In a recent campaign stop Mitt Romney addressed the subject of increasing taxes on the rich, rejecting the idea and saying “I want everyone in America to be rich.” This isn’t the first time this comment has been made by a politician running for public office and needless to say it won’t be the last. However it begs the question, is this sort of rhetoric anything other than campaign trail flourish and / or wishful thinking. Surely a guy as smart as Mitt Romney knows that everyone can’t become rich, particularly at a time when the American economy is undergoing widespread and possibly generational changes. Those changes may in the end reveal that we here in the United States are at a profound structural disadvantage vis a vis the emerging economies of East Asia and our ability to increase the wealth of our citizens will be far more challenging in the future than it was in the past when we were the undisputed and dominant world economy.
Not to put a damper on the spirit of striving and climbing one’s way to the top, but realistically wouldn’t Romney, or any other politician for that matter, be better off talking about making sure we have policies in place that will give everyone a shot at being middle class? Surely that’s a feat that would be far more realistic as opposed to creating a society where everyone is rich. As a matter of fact to my knowledge that sort of society has never existed. Even in places like Bahrain or Saudi Arabia with their generous oil income distribution policies, everyone isn’t rich so how can Romney hope to achieve that here in the United States?
SJG
9/28/11
Please share widely!
What yearly income do you need to have a middle-class family in Massachusetts?
On your assets (do you own your own home or pay $3,000+ every month for a mortgage?) and on your expenses (how many kids in your family? Are you also taking care of elderly relatives?).
But, generally, I think the median annual houshold income (about $65,000) is instructive. That’s with a median household size of about 2.5 people. So, you’ll need a little more if you family is bigger and less for a childless couple. Plus, “middle class” is a broad range.
So, how does $50-$100,000 of household income sound to you as “middle class”?
Gross pay $100,000.00
Married filing jointly
5 witholding allowances for 2 kids.
Gross pay $100,000.00
Federal income tax $10,650.00
Social Security $4,200.00
Medicare $1,450.00
Massachusetts $4,907.80
Net pay (take home) $78,792.20
figuring you get $300,000 home loan:
-$2000/month = 24000 annually
= $55,000
2 cars $60,000 loan
cost to own $20,000/year
= $35,000
Property tax on $300,000 home
avg for MA = $3500
= $31,500
utils:
$6000/year
groceries $12000/year
clothes $6000 year
= $7,500 left over
Here’s what you haven’t paid for
private school
vacation
extra health care expenses
furniture for your home, computers, tv
health club
a pet
kids sports or educational extras
eating out
entertainment
retirement
college savings
Welcome to the world.
You owe them a chunk every month for the degree that got you the $100,000 income.
The timing on this thread is a bit off, perhaps because it is an off-year election.
Usually, in October, the line is: “you may have what was once considered a middle class income, but it doesn’t get what it used to, you have more in common with the poor/working class. Let’s tax the rich and improve everything.”
It doesn’t usually switch to: Wait, you want a house, and to heat it, AND to have a car? You’re rich!” until mid-November.
I am particularly amused by the “today’s mortgage rates” line, as today’s mortgage rates are not within reach unless you, today, have 20% equity in the house and pristine credit– i.e., you are already quite well off. The only ones who have significant equity in their homes, after a 40% decline in values, are those who (i) have owned their homes for decades, and paid their original loans way down, or (ii) came up with the 20% down payment, which means they had the ability to write a check for $50,000.00.
I can’t figure it out, except that people just don’t want to work, but they don’t like somebody else eating their lunch, getting the nicer house, the nicer car and the pretty girl or boy. So the solution, instead of working harder, is to hack those people down until they are closer to the rest of us, even if in absolute terms it makes us worse-off as a result.
There are 14 million unemployed people in the U.S. and there are 3.2 million job openings. That’s a ratio of 4:1. It was even worse in 2009, but at 4:1 it’s still higher than at anytime between 1951 and 2007.
Source: CNN story on labor department figures, September 2011
You’ve stopped mid-way through your thought: Of course people don’t want to work UNDER TERMS THAT ARE SET BY OLIGARCHS: Getting a Ph.D and training for some specific career isn’t going to go to well if they want to pay pennies for the task.
An educated workforce has a pretty clarified idea of the value of the work of which they are capable. But when economic forces are so directed to push excess and unfair pressure on wages, regardless of productivity, COLA, and other such factors, people aren’t going to jump for joy asking for work at wages others dictate as too low.
If you truly believe that people who earn $100,000 aren’t doing so well, then how can you not be horrified by the fact that the median household income in cities like Springfield is under $40,000? Or that a good portion of Springfield households (like 25%) make under $25,000?
How can you justify $60,000 worth of cars as reasonable for someone who feels that money is tight?
I AM horrified.
New Honda Civics are all over $25K, a new Toyota minivan is $40K. If somebody is paying you $100,000 salary they expect you to be at work all the time and won’t tolerate your car breaking down.
