5 Myths About the Poor Middle Class
POSTED BY: Geezer
UPDATED: Friday, January 4, 2008 20:04
VIEWED: 6018
PAGE 2 of 10
1. Inflation plus the fact that penalties, such as the alternative minimum tax are not adjusted for inflation (while there's no suprise that social security payments at the same time are) largely, if not altogether, dismiss this entire point.
This is not exclusive to the dot-com boom. Bottom line, my grandpa was able to raise 5 kids and put a roof over their heads on a grocery store manager's salary in Chicago's south suburbs. Impossible today.
I do agree that demographic changes have occured that have greatly effected the marketplace though. There were a lot more jobs to go around when the only people who were working were anglo males. Funny how I've never heard how the effect that women in the job market has effected your average male's chance of getting a decent job in this country. Of course it's politically incorrect to even mention it, but usually the things that are politically incorrect and offensive to someone are true.
2. This point is nullified for the reasons that I've stated above. Because of inflation, any family with under $50,000/yr today is basically poor (particularly because of the unaffordability of housing today), and by as soon as 2010 nearly 16 million more homes will be impacted by the alternative minimum tax as our incomes increase (at a rate slower than TRUE inflation, of course).
An excerpt from MSN money on the AMT:
Right now, the number of taxpayers who are exposed to this morass is relatively small -- about 1.3 million taxpayers, or about 1% of the total, the GAO says. But by the year 2010 (and probably regardless of the Bush tax cut), the number of taxpayers affected by the AMT will rise to as many as 17 million, or about one in six. The revenue gain for the Treasury: from $5.8 billion a year to $38.2 billion a year.
The reason more of us will be affected by the AMT in 2010 than now is that the AMT, unlike normal tax brackets, isn’t indexed for inflation. If it were indexed, as much of the tax code is, the projected increase would only be to 2.1 million taxpayers.
Among the taxpayers increasingly exposed will be those with large families because of exclusions of such items as child credits.
Source: http://moneycentral.msn.com/articles/tax/basics/6647.asp
3. I can't disagree with the fact that the debt average has been manipulated any more than a lot of your figures have been manipulated. Whichever side of the fence someone is on, they are going to cherry pick stats in such a way to make their intended audience believe the sky is falling. Fortunately for me, I lost everything 7 years ago and really learned what it meant to have a good job and to use that time wisely to prepare for a dark future. Not only did I erase all of my debt, but according to your figures, I could pay off around 20 households credit card debt today. I will be using that money to purchase a house for cash money when the housing market bottoms out, which it will.
People who own their house to live there and can manage to keep their jobs will be okay, even if they go upside-down on their mortgage and the house is only worth half of what their loan was for. I feel sorry for those who got into real estate as a means of making a quick buck and didn't dump their properties fast enough.
4 I don't really have an opinion on this point one way or another. That's not to say I don't contemplate it, or wonder why for 5 years I couldn't find a good job, but they are out there. And as China and India keep coming up in the world, their wages get less competetive, considering all of their cultural and linguistic barriers on top of it. Many jobs have actually been brought back on shore from India because the greedy corpo idiots figured out that the money they were saving wasn't worth their customer base hating them because their customer service was only capable of reading a script because at most the customer service people knew 850 words of basic English, or Newspeak, as I prefer to call it. http://ogden.basic-english.org/basiceng.html
5. Well thank you very much Mr. Cor
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Geezer and PirateNews both spat out the very definition of propaganda.
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Wow. Anyone who believes that making $49,999/yr makes you poor has no fathomable clue what being poor is.
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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But meanwhile I still don't know if the figures have been adjusted for inflation. 'Cause if not, the article isn't even worth addressing.
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Always look upstream.
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Quote:Totally agree. That might put you at the lower end of middle class, or dip you into working class, but it ain't 'poor'. Unless you spend your money on 65" plasma TV's, cable, and other such things so that you have no money left for those pesky foodstuffs...
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
Wow. Anyone who believes that making $49,999/yr makes you poor has no fathomable clue what being poor is.
