There is no middle class. There are only working class and wealth class. Just because you are high earner in an office job doesn’t mean you’re not working class.
Yeah, I think people who say that don’t realize a few key things.
First, they don’t understand the ‘poverty tax’ - how not having money for things like a security deposit, reliable transportation, or bulk buying actually costs you more in the long run.
And second, they don’t see how thin the margin for error is for most middle-class families. One medical bill or job loss is all it takes to fall behind.
Depending on how you were raised you might think that this class is living in luxury until you realize that your parents relied on tull time double income to make that middle class happen. Marketing for this class is horrible for fighting class divide. It gives the impression that wealth is achievable for everyone which is just a lie.
They also don’t understand that the impact of the “lazy poor” is exaggerated by the rich to turn your attention away from The Big Theft.
Middle class IS below the poverty line.
The poverty line is a number made up by the wealthy to keep the “less poors” at odds with the “more poors” So that we don’t join forces and guillotine the motherfuckers.
There are conventional definitions of the poverty line. In France, it is defined by the national institute of statistics as:
The poverty threshold is conventionally set at 60% of the population’s median standard of living. It corresponds to a disposable income of €1,288 per month for a single person and €2,705 for a couple with two children under 14 years old. https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/5759045
There’s the Working class, who can’t live in society without trading their time for money in some way, or being given charity. And the Capital class, who can live in society without doing either.
I will add this to my vocabulary as I find it captures the issue in an easy to understand way.
It’s soooo much easier to be a class traitor when you don’t realize you’re part of that class
There is no true definition of middle class. People making only $30k a month consider themselves middle class and people making $1 million also think they are middle class.
There is no ‘middle’ class. There is only ownership and labour.
There are people who are fully owners and don’t do any labour, and those who subsist entirely on their labour and don’t own anything. Would it be fair to say that the middle class is anyone who works but still owns a non-zero amount of appreciating or revenue-generating assets?
I would argue there are at least 3 classes:
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The impoverished class that makes their living from the charity of others
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The working class that makes their living from their labor
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The ownership class that makes their living from owning things
You basically can’t live on charity one of the classes you mentioned almost doesn’t exist
in sane countries you actually can go quite far on charity alone, most every civilized place on earth outside of the US fully understands that most crime is done out of desperation than anything else…so they insure there are plentiful safety nets.
rock bottom in austrailia doesn’t compare to rock bottom in (insert red state of choice)
How about those that own things and control people so much that they can somehow get enough charity to live off it?
I somehow fail to understand how that manages to be a viable method.Fair enough, but in a more just system, the impoverished class would barely exist, if at all.
Fair enough, but in a more just system, class would not exist, at all.
FTFY :P
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There is only
ownershipparasites and labour.FTFY. You’re welcome.
Ha! Many thanks
If we guesstimate middle class by comparable lifestyle when the term was coined, it starts around 250k in today money. Comfortable house, lots of kids, multiple cars (but not luxury), at least one real traveling vacation every year, never worrying about paying bills or buying food, all while saving enough to retire by 55. There aren’t many people in the US with the income to match that. I’d say the middle class is dead.
I always take the middle class as the threshold where you have sufficient passive income to afford a dignified lifestyle without needing to work anymore but may choose to.
Examples would be landlords with a decent portfolio, business owners where all the work is done for them, and people with substantial savings and investments.
If you have to work to pay the bills, no matter how much you’re on, you’re working class. This can even include millionaires in high cost lifestyles.
If you’re so rich that you no longer need to care about the value of money then you are upper class.
That’s a lot of caveats.
There’s never been a middle class. The illusion of the “lazy poor” is fabricated by the wealth class to divide the working class.
Yes there was.
In 1960 the US minimum wage was $1.00/hour and the average house was $11,000.00.
Two kids could get married on high school graduation day and be self supporting homeowners by the time they turned 25.
Of course in those days, the rich were content with a mere $1 million…
You are correct! And it’s crazy how effective those high corporate tax rates were at distributing wealth to better society and create a healthy middleclass of consumers to fuel an economy and prevent it from collapsing.
Weird how everything’s turning to shit now that corporations don’t pay taxes and use all their earnings to influence government elections instead of needing to actually be accountable to them.
