| While I appreciate the effort to bring attention to the serious differences between the simply well-off and the astonishingly-rich-and-powerful, I'm having trouble wrapping my head around some of this: "While income and lifestyle are all relative, an after-tax income between $6.6k and $8.3k per month today will hardly buy the fantasy lifestyles that Americans see on TV and would consider 'rich.' In many areas in California or the East Coast, this positions one squarely in the hard working upper-middle class, and strict budgeting will be essential. An income of $190k post tax or $15.8k per month will certainly buy a nice lifestyle but is far from rich." What in the hell? Where I come from, six figures is rich, period. I grew up in a household whose yearly income was a bit over $100,000 (pre-tax), and had no delusions about my place in the economy. Sure, weren't "free from financial worry," but we nonetheless could afford the occasional vacation and a new or semi-new car when we needed it. My significant other comes from a place where $50,000 each year (pre-tax) is considered rich (and this in the apparently-mythical California, no less). She grew up with a pre-tax annual income of less than $10,000. While it's inaccurate an potentially damaging to misrepresent the degree to which it truly is the super-rich that benefit most dramatically from our economy, it also seems just as potentially damaging to write as though we really are all in the middle-class. This article seems to utterly silence the existence of poverty and the working class in order to make its point. Maybe I just come from one of those strange parts of the country where we still have backwards things like "industry" and a "proletariat." I suspect, however, there's a lot more folks from places like where I'm from than places like the strange utopia this guy lives in. Uh, </end_rant>? |