Clinton v. Obama

[Klast Brell]

Every time we get in a discussion of "what is middle class" people who make more money start making all sorts of qualifications for why they still qualify as middle class.

"I live in an expensive neighborhood." You chose to live in an expensive neighborhood.
"i have a big mortgage." You chose to buy an expensive house. Just because you have big bills to pay every month does not mean you don't make enough money to pay them. Your big house in your expensive suburb, and your expensive car which you replace every 2 years, and your retirement fund, and the kids college fund, and your air travel to visit friends and family a few times a year. Sure all these things leave you with not much in the bank account. That does not stop the fact that you have a life stile that someone making the median income couldn't home to have.

If you and your wife each made 35K you would be making the median income for a couple in the U.S. http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/m ... state.html but you would have to live in a shittier part of town, in a small house, buy used economy cars and drive them in to the ground, put a couple grand a year to your retirement, hope your kids get good financial aid when they go to an inexpensive state college, and drive across 4 states to visit your parents. And your idea of not much in the bank account would be a couple hundred dollars in the account, not a couple thousand.

Maybe you tell yourself you are middle class because even tho you make 4 times the median you have aspirations of making 40 times. Maybe you tell yourself you are middle class because you have to drive an Expedition instead of a Range Rover, or a BMW instead of a Ferrari. I don't know. But you have some cognitive dissonance if you think 150 - 200K is still middle class.

[Ddrak]

I'm not sure where you're getting your definition of "middle class" from, but it's not the common one if you believe the median income belongs in the middle class. Pretty much every reference I can find has it just below the start of the middle class, with the middle class then extending to about the top 3-4% from there. That puts $150-$200k squarely in the upper middle class.

To quote wiki:

Sociologist Leonard Beeghley identifies a male making $57,000 and a female making $40,000 with a combined households income of $97,000 as a typical middle class family.[30] Sociologists William Thompson and Joseph Hickey estimate an income range of roughly $35,000 to $75,000 for the lower middle class and $100,000 or more for the upper middle class. Many social scientists including economist Micheal Zweig and sociologist Dennis Gilbert contend that middle class persons usually have above median incomes.

Dd

[Partha]

I'm not sure how you get THAT as a definition of middle class, though, when you consider the hard numbers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cla ... ted_States

Combined median income of 92K in a household puts one squarely in the top 20% of the country. Don't know how anyone can call that 'middle class' without either admitting that it's not a 'middle class' or claiming that the economy hasn't been helping the majority of Americans. You can take either position, far as I'm concerned.

[Ddrak]

Did you even read that page you posted, Partha? Check out the table "commonly used divisions". That's *exactly* what I was quoting from. The middle class is about the top 45% and has nothing to do with the median wage.

Dd

[Partha]

I'd ask if you read that page first, seeing as how you're more worried about academics' semantic labels rather than the hard numbers.

[Ddrak]

I don't understand what you're getting at. The "middle class" has never referred to the median income earner, and I've no idea who gave you that idea. It's the class above the "working class" who make up the majority of any society but have little disposable income, and below the "upper class" or "ruling class" who have actual direct power over the society due to their wealth or socio-political position. If you're trying to make some sort of case that the "middle class" is the middle of the income spectrum then you're just woefully misinformed.

The middle class is typically the upper 40-45% of income earners.

Dd

[Partha]

I see your problem. You keep changing your definitions.

I'd consider all but the top 5%-ish to be "middle class", probably starting at the 25%-35% mark.

Pretty much every reference I can find has it just below the start of the middle class, with the middle class then extending to about the top 3-4% from there.

The middle class is about the top 45% and has nothing to do with the median wage.

Klast was right.

[Ddrak]

I changed because my first one was wrong, after I did some research. Sorry about that - my bad for misleading you.

