Median Income People Are Not Middle Class Watch
Last September Paul Krugman joked:
Have You Left No Sense Of Decency?: Pretty soon, we’ll be having serious, completely un-self-conscious discussions in major magazines about the servant problem...
And soon afterwards yet another reporter called me to, among other things, claim that a New York police inspector and school principal together making $250-$300K a year were not rich. When I point out that the middle-class family making the median $50k a year in household income might disagree that he and his are in the same class as they and theirs, he said that people making the median income aren't what he calls middle class...
However, the story he was working on does not seem to have ever appeared in the New York Times...
But let me quote Ezra Klein anyway:
Ezra Klein - Even in New York City, $250,000 is rich: Arguments over income taxes tend to get bogged down in arguments about who is really "rich." And what you hear then is that rich in Ohio and rich in New York City are different. But how different?According to the Census Bureau, only 6.3 percent of New York City's households pulled in more than $200,000. So if you're a household making $250,000 or more, you're easily in the top 5 percent -- even in New York City. Now, it's true that those people might not "feel" rich. There's lots of stuff to buy in New York City. It's pretty easy to construct a lifestyle where you spend $250,000 a year. In Columbus, Ohio, only 1.3 percent of households make more than $200,000, so there's less stuff for them to buy and fewer rich people for them to try to keep up with. But what you buy and whether you try to keep up with the people in the penthouse is a personal decision, not an objective economic necessity. The fact of the matter is that a household making $250,000 in New York City is making more than pretty much anyone else in the city. Being rich is more than just a feeling.