Budget Chrisisall
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But assuming that the article isn't citing "funny money" (something of a stretch, since right-wing articles like the Heritage Foundation's often don't adjust for inflation) let's take the article piece by piece.
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Quote:Okay, far more evenly than what? I charge the writer with bad English because that sentence fell off a cliff. The phrase far more than is usually followed with some sort of benchmark comparison. I'm assuming they mean far more evenly than at the beginning of the dot-com bubble. So, using that assumption, let's move along.
1. The middle class's standard of living stagnated while the dot-com boom made the super rich even richer. Not really. In fact, the U.S. economy hands out wealth far more evenly.
Quote:First of all. nobody is saying that "ALL" of the money has gone to the top 10%, just a disproportionate amount. There is a problem with this paragraph, since it shifts the base of comparison several times, and it does so simply to be able to say 65% and 30%. Makes you think that the rich have gotten poorer doesn't it? But they are just hiding this:
Per capita gross domestic product has increased by more than 65 percent since 1979 -- growth that translates to $26,000 per household. If all that money had gone to the richest 10th of the population, it would now hold more than 60 percent of the national income. That's nearly twice as much as the super rich actually have, according to the best census surveys available.
In 1979, the top 10% had an approximately 26% share of the economy and now it's over 30%. In fact, the ultra rich... the top 1%... has climbed even faster. Their share of the economy used to be about 6% in 1979, now it's over 12%.
www.nber.org/papers/w8467.pdf pp 74, 76.
In fact Income Inequality Hits Record Levels, New CBO Data Show
Quote:
Real after-tax incomes jumped by an average of nearly $180,000 for the top 1 percent of households in 2005, while rising just $400 for middle-income households and $200 for lower-income households, according to new data from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO)
www.cbpp.org/12-14-07inc.htm
Now comes the hemming and hawing...
Quote:Nobody has said that the middle class has "stood still". But in terms of maintaining an equitable percentage across the board, even the article says that the middle class got a third less than that.
To be fair, demographic changes have sparked many misunderstandings about the economic health of the middle class. For example, Americans today are more likely to live in single-adult households than they were 30 years ago. Adjust incomes to take into account this shift, along with increasing employer contributions to retirement savings and to health insurance premiums, and you find that the real middle-class median income has risen 33 percent, or $18,000, since 1979. Of course, that's a third less than the $26,000 that those households would have gotten if the growth had been distributed equally. But the middle class didn't stand still, either.
It's Xmas eve. I have things to do, I'm going to finish this much later. Finn and Geezer, thank you for being such wonderful propagandists.
Have a Merry Christmas for those that celebrate it, Happy Kwanzaa, and general good cheer to all!
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Always look upstream.
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That 50k doesn't go so very far when the Gov takes damn near half of it in taxes, then your state and local, and all those extra little taxes on everything down to your utility bills, and then throw on sales and property taxes on top of that...
Then throw in the expenses of mortgage, car payment, utilities, wardrobe upkeep for a job of that level, and heaven help you if you've got kids, not to mention that for all those premiums most health insurance covers virtually nothing with hefty co-pay on top of it and massive deductibles... oh yes, and auto insurance, homeowners, both of which will immediately file against YOU in court using YOUR money to pay the lawyers to beat down your nearly-broke ass if you dare even try to file a claim.
Get with the program serfs, shut up and bend the knee like you're supposed to for your corporate masters...
*SNARK*
Even though I work an unpleasant, "subsistence-level" job, I find it awfully damned ironic that most low to mid level corporate drones, once you adjust for expenses, inflation and taxes, ain't really any better off than me, in spite of the fact that they surrendered a good bit of their personal freedom to climb that ladder, and from what I have seen here in the whole auto industry and satellite economy, mostly wind up working 60-90 hour work weeks on a damned 40 hour "salary" as an employer dodge to avoid paying overtime, and if they DON'T put in the time, are quickly replaced by equally desperate fools with a mortgage to pay... and forget those pensions and benefits, they'll "spin off" a subsidary company, dump the obligations on it, then deliberately mismanage it to throw it into bankruptcy with the stunningly *generous* terms of such (but not for YOU peons, suck it up and deal!) in the corporate world, liquidate it and siphon the remnants back into the main company, conveniently disposing of those pesky obligations...