2012 Honda Civic Coupe MSRP: $15,605 – $23,455
do with a Honda Civic Coupe, unless your middle class family can’t go anywhere as a group by automobile because they don’t fit in it?
The half-person sits in the back. Or am I misunderstanding what “a family of 2.5” is?
Well played.
In any event, I don’t think it unusual for a family of four to require two vehicles capable of fitting four vehicles and stuff. If things work well, you can have one of them at a time paid for, such that the older one needs to be replaced around the time that the newer one is paid off. If the newer one is actually used, then your total car loan will be in the $15-25K range, unless you have a lot of cash for downpayment, which our hypothetical family here does not.
by a factor of four. It’s relatively easy to get a 60 month loan for a car with 5% down. We pay about $400 a month, or $5,000 or so a year for our Subaru. Cars nowadays easily last 10 years, so assuming a loan for two cars is probably not fair.
Cost to own includes the your loan, gas, maintenance and repairs and insurance.
I think your numbers are inflated. For instance, a $2000 monthly mortgage payment on a $300K loan is much more than today’s interest rates would require. $1000 a month for groceries? Are they shopping only at Whole Foods? $6000 for clothes? Also, private school? Health club? The family you’ve described would be fiscally irresponsible to put out money for those things.
And the truth is the family I describe is not paying for private school, not saving, not buying appliances, they never get sick and nothing breaks in their house.
I pay a mortgage and feed a family, too, and those numbers are way out of line. Here’s a mortgage calculator that says the monthly payment on a $250K loan at 5% is $1650. There is no way we spend anything like $1000 a month on food. All our groceries go on a credit card, and even with other card purchases (like clothes), the card statement is $500 to $600 a month.
If you blow money like that, it’s no wonder you think the middle class includes people making way over $100K.
I love how you guys try to cut these things down…. If you have a new car you’re a rich person. If you buy food for three meals a day for FOUR PEOPLE you’re a rich person…. ride a bike
And try your mortgage calculator for a $300,000 loan like I said. Where did you get $50,000 lying around for your downpayment? Are you a rich person???? Your explanations of the savings you want these families to take just show how you don’t get the problem! You expect them to chip away at the middle class life and still call it just as good as it was before!
Your speculations are ridiculous, but only serve to show me that the loudest mouths in the Dem party don’t really have much life experience and should not be allowed to judge economic issues for anybody. I know plenty of families in Boston. It takes at least $150,000 to have a middle class life for a family of four here. Between taxes, cars and house you will cut $60K off a $100K income and that’s non-negotiable stuff, your housing and your transportation and the government take! Believe or don’t, but maybe try living it first.
I am living a middle-class life on considerably less than your $150K. And yes, feeding four. You go on about how much it costs families in Boston, and you keep coming back to the cost of cars. If I lived in Boston (and the only thing that would persuade me to do that is if I had a job there), the first thing I’d do is get rid of the car. Oh, make that cars, because your suffering city-dwellers have two of them, which they owe $60K on. I know bunches of people who live in the city, and they don’t own any cars, let alone $30,000+ cars. They do just fine without. So much for “non-negotiable.”
Tell me all about your life experiences that make you so much more knowledgeable than I am. Have you worked for years at blue-collar jobs? Are you a veteran? Have you had any serious health problems? Just who are you to lecture me about life experiences, anyway?
If you really believed in the middle class you would say “Here’s how I’m going to get you a high income so you can have a middle class life.” Instead your instinct is to say “You shouldn’t want those middle class life things, here is where you should be cutting”. It’s Democratic austerity.
I agree with you that there are problems of design that can be solved in other ways besides individual income. For instance yes you could take the T or a bike, except that the T doesn’t work for somebody who needs to be someplace. So yes I have tried what you said and it didn’t work.
Mitt Romney wants everyone to be rich. Not everyone, however, wants to be rich. Some just want to live well but not extravagently. Some just don’t want to be poor. Perhaps this is incompatible? Perhaps the desire to be rich is the chief impetus behind inflation? Perhaps inflation, the thing that most prevents people from achieving “those middle class life things”, is driven by rapacious fortune seeking and ‘conspicuous consumption’. Perhaps inflation is a clear correlative with wealth inequality? If Romney wasn’t so greedy maybe my middle class life would be more attainable? What happens when his right to be rich interferes with my right to live comfortably?
I admit, I buy a fair amount of organic products, because, well, buying conventional meat, milk and some veggies isn’t worth the risk to my daughter. Little good it does her to have an excellent education is she dies of breast cancer because added hormones caused her to enter puberty at 9…
That being said, I can’t get out of the grocery store for my family of four for less than $150 to $200 ($650 – $850 /month). That includes soap and razors, but that’s stuff we have to buy. I guess I could shave some money off by only shopping at Market Basket, but it’s a 20 minute drive and their selection of natural foods is less than ideal.
I was on the losing side of this argument over our own expenses so I know what it takes.
