If an income of $200k/year is "middle class".... [View all]
...then what is an income of about 1/4 of that ($50k/year-which is roughly the median household income for all Americans-single, married, those with children who work, etc.)
Yes, half of all American households take in less than $50,000/year. And that's before you factor in taxes ("but I thought half of all Americans don't pay taxes!!!"
And, of course, there are the many expenses-America is a rather expensive nation to live in. Not a good country to be poor in, and increasingly, not an easy country to be middle-income in.
The only places that $200k /year could even be conceivably considered "middle class" are the handful of really, really obscenely rich zip codes-you know, the places where the 1% are actually the 99%, within those zip codes. But let's confine ourselves to the real world, for the purposes of honesty about what's really happening.
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