Oh wait was that 35k your answer? For a family of four with two working parents? Good god that is a gas station attendant married to someone working at Chipotle.

35k for a family of four between two working parents in say Boston is desperately poor. Like some Dickensian ****.

Like first generation ipad poor.

35k for a family of four is gonna be tough almost anywhere unless you're talking live off the land bayou folks.

It probably even qualifies you for free EBT red bulls.

OH WAIT I forgot they get food stamps. Those lucky duckies!

This is one of the worst hijacks of this thread we've seen. Can you guys please at least dig up the thread where this happened before?

Not even top five worst hijacks I've been involved in ITT.

Everything is going to be hijack and derails in here until something happens which probably won't be til Thursday and then there will be a separate thread

I think some people ITT are confusing their idea of "middle class" with what "middle class" actually is.


You can't simply come up with a grab bag of things you think define a "middle class" lifestyle (single family house in the suburbs, 2 late model cars, vacations to Disneyworld) then say that anyone who can afford that **** is middle class and anyone who can't isn't.


Housing costs have gone up astronomically (outside the Rust Belt) while the cost of other things (PCs, cellphones, etc) have plummeted. Middle income wages have been stagnant for over a generation. So what was once within reach of the "middle class" (like a house in a safe suburb of a major city) may now be for those doing much better.

fyp. and it has been this way for some time now.

however, I think the confusion you mention exists (and is hard to get around) because people remember what things were like for their parents who may have worked similar or even lower-skilled jobs than they do, and yet were more "middle class" than they are now in terms of possessions, savings, net worth, etc.

This is kind of crazy because I feel like I'm parroting progressive talking points here and getting shouted down by Obama supporters. Isn't this the whole "disappearing middle class" thing is all about? Like if a family making the median household income can't even come close to owning two cars and a decent house in an OK neighborhood....I mean that's my whole point.

I believe you are correct. Seems like some of us are referring to "middle class" as a certain lifestyle/standard of living (which is disappearing, as you pointed out), while others are simply saying "middle class=mean income" or "middle class=median income".

Um, welcome to America? By which I mean, the non-suburb-both-parents-owning-SUVs-America-that-represents-reality-for-fully-1/3-of-the-population-America.

I also, frankly, think our idea of what is "middle class" has gone upscale (much of it because of the media). Houses in the 50s were ****ing tiny compared to houses being built now yet they held bigger families. Most families only had one car. Most houses outside ths sunbelt or the southeast US didn't have A/C. Eating out was for special occasions. Long distance travel was a really big deal.


Other than housing, the thing that's probably gone up the most in cost is a college education. At one time, you could make enough working a summer job to pay your tuition at pretty most state schools. If you didn't go to a professional school, you pretty much didn't finish school with any debt. Good luck with that now.

Yup. Like historians talk about the "emergence of the middle class". And people now talk about "the death of the middle class." But people ITT seem to be saying "LOOOK THERE ARE STILL PEOPLE IN THE MIDDLE. THEY ARE THE MIDDLE CLASS!!! QED YO"

So, start with YOUR PERCEPTION and work backwards from there? That's....um...scientific.

The number of people who can afford what we've come to think of as a "middle class" lifestyle is indeed shrinking.


It may be that we just really don't want to admit that what we used to think of as "broke" is now pretty normal, or it may be that what is depicted in the media as normal is now only for the well off.

Why does the definition of poor or rich have to be scientific? Why should it be? How did you develop your scientific definition of "poor"?

I wonder how much of our conception of "poor" is psychological?


I remember a coworker years ago saying "I'm just sick of being poor" and I was shocked. She made roughly the same amount I did and I didn't think of myself as "poor". Sure, I was "broke", but I wasn't "poor". "Poor" suggested some sort of permanent condition I wasn't willing to accept.

BUMP FOR PEOPLE POLLUTING OTHER THREADS.

lol dids

Why would anyone bump this thread when there is a current poor/rich thread that is active?

rofl, rent in nyc for a 2br starts around 3k. That's 36 of 50k (before taxes), gone.