A medieval serf actually got to keep more of his stuff, and had more freedom than your typical corporate drone, and we act like we've improved upon our lot since the dark ages ?
HA!
About the only thing going for us THESE days is enough general education to realize how screwed we really are if we dare face up to it.
And I won't even "go there" about the increasingly-difficult and soon to be dangerous practice of trying to live outside of the little debt-slave pen they want us in, but Jack understands what the hell I mean by that, at least.
-Frem
(Oh yeah, and as an aside - no, this ISN'T the college debate team, and I don't really give a shit about some set of arbitrary rules dammit, I make common sense, heartfelt arguments from a point blank perspective, and when I offer my opinion you ain't obligated to share it, but for the love o mercy realize the stupidity and futility of trying to force such a set of rules at an anarchist who's offering you a unique viewpoint on a situation even if you do not share it.)
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Quote:My point being, the writer actually agrees with 2 of his 5 "myths" (that would be the "yes" and the "true") and almost agrees with the third ("not really") and the other two points are fuzzy numbers and heresay (sort of).
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:Quote:Not if all you can do is read the first words of each paragraph.
Originally posted by mal4prez:
I mean, am I supposed to feel newly informed after reading this?
Now, if these opening statements were followed by strong numbers and hard facts (yes, I did read all of it)... wait, the writer wouldn't have begun his statements this way if he actually had hard facts, don't you think?
Oh well, after all, it is an opinion piece. It's just not terribly convincing.
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hmm-burble-blah, blah-blah-blah, take a left
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BZZZZZZZ, Frem, I resent that 'drone' crack, BZZZZZ-
I work hard, but not for the man, I just love the honey, BZZZZZZZ, I just wish the Queen would let me keep more of it...BZZZZZZ...
Hey! BZZZZZ, big bees in black are taking me away- they say my opinions are detrimental to the hive...
BZZZZZ, my wings are being pulled off by a giant KID!!!!! ARGHHHHHH!!!!!
Bee-that-wasisall
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Quote:First of all, note that Geezer changed his original post- which defined the middle class as beginning at $50,000- to the middle class beginning at $30,000 ... something I think we all could agree in as being borderline-poor for a family of four. (The official poverty level is $25,000 for a family of four.)
2. The middle class is shrinking.
True, fewer people today live in households with incomes between $30,000 and $100,000 (a reasonable definition of "middle class") than in 1979. But the number of people in households that bring in more than $100,000 also rose from 12 percent to 24 percent. There was no increase in the percentage of people in households making less than $30,000. So the entire "decline" of the middle class came from people moving up the income ladder. For married couples, median incomes have grown in inflation-adjusted dollars by 25 percent since 1979.
So my first question is whether this definition is in inflation-adjusted dollars. If not, then it's sheer propaganda, since today's $100,000 is more like 1979's $30,000. The actual facts are that the three lowest quintiles.... Q1, Q2, and Q3 (which is the "modal class") have lost ground in terms of the percent GDP since 1967 through 2006, and the bottom two quintiles lost ground in real wages through that same time period, while the "modal class" gained slightly (from $32,000 to $36,000) top two quintiles have zoomed ahead.
www.sustainablemiddleclass.com/Income-inequality.html
Quote:This is another one of those shifting bases of comparison. What about non-married heads of household? I guess they don't count because their numbers don't look so good! According to the Census, real household income has declined 5% in the last 5 years.
So the entire "decline" of the middle class came from people moving up the income ladder. For married couples, median incomes have grown in inflation-adjusted dollars by 25 percent since 1979.
http://jec.senate.gov/Documents/Reports/08.29.07Income.pdf
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Always look upstream.
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