Reply to Can we stop referring to households making $200 or 300K a year as "middle class"?

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Reply to "Can we stop referring to households making $200 or 300K a year as "middle class"?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]I keep saying that people are deceived by the fact that several hundred thousand households in this area make over $200K and that makes them think that this makes it middle class. There are over a million households that make signficantly less than $200K. Yes there are many more families making over $200K than there used to be, but that's because the region's population is significantly higher than it used to be. Many of those million households also have student loans (there are many people who went to state schools at in-state rates that still have student loans to pay). [b]Additionally, people are measuring the middle class based on some outdated models from when we were growing up. The truth is that the lower classes from middle class down have less buying power than their peers and parents did from earlier generations. The middle class is getting poorer, not wealthier. Despite the whining from the upper classes, the policies of the last 30+ years have redistributed the wealth so that the upper classes have much more of the nation's wealth than they used to.[/b] [/quote]

Well said. And people who are earning more, but [b]getting less for their money[/b] are just deceiving themselves. Basically it now takes two incomes working more than 40 hours each to make what our parents made with one parent working.
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I think this is the heart of the problem.  Everyone from lower to upper middle class is getting less for their money.  Only the truly wealthy are doing better than previous generations.  The quibble over how to define middle vs upper middle misses the point.  The point is that people who are comparing their childhood to how they live now are realizing that in general it is harder for all classes to replicate the lifestyle they grew up with.  Which is disheartening because each generation is supposed to continue to do better than the last.  I was the first in my family to graduate college (and then attend grad school) and feel the upper middle class lifestyle my parents were able to provide on one income is harder to attain than it was back in the 80s/90s.

[b]A family of 4 can qualify for affordable housing slots on 80k/year around here. [/b] To me, you are lower middle class if you are qualifying for affordable housing.  It doesn't matter whether 150k or 250k is the exact mark of middle vs upper middle.  The problem is that climbing the SES ladder is much more difficult than it used to be and our middle class as a whole is not doing as well as it used to be.[/quote]

Where?[/quote]

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