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]FYI, from the New York Times today: "Middle Class Shrinks Further as More Fall Out Instead of Climbing Up" 
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/26/business/economy/middle-class-shrinks-further-as-more-fall-out-instead-of-climbing-up.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

Definition of "middle class" from the article:

“I would consider middle class to be people who can live comfortably on what they earn, can pay their bills, can set aside something to save for retirement and for kids in college and can have vacations and entertainment,” said Christine L. Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project, a left-leaning research and advocacy group.

[/quote]

Way to mislead.  You picked a select quote that suggests that higher income folks qualify.  But earlier in the article they are much more explicit:
[quote]In the late 1960s, more than half of the households in the United States were squarely in the middle, earning, in today’s dollars, $35,000 to $100,000 a year. [/quote]
[quote]Still, regardless of their income, most Americans identify as middle class. The term itself is so amorphous that politicians often cite the group in introducing proposals to engender wide appeal.

The definition here starts at $35,000 — which is about 50 percent higher than the official poverty level for a family of four — and ends at the six-figure mark. Although many Americans in households making more than $100,000 consider themselves middle class, particularly those living in expensive regions like the Northeast and Pacific Coast, they have substantially more money than most people.[/quote]
[quote]Even as the American middle class has shrunk, it has gone through a transformation. The 53 million households that remain in the middle class — about 43 percent of all households — look considerably different from their middle-class predecessors of a previous generation, according to a New York Times analysis of census data.[/quote]

So there are 53M households, approximately 43% that fall between $35K and $100K.  Even adjusting for the higher regional COL, we're still talking roughly $50K-150K of HHI.  Nowhere near $200K or $300K[/quote]

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