“Too big to fail” was actually just “too big to stop.” So now where there used to be a US government, there is a handful of billionaire cultists.
The middleclass 100% existed. Billionaires just stole it. The money that drove US spending across 3 decades is now all in 5 people’s bank accounts doing jack shit to help anyone but those 5 people.
Higher corporate taxes = a middle class. See most Nordic countries as a great example that still exists.
Thank you for making this point. A middle class is the sign of a functioning society.
actually most middle class voters voted and supported for the policies that destroyed themselves.
they started deinvesting our healthcare and education systems in the 70s, often as a part of the backlash of civil rights and the economic stagnation of the 70s.
Who do you think was responsible for convincing the middle class to vote against their own best interests?
It was the people who didn’t have to pay taxes after Reagonomics. They used their money to fill television, print, and eventually social media with propaganda. Propaganda that taxes were too high (for them) despite our entire social safety net outgrowing it’s sustainability.
And this form of propaganda was SO effective, the Russians figured they would do the same. Then the Chinese. Now the Saudis. So now we have just about every country in the world that hates America purchasing every second of entertainment they can to make sure we’re always voting against our best interests to the point we just about don’t have a country.
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The top income tax bracket in 2025 is 37%, for income earned over $751,600 (~$69,000 in 1960, married filing jointly).
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In 1960, >$20,000 and <$24,000 was 38% (married filing jointly). (~$219,000 to ~$263,000 in 2025 dollars). The top tax bracket then was 91%, with all sorts of steps between 38% and 91%.
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Adjusted for inflation, 11k in the 60s is equivalent to 120k today. You can get a house for that money. Not a big house, but houses weren’t that big back then either.
You’re right, but that’s not middle class–that’s working class. Making minimum wage and having a comfortable life is working class. The concept of “middle” class was a method of pitting one half of the working class against the other, so the rich could move from millions to billions.
Now you’re just playing with definitions.
“Middle class” is the term most people use.
I mostly agree. They’re synonymous today, but I think there’s still an important distinction.
The term “middle class” is distinct from the “lower class.” But those two are more or less the same when compared to the “upper class” (what I would call the “wealth class”). Both lower and middle classes need to work in order to survive, while the wealth class has enough money to live without working (many of them still work, but it’s optional for them).
Any distinction between lower and middle class ends up harming both, and allowing the upper class to hoard more wealth. I generally try to promote the term “working class” because it doesn’t divide us, and more accurately portrays the differences between classes.
An illustration in this vein:
I’ve watched people like you shoot themselves in the foot with useless arguments like this since I was in high school.
You can’t just say “Tax the rich.” No, we have to analyze every term and only use proper nomenclature. Heaven will fall if we call a Social Democrat a Socialist and the seas will part if we confuse an anarchist with a Trotskyite.
I’ve watched it for years, and I’ve never once see it help anyone actually win an election.
Holy generalizations, Batman!
My purpose in making the distinction isn’t to be pedantic, it’s to help clarify the nature of the class warfare we’re dealing with. I don’t care if you want to use the term “middle class”. I only bring up the distinction because of the nature of the original post, which was explicitly noting the false narrative of the “lazy poor”.
Tax the rich, restore the middle class, use whatever terminology you want. But understand that the poor are not the enemy of the middle class, and they’re not the villains. The rich people are.
Was going to bring up interest rates, but apparently a 30 year mortgage in 1960 was something like 7%. Which…isn’t that bad.
Lyndon Johnson wanted to have a massive war in Vietnam without raising taxes, so he printed money to pay for it. Nixon doubled down on LBJ’s plan. The OPEC oil embargo really made inflation soar. Jimmy Carter hired a man named Paul Volker to run the Fed and bring it under control. Carter’s plan worked, but only after Reagan won. Then Reagan turned around and started cutting taxes without a way to pay for the cuts.
In 1968 when Nixon came in, ‘middle class’ was one Union job supporting a family of four with enough left over for a few luxuries. By the time Bush Sr finished, ‘middle class’ was two incomes. In 1968 $1 million was a massive fortune; by 1993 it was what a rich guy paid for a party.
Mortgage rates were in the teens in the early 80s.
Yeah, that’s why I brought it up. I always assumed they were high in the 60s too.
