Xstryker Picked This Up In A Flash
While we were live blogging the debate Xstryker noted that what Charlie Gibson thinks of as middle class (people who make $200,000 per year) most people would consider rich.
Indeed, people who do have a family income of $200,000 are in the top fifth of the country in income.
Tags: (h/t atrios)
Jason, that link is screwy. I cannot seem to find the original link. Can you fix it?
fixed.
Thanks!
Gibson did it at the New Hampshire debate too:
GIBSON: …You’re all talking about letting some of the Bush tax cuts lapse. And yet…
CLINTON: Yes, but, Charlie, the tax cuts on the wealthiest of Americans; not the middle-class tax cuts. One of the problems with George Bush’s tax policy has been the way he has tilted it for the wealthy and the well-connected.
GIBSON: If you take a family of two professors, here at Saint Anselm, they’re going to be in the $200,000 category that you’re talking about lifting the taxes on.
(LAUGHTER)
GIBSON: And…
(CROSSTALK)
(LAUGHTER)
CLINTON: That may be NYU, Charlie. I don’t think it’s St. Anselm.
GIBSON: Two public school teachers in New York?
(LAUGHTER)
***********
EDWARDS: …This is a battle for the middle class….You talk about professors here, at this college. Let me say a word…
GIBSON: Well, I shouldn’t have done that, apparently.
EDWARDS: Yes, it was a mistake.
(LAUGHTER)
Let’s look at who Obama thinks is middle class. He constantly refers to families making under $75,000 per. Does that mean two working parents who make $40,000 each and have four kids are not middle class?
Obama seems to think so. He certainly plans to cut the taxes of families making $75gs or less. But, what does he have in mind for those of us that fall on the plus side of $75gs?
A family of three whose household income is $74,999 should expect a deduction. However, if Obama takes office a family of six whose household income is $76,000 per should expect there taxes to do no better than stay where there are. Further, most see a tax increase in store for the latter. This is Obama’s idea of “fairness!”
Gibson is dead wrong. However, I really don’t think Obama has much of a clue either when talking about the middle class.
If you go all the way through the link to the source, one of the interesting things you find (part of the “how to lie with statistics course”) is that for the three lowest fifths of the spectrum the chart-makers have used single-income families; for the two top fifths, they have used a 2-income average.
This is a really disingenuous way to distort the data. I’m not even sure how to parse this data, now.
Any real measure of “middle” or other class has to find a way to regulate for the number of earners, the geographic location (which affects cost of living in a highly variable fashion), and even the age of the family (what puts a family in their late 20s in the middle class is different from what puts one in their 50s into it).
So I throw the question back to Jason. Family of 4, national average. Where between $75-200K do you top out middle class?
100k.
Next question?
that for the three lowest fifths of the spectrum the chart-makers have used single-income families; for the two top fifths, they have used a 2-income average.
The data when you click through are US Census survey data that the authors of the chart have analyzed to determine financial characteristics of this population. They have not selected or sampled for single income or double income families, they are pretty clear that:
Household type is strongly correlated with household income. Married couples are disproportionately represented in the upper two quintiles, compared to the general population of households. Cross-referencing shows that this is likely due to the presence of multiple income earners in these families. Non-family households (individuals) are disproportionately represented in the lower two quintiles. Households headed by single males are disproportionately found in the middle three quintiles; single females head households concentrated in the bottom three quintiles. Median (and they do say median) number of wage earners in a household correlates with higher wages.
Certainly work at some definition of middle class, but this data as presented in that link is not doing anything that it should not in reference to the median number of wage earners per household by quintiles.
cassandra–of course it is. Statistically speaking, I don’t care whether the Census Bureau did it or not, it is quantitatively invalid.
Here’s why. Take von Cracker’s 100k as the upper limit for middle class (I think he’s wrong, but you could use any figure for this demonstration.)
Posit a family of four with a single breadwinner who makes 75k and they get by reasonably well. But about the time their children first go to school they realize that they are not managing to save enough for college educations, and so they make the decision that the second parent should go to work to lay that money aside, and also to provide the extra family vacation now and then.
The second earner makes 30K, bringing them to 105K, which–according to vC’s definition–removes them from the middle class, and calls for any additional income to be taxed at a much higher rate. They are being penalized heavily for being financially responsible.
If, in the upper quintiles, there are more dual-income households and you use this fact to penalize those households for tax purposes, what you are going to find is that you have given the Christian neo-cons their heaven: professional women will start leaving the workforce because it no longer makes economic sense for them to stay there. In fact, being home NOT earning an income and not paying for child care will allow them to keep more of the money they earn.
So much for gender equality.
This is a shell game of measuring unlike categories, and it is intellectually dishonest.
von Cracker’s 100K barrier for breaking out of middle class is ludicrous.
In northern Delaware, two public school teachers, both age 45, with 20 years service between them and two children to pay for in college will be rich by his definition.
Take another example: a skilled building trades professional makes $65K (thank you prevailing wage law), brings in an additional $10K on the side tending bar on the weekends, and his wife busts herself making $30 as an administrative assistant to some DE corporate boss. Yeah, $105K and they’re freaking rich, right?
$200 K, much as you guys hate to admit it, is not far off the mark as a reasonable northern end of middle class.
Of course, I don’t expect anybody here to acknowledge that.
Well, no.
You are trying to make this data have a narrative that it won’t support. It is just fine to redefine their quintiles and redo this to whatever methodology you want. You originally critiqued this data as lying in accounting for the number of wage earners per household. That is completely untrue.
The categories rely on exactly what the Census can measure — not on some narrative re: excessive taxation or what a family in some quintile can afford. Argue for some other methodology if it suits your narrative, but my sole point here is that your original accusation of the truth of this data is quite wrong.
Steve, I would put VC’s number somewhere around 150K for a household with two earners and 2 kids. Above that you are now leaving the middle class.
That said, someone smarter than me defined the line between middle-calls and upper class as financial independence. I’m not sure how to quantify that, but I can see it as a concept.
Charlie Gibson should not be choosing the numbers for us. Period.