Here’s some information from the U.S. Census Bureau:
Real median household income in the United States in 2011 was $50,054, a 1.5 percent decline from the 2010 median and the second consecutive annual drop.
The nation’s official poverty rate in 2011 was 15.0 percent, with 46.2 million people in poverty. After three consecutive years of increases, neither the poverty rate nor the number of people in poverty were statistically different from the 2010 estimates.
The number of people without health insurance coverage declined from 50.0 million in 2010 to 48.6 million in 2011, as did the percentage without coverage – from 16.3 percent in 2010 to 15.7 percent in 2011.
For dumb people, “median” means that there are an equal number of things on each side of the number. In this case, it means that in 2011 the exact same number of people households made more than $50,054 than made less. This is an entirely defensible and sensible way of defining “middle-income Americans.” People Households making $50,054 last year were precisely in the middle. Nevertheless, the following exchange occurred on this morning’s Good Morning America program:
“No one can say my plan is going to raise taxes on middle-income people, because principle number one is (to) keep the burden down on middle-income taxpayers,” Romney told host George Stephanopoulos.
“Is $100,000 middle income?” Stephanopoulos asked.
“No, middle income is $200,000 to $250,000 and less,” Romney responded.
The Washington Post article points out that President Obama has referred to the “Middle Class” as including people with incomes up to $250,000. But that is not equivalent to what Romney said. The president was giving an upper range. And he certainly wasn’t suggesting that people making less than $200,000 a year are not middle class.
“Middle class” is a vague term, but “middle income” shouldn’t be. I’d argue that middle income people make between $40,000 and $60,000 a year. I’d choose that range because if you go any lower, you’re dealing with people who can’t be described as having any financial security. And I think that’s what we’re trying to talk about when we use these terms. The middle class is supposed to be a comfortable place. It’s not great; it’s not that secure; but it is comfortable. What’s happening in this country is that the middle income is getting perilously close to the poverty level for any family of significant size. The middle class isn’t as comfortable as it used to be.
But, unless you live in Manhattan, making $200,000 a year is a lot of money. And only about 3% of Americans make more than $250,000 a year. You can’t call that middle income or middle class.
But, unless you live in Manhattan, making $200,000 a year is a lot of money.
Making $200,000/yr in Manhattan is still a lot of money. Sorry to burst the bubble of people like McMegan.
So, this is inaccurate:
More households above that median income than people earning more than $50,054.
good catch. Will update.
Also
Again, that’s median household income, not individual pay, which I think is somewhere around $27,000 because many, if, not most households have two wage earners. To make sense of all this, we also need median personal income and median personal salary, which might be that $27,000 figure because income includes transfer payments (i.e. SS or SSI), pensions, interest, dividends, bonuses, rents collected, et cetera.
Dontcha know, BooMan, in American everyone is both middle class and middle income. Especially in election years. It’s the way we avoid class warfare.
For the midwestern rural perspective, our elected county administrative officials (auditor, court clerk, treasurer, etc.) will gross $36,000 – 41,000 next year.
These things depress me. I work at a middling sized public university in the midwest. I have an MS degree in a hard science. I have a full-time job with decent benefits. I am the sole wage-earner in my household. I am a member of a union. My parents were college graduates. One of my sisters is a physician.
My gross pay is about $28,000/year (no, I did not forget three zeros). I feel middle class as far as education, attitudes, background, etc., but financially? I hear people throw terminology about hundreds of thousands of dollars around, and the very concept boggles my mind.
In Romney’s world, I am pretty sure I would be considered to be on the same socio-economic level as a serf scrabbling for twigs outside the castle walls. And I would have just about as many rights and as much respect.
If you’re in Wichita, KS a comparable salary in NYC would be $66,446. (Perhaps the only adjusted comparison that would put your income above the national median.) Money.CNN has a cool location COL calculator. Nationwide corporations use some variation of this in setting salaries by city/region. (Although have never heard of someone working in a high cost region taking a salary cut when transferred to a low cost region.)
You need a new union. My education is the same as yours but it is irrelevant to my job which Mail Processing Mechanic. I am at the top of my scale as most of my fellows are. You reach it after about six years. I make $57,487, not counting Sunday pay which is $55 and most of us are required to work every Sunday.
You need a new union.
My wife and I both work full time and there are no kids in the house. So we are what I would consider pretty “comfortable”. No elevators for our cars, but we are doing okay. We are probably, by many estimates considered upper-middle class. My brother is divorced with three teenagers. One kid is on his own, one lives with my brother and the third with her mom. He pays child support for the one living with her mother. He has a decent job which he has held for over twenty years. His salary is above the median by a bit, though not by a large amount. He is very frugal. Lives very simply. Drives a beater car. We both live in affordable areas. But my brother struggles. I see it every day. Even with his higher than median income, he is constantly teetering on the edge. It wouldn’t take much for him go over that edge. And he is safely above that $50,054 number.
Mitt Romney is clueless about people like my brother. He knows absolutely nothing about his life experiences. By all official measures, my brother is pretty squarely “in the middle”. But he is certainly not comfortable or secure. And he has done “all the right things”. For people like him, a thousand dollars here or there, like maybe a Romney tax increase, would be all it would take for him to fall off the radar screen and lose much of the little that he currently has. People in the median range, and there are millions and millions of them, are just one bad break away from poverty. Mr. Romney, that is the way things are in “The Real America”.
Take it from a numbers guy, it’s not just “dumb people” who don’t know/remember what median means. Most folks’ understanding of statistics ends with percentages.
Americans like thinking of themselves as middle class. I could see someone defining the middle class as above the poverty line and below the line delineating the 99% from the 1%.
If one wants to define a range for middle income then I think a statistical method worth using would be to decide first what portion of the total that middle income range should be. Would it be decided as a percentage of the whole? Or with some multiplier of standard deviation? If we want to include the middle 40% of households (20% higher than median, 20% lower than median) then the range might be something like 30k to 80k.
Some interesting notes below. The last one is a calculator you can use to compare your income. Be sure to check it by doing a mouseover on the map:
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/where-do-you-fall-on-the-income-curve/
http://www.decisionsonevidence.com/2012/02/want-to-know-your-household-income-percentile-ranking/
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/01/15/business/one-percent-map.html
Actually, he’s kinda right. Depending on how you chart it. The funny thing about this fool is that he’s unintentionally honest. Actually the middle of the income spectrum is in the millions of dollars, since some people make more than $2 mil/year. In fact, there are dozens of Wall Streeters that make more than 20, so the middle income is actuallly over $10 mil/year. The question is why so many people “earn” such low percentile incomes. Are we really all that much less valuable than the super-rich? How can that be possible?
White suburbia is sheltered from it just as much. My mother nearly had a heart attack when I told her we were upper middle class because our household brings in $110k pre-tax. It’s like they don’t know how they would cope with less; I doubt they have any savings, they pay for hospital bills in increments, and I think the car still has payments to be made.
The great victory in the class war was managing to convince working class people that they were middle class.