It’s not fabricated, these people honestly think one can live the “welfare queen” lifestyle. Reagan said the words and it resonated with the Republicans, Fox News ran with it. But really, this isn’t some master plan. Unless you’ve been through it or tried getting welfare, you can’t know how hard it is and how little you get. I’ve talked to many people like this.
You have to earn below 130% of the poverty line to get food stamps. More you make, less you get. I will say that when I first moved here I was getting a ridiculous amount for a single guy, and they just kept sending it, no questions asked for 6-months. Those days are long gone.
God knows what you have to do to get an actual check, but you have to be worse off than merely needing food stamps. And those checks are paltry. Unless you’re renting a room in someone’s house, you’re not making rent.
Unemployment is a fucking joke. In Florida, employers have to pay $7,200 when you first start, and they have 6 months to get it all paid into the unemployment fund. I would have got a MAX of $4,200, then it’s over. That was less than a month’s pay from my last job.
There is a gauntlet to be run to get a single penny. And you have to keep running that gauntlet, over and over again. I could go on and on, but I figured out 3 decades back that it’s easier, less time consuming, and more profitable, to work a shit job 40-hours a week.
This is a recurring theme in American politics in all sorts of areas.
I’m Canadian-born, and went through the process of a TN1 status, to a green card, to citizenship. There is an astounding amount of ignorance around how that works.
For example, the vast majority of Americans thought I would be granted citizenship when I married an American. Nope! The only advantage marriage gives is that you get to skip the green card lottery.
But the process still takes months, dozens of forms, and several thousand dollars (and I did the paperwork myself–those not fluent in English or not as confident in the paperwork will end up paying over $10,000 easily). And citizenship takes years and even more paperwork. People who think immigrants are just coasting along enjoying the easy life need to turn off Fox News and get out and talk to people.
My wife is fighting for her 10-year green card right now. It’s a fucking nightmare.
The rich 1% are the middle class. America discarded the hereditary upper class when we banned titles of nobility.
In our free society there are only two classes : those with enough money that they never have to work again, and those without.
no. they aren’t.
i have family in the 1%. they think they are middle class, but nothing about them is middle class. their perception is deeply distorted.
the only reason they need to continue to work is that they massively over consume. they have 6 cars, boats, four properties, etc. if they cut that down to one modest house, modest travel, and dumped all the cars and boats etc, they could have retired 10 years ago in their 40s. there are 100s of articles about these types of people in major newspaper in magazines. how ‘difficult’ the life of multi millionaires int he upper west side is because this year they had to cut back on their 50K ski vacation to a 30K ski vacation. the ‘struggle’ it is to own 10 million in property and how they are terrified they might need to sell the vacation home they use 2 weeks year because it’s not going up in value as fast as they want and the taxes went up.
but if you talk to them they think they are working class ordinary folks and all of this is entirely normal. and if you dare suggest it isn’t they will tell you are a jealous asshole who is just lazy and hasn’t worked hard like they did. they are also super mad right now that they have to pay full tuition to send their kids to college, they feel like they are being ‘punished’ my the schools because their children should go to free for being smarter and richer than other kids and the stupid poor kids should be the ones paying full tuition. they are being ‘punished’ for their success, and poor lazy people are being ‘rewarded’. they absolutely are stoked at what Trump is doing with colleges and removing DEI and international students, because it means their kids have a better chance of getting into an elite school.
and all of their 1% friends are like this. most of their friends are actually WAY weather than they are. but if you go to a party with them all they will do nothing but go on and on about how poor and unfortunate they are because they can’t afford condos in Hawaii or 100 ft yachts or how worried they are their kids might have to go to a public state school and not a ivy league school and what a horrible social embarrassment that would be for them because their friends/family will think they raised stupid shitty kids.
Wealth does messed up things to our brains.
Nobody wants to believe they’re the “bad guys”, or “privileged”, or anything like that. So when you have more wealth than 99% of other people out there, you (consciously or subconsciously) come up with ways to justify it.
In this case, the multimillionaires believe they are the “normal”, middle-of-the-road class, because they compare themselves against the ultra-rich. And anyone who has less than them must be lazy, or bad with money, or some other moral failing. Because if the millionaires aren’t morally superior, the only other explanation is privilege or greed, and they can’t live with that.
