What makes someone middle class? According to Mitt Romney, it’s as simple as making less than $200,000 or $250,000 a year. But as Derek Thompson notes, that implies that 96 percent of Americans are middle-class:
In fairness, this is the same cutoff for “middle income” that Barack
Obama has used in talking about the Bush tax cuts. $200,000 is also the
cutoff that the Tax Policy Center used in finding
that Romney’s tax plan will raise taxes for the vast majority of
Americans. Economists who have criticized the TPC study, such as
Harvard’s Martin Feldstein and Princeton’s Harvey Rosen,
focus on this element, with Feldstein arguing that $100,000 is a more
appropriate cutoff and Rosen admitting that it becomes much harder for
Romney’s plan to work without raising taxes on middle-income people if
$200,000 is the cutoff than if $100,000 is. But what does a more
reasonable definition of “middle class” include, and what does that
class look like? And what does the tiny portion of the population
that isn’t middle-class under Romney’s definition look like?
One plausible definition of “middle-class” is those households in the middle quintile of the income distribution, or between the 40th and 60th percentiles. Under this view, 0-20th percentile is lower class, 20th-40th is lower-middle class, 40th-60th is middle class, 60th-80th is upper middle class, and 80th to 99th is upper class. The lower classes make under $20,262, in this view, and the upper classes above $101,582, according to the latest Census data. How do the classes compare, then? Let’s compare the five classes, as well as what we’ll call the Romney/Obama upper class, defined as those making over $200,000 a year. Here’s how much each group makes, on average:
People
not in the middle class, under Romney and Obama’s definition, make a
mean of $426,271; the top quintile makes, on average, less than half
that. The lower and RO upper classes are likelier to live in cities than
the middle class, but in general the richer a quintile is, the more
suburban and less urban or rural it is as well (RO upper class is over
$200,000 here):
The RO upper classes are much more Northeastern and Western than the country as a whole:
And as you’d suspect, the RO upper classes are a whole lot whiter than the rest of the country:
Source: Derek Thompson
One plausible definition of “middle-class” is those households in the middle quintile of the income distribution, or between the 40th and 60th percentiles. Under this view, 0-20th percentile is lower class, 20th-40th is lower-middle class, 40th-60th is middle class, 60th-80th is upper middle class, and 80th to 99th is upper class. The lower classes make under $20,262, in this view, and the upper classes above $101,582, according to the latest Census data. How do the classes compare, then? Let’s compare the five classes, as well as what we’ll call the Romney/Obama upper class, defined as those making over $200,000 a year. Here’s how much each group makes, on average:
People
not in the middle class, under Romney and Obama’s definition, make a
mean of $426,271; the top quintile makes, on average, less than half
that. The lower and RO upper classes are likelier to live in cities than
the middle class, but in general the richer a quintile is, the more
suburban and less urban or rural it is as well (RO upper class is over
$200,000 here):The RO upper classes are much more Northeastern and Western than the country as a whole:
And as you’d suspect, the RO upper classes are a whole lot whiter than the rest of the country:
No comments:
Post a Comment