Friday, November 09, 2007
What's in the 'Middle'
This is a great article that discusses the various definitions used, primarily, by politicians to define what is meant by the term "Middle Class".
By the way, the article is by Alan Reynolds. He is a contributor to the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
Some interesting quotes from the article:
Senator Hillary Clinton's campaign bus is called "The Middle Class Express." She says, "America's middle-class families have been invisible" to President Bush. "For middle-class Americans," she pledges to "extend the tax cuts including the child tax credit, the marriage penalty relief, and lower income tax rates that they currently pay." Ironically, all of those tax cuts were enacted in 2003 by a president accused of forgetting the middle class.
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A recent CBS polls defined middle class as those with incomes of $30,000 to $75,000. Yet that amounted to only 44 percent of those who described themselves as middle class to CBS pollsters. In reality, we can't know tell if $75,000 buys a lot or a little unless we ask whether that refers to single-person households or large families and whether they live in Honolulu or Little Rock.
Polls tell us that nearly everyone with incomes from $30,000 to $200,000 think of themselves as middle class. That encompasses 73 percent of all families, with fewer than 5 percent earning more.
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In a sense, politicians are nonetheless correct to depict the middle class as struggling to make ends meet, because that has always been true. If people had no budgets to worry about and no trouble buying whatever they want, then they wouldn't be middle class, would they?
The article goes on, sometimes at dizzying lengths, to show how the press and politicians have manipulated numbers to prove how great or bad things are for the middle class at various times, to the benefit of the agenda they are pushing.
By the way, the article is by Alan Reynolds. He is a contributor to the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
Some interesting quotes from the article:
Senator Hillary Clinton's campaign bus is called "The Middle Class Express." She says, "America's middle-class families have been invisible" to President Bush. "For middle-class Americans," she pledges to "extend the tax cuts including the child tax credit, the marriage penalty relief, and lower income tax rates that they currently pay." Ironically, all of those tax cuts were enacted in 2003 by a president accused of forgetting the middle class.
---
A recent CBS polls defined middle class as those with incomes of $30,000 to $75,000. Yet that amounted to only 44 percent of those who described themselves as middle class to CBS pollsters. In reality, we can't know tell if $75,000 buys a lot or a little unless we ask whether that refers to single-person households or large families and whether they live in Honolulu or Little Rock.
Polls tell us that nearly everyone with incomes from $30,000 to $200,000 think of themselves as middle class. That encompasses 73 percent of all families, with fewer than 5 percent earning more.
---
In a sense, politicians are nonetheless correct to depict the middle class as struggling to make ends meet, because that has always been true. If people had no budgets to worry about and no trouble buying whatever they want, then they wouldn't be middle class, would they?
The article goes on, sometimes at dizzying lengths, to show how the press and politicians have manipulated numbers to prove how great or bad things are for the middle class at various times, to the benefit of the agenda they are pushing.
