So are you saying that someone making $250K/yr living in an $800K home in San Francisco, might not be as rich as someone making $150K/yr living in a $300K home somewhere else?

You guys seem like you're using some pretty weird qualifications for what counts as rich. I'm saying that if you're making 5x the median income (which is ~$250K) you qualify as rich. You're talking about what kind of home a person owns? WTF?

What exactly does 25k a month get spent on then?

lol @ private schooling, yachts, 800k houses and other unnecessary luxuries causing such trouble getting the bills paid every paycheck.

That problam of differing scales of richness would be a lot different if we only said people on $500k or $1m a year + are rich?

Most people, I think conceptualize "richness" in comparison to their own situation. Therefore, rich would be defined, by most people, as significantly more than the average income. $250k is 5x the average income, like the other poster said, which is significant enough to be called rich imo.

Right, but "not poor" doesn't imply "rich", that's why this whole "calling $250k not rich is an insult to all those poor people out there who are struggling". No, it's not. It's just common sense that poor people will have a hard time no matter where you draw the artificial "rich" line.

hint: it's close to impossible to find a home less than $800k in some markets

malibu?

Yeah, let's all shed a tear for little Muffy because her daddy's portfolio took a hit and she might have to choose between going to private school and getting a new car for her 16th birthday.

i think people understand very well what rich means. the last time i heard a rap song btw where the guy was talking about how wealthy he was going to be he wasn't rapping about making $250k.

I disagree. I think that in the context of politics and tax, to most people "the rich" means "those who have extra money floating around that they don't really need and that can be redistributed for the greater good".

My point is that many people who make 250k are in fact spending their entire income on stuff that isn't in any way extravagant. An 800k home isn't luxurious in many parts of the country. Two car leases totaling 2k/month represents a a couple of Acuras. I don't really know what other expenses might look like for a family of five but I'll bet that the remaining 5k could be spent real fast, and again on nothing that is even remotely luxurious.

if by "most people" you mean liberals

Not all people making $250k have a lifestyle this luxuriant, and that's the whole point. A family making $250k and living in a major urban center and raising a family will be very comfortable but they won't be buying new cars for all their kids and sending them to private school. This is exactly why the $250k figure doesn't make sense.

Dude $250,000 a year is a completely arbitrary number for a marginal tax rate threshold. It could easily be $150,000 or $350,000. Could have more marginal tax rates as well (and US has had more marginal rates in the past btw). It's all completely arbitrary. Obama just uses highest marginal rate to promote class warfare that Dems have been promoting for a long time. The "rich" people are bad because they rip off the rest of the public.

And then we have this crap from an uber lib:

Nadler's Tax Equity Plan: Jerrold Nadler Raise Taxes On Red States

Don't give me hints. Give me a market. Give me an example. Right now, you're just pulling numbers out of your ass.

Loudoun County, VA is the richest county in the United States. Median income is $110K, less than half of your paycheck-to-paycheck $250K folks. Median homesale prices are less than $600K.

So please, tell me, where the **** are you going where people make more money, and the houses are more expensive, than in the richest place in America?

Wow at the people declaring 250k rich, just wow. That means you guys must make a fraction of that I guess. Stop hating those who have been successful, it isn't very endearing

I'm willing to go out on a limb and bet the same people that cry that they aren't rich when talking about taxes because they aren't Buffet rich are also bragging about the baller job they have and how much they make any other time.

Does anyone have to live in San Francisco? That seems a complete luxury in most cases to me. People choose to live there. They could very easily move to a ****ter part of SF, or further south or move to the East Bay Area and catch the BART or drive in to work like hundreds of thousands of other people. Using examples like this is like saying "well, if you live in Malibu or South Manhatten, then $xxx,xxx a year isn't a lot of money." Point is, people choose to live there because of the desirability of the neighbourhood, its location and other features. No one is forced to live in those super-exlusive neighbourhoods, and they don't become any less rich just because they choose to live in the astronomically high property areas and have a smaller place.

You're basically saying that people who can afford to (if they chose to) have a huge house 6-bed house, beautifully furnished, a ferarri, multiple other nice cars, a boat, go on multiple exotic holidays, send their kids to private schools, save a bunch for retirement, put kids through private colleges, and so on and so on, not rich. I know this because my girlfriends step dad has all that and makes quite a lot less than $250k as far as I'm aware,

If that guy isn't rich then I don't know who is.

I think lifestyle has more to do with "is person X rich or not" than their salary. If a person has enough money to sustainably live at a certain level then he is rich imo. Noam Chomsky says that the one thing that money buys is freedom, and I think asking "how much freedom does person X's financial situation buy him?" is a good way of answering the rich/not rich question. And the answer to that question for the family blowing through their take home pay of 12k/month while driving a couple of moderately nice cars and living in a moderately nice house is "not a whole lot".

Actually, a lot of people who make in the $250k range probably do have to work in major urban centers where the cost of living is higher. It's not a coincidence that many of the best paying jobs are in the the most expensive places to live.

But other people (like my wife and I) make more than that and don't have all those things. This is the whole point - the cut-off figure doesn't contain enough information to make a sound judgment about how rich that person is.

So a happy homeless person could be rich, while someone making $250K and blowing it all on cars and houses, isn't?

The guy I described in the post above self-described as rich when we had a discussion about taxes and income levels and stuff. I guess he is just trying to sound balla right. No way this fool in the newish Ferarri is rich!

LOL at having a difference of opinion about the definition of rich being some sort of evidence of that person being an envious poor person. Just lol.

You said 300k. That's 25k (canadian)/month. What the **** do you spend 25k a month on? I know people that make that a year and save some.

The hobo's freedom/happiness is not due to the amount of money he has, so no.

Yeah, we also save but not at an insane rate - just up to the maximum RRSP and TFSA room.

Our mortgage is large because we live in downtown Toronto. All of our taxes together (income tax plus property tax plus sales taxes) consumes about half our pretax income. Our other living expenses are reasonable - we cook at home almost every day, we don't have a ton of disposable goods like fancy clothes, we use public transit and we don't even have cable. Like I said, we live a very comfortable lifestyle and we certainly don't think that we're struggling like "the poor", but we don't find ourselves with big chunks of money at the end of the month. We certainly don't have a "rich lifestyle" in the sense that we've seen described in this thread, i.e. spoiled brat rich kids that go to private schools and have new cars at 16. That's simply not so.

Out of curiosity, how old is he and what's his net worth (approximately)? There's a big difference between someone making $250k per year at 35 with some young kids and a mortgage and a person who is 55 with no mortgage, no dependents, and a $2M retirement savings nest egg.