I think the mortgage number is quite understated, at least for any borrower who has had the mortgage for more than a year or two, when rates were closer to 6-7%. Also, that rate is really only available if you can write the $50,000 check for the equity.
With respect to groceries, our experience mid-state is that his figure might be a a bit high, but not absurdly so. I would say $800/month. That can be driven down by buying processed crap rather than fresh meat and produce, but once you’re forced into Stouffers for cost reasons, it is pretty hard to call yourself middle class.
Private school must be considered in the context of the mortgage. We have assumed a $300,000 home, which must be within commuting distance of a $100,000 job. (I assume that only one spouse works, because nothing has been said about day-care, which could run $30,000+/year for two kids if you’re quite lucky). Public schools in areas that match that description are, more often than not, of the “struggling” and “chronically underfunded” variety. So, either keep the private schools, or put another $1-2K/month on the mortgage.
$125/month/person is probably a bit high for clothing, but certainly isn’t extravagant, especially if you don’t have a source of hand-me-downs for the kids, and if their feet grow.
Its thus seems that your view of “rich” has a rather low threshold, and includes anyone who lives anything other than the most spartan (and urban) lifestyle.
of the 98% of Americans, who are running as fast as they can to keep ahead of disaster.
Elizabeth Warren gave a lecture in 2007 on how the middleclass has been losing the things that were once the staples of the middleclass lifestyle, which are now too often, un-affordable luxuries.
Not only does this effect the middleclass, but if they must cut back on these purchases, it causes a retraction in the economy, which means further decline……..
Absolutely true, in all respects.
But.
What they neither know nor believe is that the Democratic party offers any solution to this at all. Rather, it has historically seemed like Democratic party policy is to create some new government program to help people in some way, direct the benefits of that program to the people “who need it the most” (i.e., not the struggling middle class), and then seek to pay for said program with new taxes on everyone who is “rich” (i.e., including the struggling middle class, but not the truly rich, who are powerful enough to deflect such effort).
So, that struggling middle class perceives itself to be beset on its left by ever-expanding welfare and entitlement programs directed elsewhere to be paid for out of its pocket, and on its right by the ever-expanding effort to completely isolate and remove the truly rich from American society and indeed even the rule of law. It is for this reason that the struggling middle class is often described as “Independent” or as a “swing-voter” and how the “middle class” which one would think should be economically liberal, were once heavily populated with Reagan Democrats.
are not expanding.
Agree that the Democratic Party doesn’t always act in the interests of the middleclass, but more often. Both parties are under assault from powerful corporate lobbyists. The poor are not getting richer, the wealthy are the ones that are the beneficiaries of one of the greatest transfers of wealth in our countries history, through web of corporate, business and tax laws that benefit them at the expense of our countries future.
How does that story go about the plate of a dozen cookies. The corporate suit reaches over and grabs 11 of the cookies and whispers to the guy next to him, “That (union, teaparty, immigrant, government employee, liberal, poor….) person is trying to steal your cookie.
Welfare programs have been contracting dramatically in the past 15 + years.
In 1994, there were 103,600 families with children receiving welfare in Massachusetts. Today, even in the worst recession in decades, 51,311 families with children are receiving welfare.
And what’s going on here is consistent across the country.
Sue is right – somebody else is stealing cookies from the middle class.
Sources here and here.
Much of the middle class has been voting for more than 15 years. The phenomenon I describe is many decades old.
And this success was largely the result of Clinton-era policies directed toward the middle class (and for which he was widely vilified by his own party).
Because of Clinton era welfare reform. Clinton, who just happened to be extremely popular among….
But Clinton’s efforts to address the concerns of the middle class were thereafter either dismissed or even vilified by the Democrats, and especially liberal Democrats, as “triangulating”– something to be avoided by Dems at all costs now.
The cookie thing is nifty, but misses the point that there is no political party that exists to look after the middle class’ cookie. The existing political parties are ideologically hard-wired to view it as that from which things must be taken. The middle class is never the base of the party, either party, which must be protected, but rather the “big tent” who must be grudgingly admitted, and barely tolerated, but only to the point necessary to ensure 51% of the vote.
people are getting ripped off.
Scapegoating the powerless and encouraging them to turn on each other has caused a distraction that has allowed the 1% to get away with the greatest re-distribution of wealth in the history of the country.
Who losses? Both liberals and conservatives, labor and small business, immigrants and native born….the other 99%.
I think I agree with you on this – the D’s aren’t protecting middle class interests sufficiently. But I think they’re acting too much like Republicans, siding with the rich. Tim Geithner and all that.
Anyway, somewhat related subject — I’m in the middle of Griftopia by Matt Taibbi and this thread reminds me of something he wrote:
I think he’s on to something.
.
We in the middle class are far too stupid to understand that Dems are full of grad plans that can be financed entirely by taxes imposed on a “couple of obnoxious bankers on the Upper West Side,” arithmetic to the contrary notwithstanding.