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Psycho
Location: the center of the multiverse
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Bear Cub
There was another thread on this site that linked to a breakdown of proposed tax rates for both candidates based on income, and the tradeoff of where McCain's breaks became favorable was well below $250k a year.
As Necrosis put it, "rich" is a loosely thrown around term. I know people who pull in $200k a year who have a decent life, but are far from rich in their respective locations.
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I was referring (with a wink and a grin) to this sort of thing...
Quote:
Sorry, Pal, but You're Rich
The deluded business pundits and Obama critics who think $250,000 is a middle-class salary.
By Daniel Gross
Posted Wednesday, Aug. 27, 2008, at 5:51 PM ET
Barack Obama's tax plan, laid out by advisers Austan Goolsbee and Jason Furman in the Wall Street Journal in mid-August, promises to improve the nation's fiscal standing by scaling back tax cuts for people making more than $250,000. Since then, the business pundit class has been griping that people who make $250,000 a year aren't really wealthy, especially if they live in and around New York; San Francisco; or Washington, D.C. (Check out this CNBC debate, for example.) On Wednesday afternoon, CNBC's unscientific online poll found that (surprise!) only 35 percent of respondents believed an income of $250,000 qualified a household for elite rich status.
I have two pieces of bad news for the over-$250,000 crowd. First, the reversal of some of the temporary Bush tax cuts is probably inevitable, given the Republican fiscal clown show of the past eight years. Second, I regret to inform you that you are indeed rich.
To a large degree, feeling rich or poor is a state of mind, as John McCain recently noted. "Some people are wealthy and rich in their lives and their children and their ability to educate them. Others are poor if they're billionaires." But income data can surely tell us something. And they tell us that $250,000 puts you in pretty fancy company. The Census Bureau earlier this week reported that the median household income was $50,223 in 2007—up slightly from the last year but still below the 1999 peak. So a household that earned $250,000 made five times the median. In fact, as this chart shows, only 2.245 million U.S. households, the top 1.9 percent, had income greater than $250,000 in 2007. (About 20 percent of households make more than $100,000.)
In dealing with aggregate nationwide numbers, we should of course take account of the significant differences in the cost of living from state to state. It's obvious that $250,000 doesn't go as far in Santa Barbara, Calif., or Manhattan—or in most places where CNBC viewers, employees, and guests live—as it does in Paducah, Ky. As census data show, state median incomes vary from $65,933 in New Jersey to $35,971 in Mississippi. But even in wealthy states, $250,000 ain't bad—it's nearly four times the median income in wealthy states like Maryland and Connecticut. And even if you look at the wealthiest metropolitan areas—Washington, D.C. ($83,200); San Francisco ($73,851); Boston ($68,142); and New York ($61,554)—$250,000 a year dwarfs the median income.
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EDIT: The rest of this article can be found here... http://www.slate.com/id/2198806/
Last edited by Cynosure; 09-05-2008 at 08:31 AM..
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