= new reply since forum marked as read
I paid $200 for mine, and now that it's repaired it's a serviceable $1500 car. High end? Not so much.
with low miles. Maybe i should also check out a Subaru or two 
On edit: I just am so happy there are things like edit and craigslist
I bought each at about 4 years old, 75,000 miles on. each..first 2 lasted past 250,000..my present 2003 has about 130,000 and going strong..
:>
Two times the income of having three jobs at the going rate in education.
Fortunately, I have other sources of income but still don't reach 50% of middle class as a household.
And I've got engineer and architect and even stockbroker friends who are dying right now, not even making over $100K (but are close).
The $250K household even with two incomes is nothing like middle class, or median, or mode.
If you have some data I'd love to see it.
That gives a little perspective.
200K can't be rich
You keep attacking points that other people do not make, i.e., creating straw men.
Once again, I am not saying that $250K is the same as $50K. I am saying that a household income of $250K has a life that is more similar to one of a household making $50K/yr than one where the household is a 1% household.
That has been my point from the beginning and it is one you have not addressed. You keep addressing all kinds of other points that no one has made.
If we cut anyone's income by 80% it is going to be a severe change. No one asserted otherwise.
On Edit: Here, you need this badly:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
A straw man or straw person, also known in the UK as an Aunt Sally,[1][2] is a type of argument and is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position.[3] To "attack a straw man" is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by replacing it with a superficially similar yet unequivalent proposition (the "straw man" , and to refute it, without ever having actually refuted the original position.
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Structure
The straw man fallacy occurs in the following pattern of argument:
1. Person 1 has position X.
2. Person 2 disregards certain key points of X and instead presents the superficially similar position Y. The position Y is a distorted version of X and can be set up in several ways, including:
1.Presenting a misrepresentation of the opponent's position.
2.Quoting an opponent's words out of context—i.e., choosing quotations that misrepresent the opponent's actual intentions (see fallacy of quoting out of context).
3.Presenting someone who defends a position poorly as the defender, then refuting that person's arguments—thus giving the appearance that every upholder of that position (and thus the position itself) has been defeated.[3]
4.Inventing a fictitious persona with actions or beliefs which are then criticized, implying that the person represents a group of whom the speaker is critical.
5.Oversimplifying an opponent's argument, then attacking this oversimplified version.
3.Person 2 attacks position Y, concluding that X is false/incorrect/flawed.
This reasoning is fallacious because attacking a distorted version of a position does not address the actual position.
Look, I am guessing you are an Occupy supporter, right? So am I. There were several points to why Occupy targeted the top 1% of wealthy folks as receiving too favorable treatment and the rest of the 99% as not getting our fair share.
Virtually all growth in wealth in the last 40 years was among the top 1%. Beneath the 1% wealth grew by either little or virtually zero amounts.
Here are graphs that illustrate the point by income and then by wealth:
Income:
Wealth:
The problem is not 99%ers that earn $250K/yr, the problem is the policies that unfairly benefit the top 1% in wealth.
The three scenarios presented below include incomes that would all fall into the 25% bracket on ordinary income. None actually pay 25%. The highest in that bracket comes close when adding SS and MED FICA but considering federal income taxes alone, the lowest will end up paying 11% federal income taxes and the highest will end up paying 18% federal income taxes. (The percentage tax computation chart that I used comes from the IRS 1040 handbook.)
This pattern holds true for every bracket. The lowest ordinary income in a bracket will pay a smaller percentage of federal income tax than the highest income in the same bracket.
What skews the percentage for the wealthy is that they rarely take the standard deductions because their mortgage, property tax, and charitable contributions combined will be much huger than the standard. Also, long term capital gains are taxed at 15% and the wealthy can take advantage off off-shore tax shelters. And keep in mind that SS FICA is only assessed on the first $106,000 in income.
That is why people like Mitt Romney and Warren Buffet are able to pay a lower percentage of their income than someone in the 25% tax bracket.
And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process — by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute — the machine did raise the living standards of the average human being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.
But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction — indeed, in some sense was the destruction — of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable.
For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.
George Orwell
- It's really not that difficult to see or understand why TPTB created this system. If everyone benefits equally, or just fairly from the earth's bounty and man's invention -- then there would be no need. And without those who are always in need or dire poverty, then capitalism can't exist......
K&R