There are a handful of wealthy people who haven’t succumbed to that as much. Dolly Parton is a great example–one article I read suggested she’d be one of the wealthiest people in the world if she weren’t donating 90 to 95% of her income for most of her career. But when you have empathy and a lot of wealth, you end up with just a little wealth and a lot of grateful people.
Yeah thats the “middle class”. They aren’t part of the working class (serfs) but also arent the hereditary owners of counties (nobles.).
Rich fucks who have more money than anyone else and yet removed about how hard they have it has literally always been what “middle class” means.
Washington and Jefferson was middle class. FDR and JFK were middle class. King George, Queen Elizabeth and King Charles are not
‘the rich get richer, the lazy live for free, and the middle class pays for it all’
This is what the country subreddit I abandoned more than a year ago became this fucking mentality. Like they’re toying with the idea of eugenics and limited voting rights. They’re figuratively and literally scared of the actual poor.
The difference between a million and a billion is about a billion. Millionaires are closer to zero than they are the ultra rich.
Sadly for your arguments, currently it is easier to lose any amount of money than to win it.
“I am closer to becoming a millionaire than Elon Musk is.”
Millionaires don’t count as ‘rich’ any more. One million is no longer enough for stability.
I disagree.
Low millions, like your net worth in your 60s when you own a home, potentially two cars, and a retirement fund. 1-4 million? Sure, not rich, well off by most standards.
Closing in on thay double digit millions? Yeah you’re rich. Hell, in most of the US, having a net worth of 7 million dollars is the ‘eccentric millionaire’ level for most of rural America.
most people middle aged people with six figure professional careers are millionaires. that’s why the number of millionaires keeps going up.
i’m not far off from being a millionaire myself. i probably would already be one had i started my current career at 22 and not 30.
however, most of my peers are of the NIMBY type who think growth and investment is bad because their homes will stop returning 5% gains year over year and they own stocks, so they also benefit massively from an inflated stock market.
most of my friends have turned from social progressives to social conservatives once they bought a house and had a kid. funny how that works. now they will removed at you for there being too much business and too much change/development/growth. 5-10 years ago they were removed about boring things were and there wasn’t enough development/change/growth.
Some of my peers should be rich enough to retire, but fell victim to lifestyle inflation. Sure they’re making $250k/year, but they moved into a $5k/mo apartment, go on expensive vacations, and just do whatever in their day to day. I don’t know where their money goes. Maybe they are secretly investing.
Meanwhile I live like a goblin on less
they spend it.
a huge chunk of it IME is that they don’t cook so they eat out almost every meal. That runs up into 1000s pretty quick. eating out in my city can run you easily $100+ a day. they also impulse buy trendy and expensive things, like Pelotons.
everything is about the image. without the image of being successful they have nothing.
I did have a coworker that was both a picky eater and didn’t cook. She’d order seamless (GrubHub) for most meals. That’s got to be like… $30/meal, two meals a day so $60, seven days a week, ~$400/week? My monthly food budget is like $200. Plus she’d go out drinking. Guess that adds up. That’s like $100k over five years.
She also had an expensive gym membership she didn’t use and was too shy to cancel.
There is no middle-class. There is the working class and the aristocrats.
That reminds me of a joke.
The working class walks into a bar . . .
In this economy‽
I’m about to walk into my fav microbrewery… Cheers! 🍻
what’s the cut off?
When you start using your capitol to sway local governments in your favor
It’s really hard to even decide what middle class is. I have a good job, good benefits, savings and retirement account, but if I lost my job we’d be homeless in 6 months.
I’d take that as working class personally. You could be earning 500K per year but if you still need to sell your time and energy to pay the bills then you’re not middle class yet.
“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.” - James Baldwin
No truer words.
That’s a good explanation of generational poverty and why it’s so expensive to be poor, but if Vimes is looking for the real reason the rich are so rich, he should read about surplus labor value. He seems to have ignored the broader class dynamics at play under capitalism.
Or maybe things are different on Discworld, I haven’t actually read the books.
plenty of rich people debt spend.
Yes, but they can afford to debt spend for better things they end up spending less for in the long run.
Did you actually read the quote, or are you just going off the biggest text?
