An editor for the Chicago Tribune questions what anybody means by the term “middle class”. It’s a good question. He doesn’t have the answer, and neither do I. But I do think we can narrow it down. The answer may surprise you.

As I recall, back in the days when I graduated from college (late 80s), my first job had a starting salary of $17500. I thought it was a little lame. I think my manager made about $45K, and she had been with this large corporation for many years. She and the other woman I worked with chain-smoked cigarettes in the office all day long. Anyway, around that time my sister and her husband bought a new house for under $100K, and he probably made no more than $50K at the time. They were in their early 20s and doing just fine. I considered them very successful. New house, new furniture, new cars, new babies. No problem. As soon as they had a baby my sister stopped working. They loved Ronald Reagan, and they’ve been Republicans ever since.

This is not ancient history, but it might as well be. In those days a salary of $30K was a decent salary. You could live on that, have a decent car and a decent place to live.

Compared to 2000, we are spending 17% more for goods and services. Compared to 1987? I don’t know, but I estimate that where I live now, a family easily needs to bring in over $100K a year to live approximately like people used to live on $40K twenty years ago. That is some serious inflation. Of course, most families accomplish their middle class standard of living now by having multiple crappy jobs which, when pasted together, make the ends meet. Things have been sacrificed, but that’s another story.

The funny thing about “middle classness” is that despite how much more money it takes, the definition remains stuck in the 80s. There’s something about crossing that magic six figure salary line that pretends to vault us to the upper end of the middle class. Just a little more and you’ll be RICH!!! Keep working!!! Well maybe that used to be true, but today, of course, it’s total bullshit. A low six figure family income is just not that much money anymore. Just think about every time you’ve registered for some free service or product warranty, and the business wants to know your income. The choices always stop around $150 or $200K. If you make more money than that, I guess you don’t have to answer questions anymore. You’ve made it, baby. You are rich. Right?? Every time you see one of these marketing things, it confirms the official story of how we are supposed to sort out by income. Poor, middle, upper. Except the numbers I always see mean poor, not as poor, and middle. Wealthy? Where does wealthy start? Why are those people always invisible?

This website (last update 2005) estimates that the poorest rich earn $400K a year without working. That’s right. Rich people are so incredibly rich that after you’ve doubled the upper limit of every marketing questionnaire you’ve ever seen, you enter the outer slums of Richistan. And not to get into all of that, because you can read about it for yourself, but what does it mean about the definition of the middle class? It simply means that everybody who earns less than $400K without working is not rich. Clearly, they’re not poor. Aha! They must be the middle! Once you factor the truly rich into the picture, the middle class becomes everyone from about say $150K right on up to those who make a half million dollars annually without even working. So that means the rest of us are actually poor. OK? I mean, if we’re going to have a society that worships rich people, then let’s be honest. Look at the data. Read David Cay Johnston’s book Perfectly Legal. The system works this way for a reason. The people who greatly subsidize the rich are the very same people who smugly prance around thinking they shit cupcakes because they make $200-400K a year. Little do they know the joke is on them. It’s all a big head game.

Real rich people live in sequestered places where they don’t have to interface with life as we know it. They don’t go to grocery stores, and they don’t shop at the mall. They occupy different space.

But while we don’t see these people, they are out there making decisions every single day that affect you and me. They control vast resources. They amass more and more wealth with each passing day, week, month, and year. The bottom line is that from the rich man’s perspective, every moneybags asshole that ordinary people have to put up with is really just a middle class asshole, a wannabe who will never get into the club but who needs to die trying. As a result, I think it would be helpful to society if we all started using the same definitions.