The second two are the same, and are also in line with the very same article you linked, so I'm STILL not sure what you're trying to prove. Go read a bit - the working class extends for about the bottom 55%, the middle for the next 45% or so and the upper/ruling is less than 1%. The definitions aren't to do with base incomes (median or not), but with the security of their jobs, the disposable incomes and the degree of financial independence they can enjoy.

Klast wasn't "right" at all, because he was trying to equate the middle class with the median income, which is an absolute falsehood under any recognized definition of "middle class".

Dd

[Klast Brell]

OK so by your definition the middle and upper classes are a smaller group than the lower class? Then who is this democratically elected government supposed to serve?

[Partha]

Every time we get in a discussion of "what is middle class" people who make more money start making all sorts of qualifications for why they still qualify as middle class.

"I live in an expensive neighborhood." You chose to live in an expensive neighborhood.
"i have a big mortgage." You chose to buy an expensive house. Just because you have big bills to pay every month does not mean you don't make enough money to pay them. Your big house in your expensive suburb, and your expensive car which you replace every 2 years, and your retirement fund, and the kids college fund, and your air travel to visit friends and family a few times a year. Sure all these things leave you with not much in the bank account. That does not stop the fact that you have a life stile that someone making the median income couldn't home to have.

If you and your wife each made 35K you would be making the median income for a couple in the U.S. http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/m ... state.html but you would have to live in a shittier part of town, in a small house, buy used economy cars and drive them in to the ground, put a couple grand a year to your retirement, hope your kids get good financial aid when they go to an inexpensive state college, and drive across 4 states to visit your parents. And your idea of not much in the bank account would be a couple hundred dollars in the account, not a couple thousand.

Maybe you tell yourself you are middle class because even tho you make 4 times the median you have aspirations of making 40 times. Maybe you tell yourself you are middle class because you have to drive an Expedition instead of a Range Rover, or a BMW instead of a Ferrari. I don't know. But you have some cognitive dissonance if you think 150 - 200K is still middle class.

I repeat: Klast was right.

[Embar Angylwrath]

OK so by your definition the middle and upper classes are a smaller group than the lower class? Then who is this democratically elected government supposed to serve?

Whoever votes them in.

If you're equating socio-economic class levels with just the "economic" part of that, then I'm sure you know that, as a whole, lower income individuals don't turn out the vote as much as higher income individuals.

[Partha]

Maybe not in terms of percentage, but in raw numbers, lower class voters far outsrip upper class ones.

[Chants Evensong]

In raw numbers, the upper classes vote far, far more than the lower classes.

[Partha]

Unpossible. Offer proof.

http://sda.berkeley.edu/D3/NES2004publi ... htm#v3293x

[Ariannda Kusanagi]

It is my personal opinion that the lower the income class, the more a person believes their vote doesn't matter and even if it did whomever it is their voting for doesn't care about them anyway. They care about those with money, aka power, aka influence, aka the chance to get something done for themselves to give them more money, aka power, aka influence.

But thats just my opinion, I've always voted no matter what.

[Ddrak]

OK so by your definition the middle and upper classes are a smaller group than the lower class? Then who is this democratically elected government supposed to serve?

It's not "my" definition. It's the accepted one, and yes - the middle and upper classes are smaller groups than the working classes.

The government serves the people as a whole. Not sure where you're going with that either - typically the debate is over how to best manage the system to gain a better collective benefit for everyone.

I repeat: Klast was right.

Nope - he wasn't. 150-200K is commonly accepted as well in the middle class. You've offered no argument against that aside from the strawman of "median wage", which has nothing to do with the middle class. What you're actually seeing is a bunch of working class people thinking they are middle class because they can't bear to acknowledge that they aren't - it's a common fallacy in the US.

Dd

[Klast Brell]

Unpossible. Offer proof.

http://sda.berkeley.edu/D3/NES2004publi ... htm#v3293x

I used to do these kind of studies. One thing that jumps out at me is that Upper class is a "volunteered" category. People have a natural tendency to limit themselves to the choices given. For instance asking someone if they are republican or democrat "volunteered independent" will result in very few people saying independent. Asking if they are republican independent or democrat, will result in a jump of 20 percent of more in the incidence of respondents self identifying as independent.

