[jppope]

Its pretty easy to understand actually, and all of metropolitan California is the same way- A normal, dual income, middle class working family has an income of ~$250K-$500K (Doctor + teacher, Lawyer and a Doctor, Business exec and Accountant, etc) and they're going to spend upwards of ~40% of their income on their house. thats going to have them spending $6K-$11K. Now they can handle a $1M home no problem. 3 bed 2 bath shitbox from the 70s sure thing... Anything to live in California. Same house in Kansas City is $300K but whatever. However, for them to go after a $2.5M+ property you need real money, a $5M house even more... you aren't working a normal person job to spend the estimated lifetime earnings of most Americans on a house... it just aint happening. So anything after ~$5M is a VASTLY better deal then the rat race housing.

All of these dynamics can be figured out pretty easy thanks to prop 13, Californias insane income taxes, and the job market... if you can figure out a way to buy a house, hold on to it for dear life, never move, and work your entire life to pay for it. The only thing more consistent than people in the northeast wanting to move to California are death and taxes, which coincidentally prop 13 covers. lol

[skrebbel]

Nitpick, but

> A normal, dual income, middle class working family

> (Doctor + teacher, Lawyer and a Doctor, Business exec and Accountant, etc)

That’s not the middle class.

[nabla9]

That's the traditional middle class. "American Middle Class" is a clever political trick. It was created to remove "working class" from the vocabulary so that people could no longer identify as such.

If we use only lifestyle indicators, such as making enough money to save and retire comfortably, having enough money to go on vacations and to restaurants frequently, and being able to buy a house, the middle class is shrinking.

[labcomputer]

Lol. Doctors and lawyers are the very definition of middle class!

Middle class is people who trade labor for money, but who sometimes have a (full or partial) ownership stake in the business they work for. They are what marxists might call the "petit bourgeoisie".

[dragonwriter]

> Doctors and lawyers are the very definition of middle class!

Doctors and lawyers are often middle class (petit bourgeois) but also can be part of the better paid, highly educated segment of the working class (proletarian intelligentsia). Economic class isn’t about job title or even really strictly income, though it correlates to both.

[labcomputer]

I think we agree.

The main point I was making is that doctors and lawyers (and tech workers!) are not members of some "upper" or "capitalist" (depending on which terms you prefer) class, irrespective of their income, because the value they collect is primarily a result of their labor.

[dragonwriter]

The petit bourgeoisie and the haut bourgeoisie are both capitalist classes, though the petit bourgeoisie is a hybrid capitalist class (in the traditional formulation, dependent on ability to apply their own labor to their capital in order to live without liquidating capital [0]) rather than a pure capitalist classs like the haut bourgeiosie. And while the petit bourgeoisie is a “middle” class in the sense of being situated between the proletariat and the haut bourgeoisie, both bourgeois classes are “upper” classes in the sense that in capitalist society they together represent an elite minority of the population, most of which working class.

The sense in which they are a “middle class is quite distinct from the usual American sense of “middle class” which is usually an income-defined band centered around median income which is overwhelming part of the working class in the scheme in which the petit bourgeoisie are the “middle class”.

[0] But I think most people who use the scheme now would recognize more diversity, including the form probably most common to modern white-collar professionals, where rather than applying their own labor to their own capital, a lot of the petit bourgeiosie both rents labor out to other capitalists in the manner typical of the proletariat and has capital to which rented labor is applied in the manner of the haut bourgeoisie, with both being significant to their interaction with the economy (distinguishing them from workers with incidental capital holdings or capitalists who incidentally have a “paid job” which they could take or leave without meaningfully impacting their lifestyle or overall engagement in the economy.)

[tills13]

Am I crazy or reading the wrong info or are you being hyperbolic when you say California has "insane" income taxes?

As an example, the effective rate when making $200k is 25% including federal taxes. That's great. You get to live in a productive and supportive society. The only issue I see is that housing is expensive and $150k, as much as it can support a comfortable lifestyle, would be insufficient to ALSO buy a home. But what we're talking about here is a separate issue from housing.

(your state taxes when making $100k would only be $2k, to preempt that retort)

[hylaride]

The tone around "high taxes" are set by the uber-rich. Hilariously, most of them borrow against their shares to fund their lifestyles (where the interest is tax-deductible!) if they're even still resident in CA.

That being said, California is an ungovernable mess where state-constitutional amendments dictate a huge percentage of taxation and spending. It'd otherwise be a great place to live if real estate prices were somehow brought into line, but alas...

[wonderwonder]

I feel like the Canadian style "just let it happen" approach to crime is a bit of a negative as well

[nicholasbraker]

Damn, only 25%? Luxury!