not sure looking at either the mean or median really captures the essence of how incomes are distributed or where class lines ought to be drawn. And charts that show 99th percentile incomes obscure how insane things get when you zoom in.
For example, there’s this chart
and this chart that’s just a little more granular at the high end:
Now take that $1.6M figure from the0.1% from chart #2 and add it to chart #1:
And I don’t even want to know about what happens if you look at the 0.01% At some point, terms like “upper, middle, lower” don’t really capture what’s going on.
I agree with you that it’s ludicrous to say the guy making more than 90% of the population is “upper middle class.” But at the same time he actually does have more in common Joe Sixpack than he does with the 0.1%ers.
This isn’t really true, or at least not nearly as pronounced as you imply. Plenty of urban professionals make six figures and vote Dem. In 2016 the votes were pretty evenly split on those income bands.
What about voting sanders and now hating the poor? Well not hate but being much more indifferent toward them.
