re: #313 Jay C

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Maybe, but there are a lot of folks (maybe not in absolute numbers, but certainly in “influence”) out there who take it as a given that $450K a year is, at best, middle-class wages.

Remember the flap back in the Obama Admin, when there were proposals to fiddle with the tax code, and some professor from (I think, U of Chicago) penned some Op-Ed screed about how miserable his life was, since he and his wife “only” pulled in about $650K a year, (like 5x the national-average annual income) and how they had, after expenses, like *NO* money left over? For doing anything in life worth doing?
(And the inevitable blowback: it turned out Prof. and wife lived in some huge house in some hugely-expensive neighborhood in Chicago, sent their kids to posh, pricey private schools, drove around in top-end BMWs, paid for nannies and servants 24/7, etc.)
It merely pointed out a common failing in American society: nobody cares (or seems to care) about how well-off they are vis-a-vis the “average”: most people’s economic horizons center only around that level just so much higher than their own. And then, mainly with envy…

I live in an area of the country that …ahem… distorts one’s picture of what’s normal. And I grew up in a family that was solidly upper middle class, so I have my own blinders to deal with even before that, and I still wrestle with what would I consider to be actually “rich.” It’s easy to see with the mega-wealthy.

It becomes a lot harder with where you draw the line otherwise. Is it based on saved wealth? Income including work? Income independent of working? I don’t have good answers to these questions and very often everyone has their own definition they’re working from anyway, and nobody spells out what it is before talking about these topics so I wonder how much we’re really understanding each other.

It would be nice if we didn’t have so many fucked up conventions about money in this country, to the point where it’s nearly impossible to have a conversation about it. But here we are.