This article makes me... well, angry.

[blackflame2180]

"Analysis examines what it's like to be a 'rich' family in America"

This is one of those articles that gets me steamed up. It examines what the costs/spending habits of the typical family making 250k would be, more or less an effort to say, "I'm not really rich-- I have all these expenses, you see!"

So I'm going to pick it apart, bit by bit.

Comments

[blackflame2180]

One statistically reasonable place to draw the line is just simple statistics.

It works like grading on a curve. Take the average score, and subtract the median. That is your standard deviation. In grading, a standard deviation in either direction is a C, or average. Between one standard deviation and two on the positive side is a B, and on the negative side is a D. Beyond that is either an A, or an F.

So to do that with income, a D would be "lower middle class," a C would be "middle class," and a B would be "Upper middle class." A would be wealthy, and F would be poor. To use numbers:

"Overall, the mean household income in the United States, according to the US Census Bureau 2004 Economic Survey, was $60,528, or $17,210 (39.73%) higher than the median household income."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States

So that would make the mean income in 2004 $43,318. So $26,108 to $60,528 would be straight up middle class, and $8,898-$26,108 would be 'lower middle class.' Following the same logic, the upper bound on the upper middle class would be $77,738.

There is a slight problem with that, though, because income distribution isn't a bell curve, largely to do with there being a basic cost of living.

So there's another grading system: Quintiles, which divides the country in 20% chunks. By that definition, the lowest quintile (the bottom 20%) is 'poor,'and the top quintile is 'wealthy', with the second quintile being 'lower middle class,' the middle quintile being 'middle class' and the fourth quintile being 'upper middle class.'

Again, Wikipedia for numbers:

$22.5k and below is the bottom quintile, and above $90k is the top quintile. We could be more generous, and say that only the top 10% count as wealthy-- that cutoff would be somewhere between $150k and $200k.

More, we could recognize that there are regional cost of living differences, and do the quintile count by region-- which is what the Federal government does when it determines pay scale, but doing so isn't generally politically helpful in a national campaign and the data is not as widely available. Few countries are as geographically large as the US, and therefore less diverse, and so for most countries the straight quintile count is sufficient.

Re: whether government should take the Jones money away? Whether or not you see it as the government 'taking' their money, or making the Jones pay their fair share for the benefits they receive is a question of what you think the Jones 'owe' in the first place. See my comment to Lawrence re: that.