One of the favorite “buzzwords” the politicians keep using is “middle class.” Do you know who Romney or Obama are talking about when they use it? I don’t. It would be helpful if they would tell us who they mean when they say “the middle class.” I suspect they are not talking about the same people.
My curiosity got the better of me and I did a Google search to see what I could find. I got 510,000,000 results. I looked at a few. Basically there seem to be about 510,000,000 opinions. But I still don’t know who Romney or Obama are talking about when they say “the middle class.”
Do you consider yourself to be “middle class?” If you do, who else do you include in “the middle class” with you? If you don’t, do you consider yourself to be “upper class” or “lower” (scratch that, make that “working”) class? If so who else do you include in the “upper class” or “working class” with you?
Here’s a little of what I you can find on the internet about “the middle class:”
Everyone wants to believe they are middle class…But this eagerness…has led the definition to be stretched like a bungee cord — used to defend/attack/describe everything…The Drum Major Institute…places the range for middle class at individuals making between $25,000 and $100,000 a year. Ah yes, there’s a group of people bound to run into each other while house-hunting.
—Dante Chinni (2005-05-10). “One more social security quibble: Who is Middle Class?”. Christian Science Monitor. . Quoted at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_middle_class
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Household income distribution |
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Bottom 10% |
Bottom 20% |
Bottom 25% |
Middle 33% |
Middle 20% |
Top 25% |
Top 20% |
Top 5% |
Top 1.5% |
Top 1% |
|
$0 to $10,500 |
$0 to $18,500 |
$0 to $22,500 |
$30,000 to $62,500 |
$35,000 to $55,000 |
$77,500 and up |
$92,000 and up |
$167,000 and up |
$250,000 and up |
$350,000 and up |
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Source: US Census Bureau, 2006; income statistics for the year 2005 |
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_middle_class
In February 2009, The Economist announced that over half the world’s population now belongs to the middle class, as a result of rapid growth in emerging countries. It characterized the middle class as having a reasonable amount of discretionary income, so that they do not live from hand to mouth as the poor do, and defined it as beginning at the point where people have roughly a third of their income left for discretionary spending after paying for basic food and shelter. This allows people to buy consumer goods, improve their health care, and provide for their children’s education. Most of the emerging middle class consists of people who are middle-class by the standards of the developing world but not the rich one, since their money incomes do not match developed country levels, but the percentage of it which is discretionary does. By this definition, the number of middle-class people in Asia exceeded that in the West sometime around 2007 or 2008. … As the American middle class is estimated at approximately 45% of the population, The Economist‘s article would put the size of the American middle class below the world average.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_class
Well what do you know about that!