Having upper class as a volunteered category yields a bias resulting in less people self identifying as upper class. I don't know why the survey designers chose to omit that choice. Some times there are good reasons to omit a choice. Like when you know that it may bias answers in another way. Say you want to know how people will vote in the fall. If you give them the choice of independent you will miss out on 20% of the voting inclinations. If you leave the choice out or give them the choice of Strong republican moderate republican leaning republican leaning democrat moderate democrat strong democrat a huge number of the people who would otherwise self identify as independent, but really are going to vote party line when they get in the booth will shake out.

So I don't know why they omitted the choice. But i do know that it shifts people in to other categories. For the purposes of identifying upper class that survey is useless.

Now to move in to the real of purposely biasing respondents. I noticed that "lower class" was not a volunteered category, but an offered category. This will cause more people to place themselves in that category that would have if the opposite were true. So why would the survey designers create a situation where all the numbers were skewed downwards?

[Klast Brell]

commonly defined? I have a testable definition. Percent of the population at various income levels. For the sake of this debate I define the middle class as the middle 33%. Because income statistics are easily found in quintiles I'm willing to go as broad as the middle 60% or break it in to: 20% lower, 20% lower middle, 20% middle middle, 20% upper middle, 20% upper. You have not given your own testable definition. Only falling back on phrases like "commonly defined" Defined by who? Defined as what? Can you site any definition and it's source? US census bureau or GAO? Economics text book? etc?

I'm not trying to bust your chops here. I just want us to come to an agreement of what the middle class actually is.

[Embar Angylwrath]

Maybe not in terms of percentage, but in raw numbers, lower class voters far outsrip upper class ones.

http://www.census.gov/population/socdem ... /tab08.xls

Best I could find. Although the breakdown is by income, and not class (the two are linked, but not the same), you can see that as incomes rise, so does voter turn-out. If you take Klast's suggestion that around 40K is middle class, then the stats indicate those in the middle class and above overwhelmingly turn out the vote (in sheer raw numbers) than the lower class. Even if you move the bracket to those making above 50K, versus those making less than 50K, the group making above 50K outvotes the group making below 50K two to one.

Again, it sort of depends on where you draw the line on income, and how you relate it to class.

[Ddrak]

commonly defined? I have a testable definition. Percent of the population at various income levels. For the sake of this debate I define the middle class as the middle 33%. Because income statistics are easily found in quintiles I'm willing to go as broad as the middle 60% or break it in to: 20% lower, 20% lower middle, 20% middle middle, 20% upper middle, 20% upper. You have not given your own testable definition. Only falling back on phrases like "commonly defined" Defined by who? Defined as what? Can you site any definition and it's source? US census bureau or GAO? Economics text book? etc?

I'm not trying to bust your chops here. I just want us to come to an agreement of what the middle class actually is.

I wasn't falling back on "phrases" - if you go back through the thread I've used the definitions that sociologists tend to use, and wiki has excellent descriptions of. There's a good run down here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_middle_class

To summarize:

Gilbert, D. (2002) The American Class Structure: In An Age of Growing Inequality. Belmont, CA
Upper class = >1%, Middle class = 45%, Lower classes = 55%

Wadsworth; Thompson, W. & Hickey, J. (2005). Society in Focus. Boston, MA
Upper class = >1%, Middle class = 47%, Lower classes = 52%

Pearson, Allyn & Bacon; Beeghley, L. (2004). The Structure of Social Stratification in the United States. Boston, MA
Super Rich = >1%, Rich = 5%, Middle class = 46%, Lower classes = 50% (his math is suspect I think)

All seem to agree that the middle class incomes start above $35k and extend well into 6 figure mark. It's certainly not the division you were suggesting though, because class divisions aren't income based at all but are a sociological construct.

Dd