Dylan Matthews at Wonkblog does us all a service today by passing around this chart from today's Census Bureau release on Income, Poverty and Insurance:
As he notes in his post, "If you're in a family of four, and your family's income surpasses $66,000 a year, you're doing better than the typical American family. If you're making six figures, then you're doing much better than the typical American family. If you're making $200,000 or more, you're in truly rarified territory."
This gets at an enduring frustration of mine and of many of my colleagues. Everyone can't be "middle class." I'm sorry to shock the American conscience this way. My frustration boiled over just about one year ago when both candidates for the Presidency seemed to be advocating that the middle class included everyone up to those making "$200,000 to $250,000 and less." Governor Romney took more heat for it than President Obama did at the time, but Derek Thompson basically nails the dynamic in that post.
For starters, there's got to be a lower bound too. That's sort of a defining characteristic of the "middle." Beyond that it's impossible to have real conversations about what our policy choices should be when everyone is talking past each other like this.
So, a plea, can we as a society have a drum circle or a grand council or a loya jirga or whatever and come up with a rough approximation of what we're talking about when we say "middle class?"
Short of a unifying definition, maybe our politicians and policymakers, along with the wonks, sportos, and motorheads could start including some clarifying disclaimer of what they mean when they say "middle class?" Maybe our journalists could persistently try and get some meaning out of the blather by asking what is meant by "middle class" more frequently?
One of the things I liked about the forthcoming documentary, Inequality For All, is that Robert Reich puts forward an actual definition of "middle class" and uses that frame. IIRC, he intends "middle class" to mean 50% above and below the median, effectively households making between $25,000 and $75,000/year. Hey, that's way short of the Obama/Romney definition, but it seems pretty reasonable to me. What would it look like? Well five minutes in Paint got me this:
Everyone wants to strengthen the "middle class," but you need WILDLY different policies to help out people that are making $51,017 (actual median household income in 2012) and households that are making four or five times as much money, or hey, three times as much.What do we say? Put this up on your cube wall, pass it around to your friends and family and see if it helps you have more productive conversations about who is middle class and what our public policy should be.