How is a guy who makes more than the rookie minimum in the NFL now a working class icon?  He makes five times the national average!

Joe the Plumber needs to realize that a growing number of Americans work for firms that either don’t provide medical benefits or force their employees to work less than 40 hours a week to avoid giving them benefits. Joe should also understand that these employers are in fact being subsidized by the American taxpayers who are forced to shoulder both the direct and indirect costs of our failing health care system. That we’re spending more on health care than all other industrialized nations and have a higher infant mortality rate than Cuba says we need to do better.

“The United States dropped to 29th in the world in infant mortality in 2004, the latest year that data are available from all countries, tying with Poland and Slovakia.” From an article by Mary Engel of the Los Angeles Times (10-14-08)

For too many Americans without health care, their only option is the hospital emergency room – an expensive provider of last resort for which we all pay dearly. CDC studies show that every dollar spent on preventative care saves over six dollars in costly critical care.

$250K is upper middle class. It’s a couple, each with professional occupations or someone who owns a small business working 10-12 hours a day for 6 days a week. Let’s see: What would you want to be paid to be a plumber working full time and factoring in 20 hours a week in overtime. You think you’ll be rich? Think you should give 40% away to a squandering government?

Rich is when you don’t have to work and can still afford to maintain your lifestyle.

Could you ever have imagined any presidential candidate telling a plumber that their wealth must be “spread around” so that others may succeed? Have we sunk so low in this country that we have to confiscate the wealth of plumbers in order to “help those behind you”?

There is no fucking way in hell that $250K is upper middle class. None. I don’t care where you live, I don’t care how you earn your income, I don’t give a shit what your expenses are. You can’t earn over ten times the poverty line for a family of five and consider yourself upper middle class. You can’t earn five times the U.S. median household income and consider yourself upper middle class. You make $250K? You’re rich. Deal with it.

Well, if we need to fund the government, I guess we could always just auction off Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

Right? 

Why are you all looking at me like that?

Is there a flaw in my plan somewhere?

I live in Toledo.  Have all my life.

Joe the Plumber is DEFINITELY NOT registered to vote. 

The Blade interviewed him in his home last night.  They give his street name, which I already knew.  The ZIP for that street is 43528.

Now try to find him in the voter rolls.  Not registered.  I called the newsroom at the Blade and asked why they didn’t mention it, and they confirmed that he is not registered, but they didn’t know that until this morning.

Oops.

Jesse,
He probably doesn’t think the government should fund schools and that the federal government should be totally uninvolved with education.  Hell, he probably thinks NSF grants are a waste of money, since an entrepreneurial company would obviously fund any research that’s really necessary.  It gets weird when you start talking to libertarian fundamentalists.

$250K is well off.  I don’t care if it’s called upper middle class, rich, or whozziwhatsit, but that’s a damn comfortable lifestyle.  If that’s his income he’s in fine shape.  If it’s revenue, things may be a bit different, but he’s still making a fine living.

Jim, to add what Jesse said:

Spend ANy time in public school?  How about your folks?  Are you living in a red state that gets to enjoy (disproportionately) blue state tax dollars?

I mean, do you only support cuts in taxes since you’ve (likely) taken what you need already and will not be affected?  Or will you state for the record that you are an anarchist?

Seriously, if you support ANY public program, you’re basically supporting one form of wealth redistribution over another, and not wealth redistribution in itself.

And if you’ve benefited from ANY taxpayer-supported programs in the past, you may want to explain to us why you should have gotten those benefits and those who need them now or will need them in the future should not.

While you’re at it, please tell me how you are so well-off that you would never need to use the social safety net.  I mean, I’m a professional earning a six-figure salary, and even *I* worry about unexpected disaster that will put me in harm’s way.

Maybe Joe should have compared Obama to Fred Astaire.

Maybe Joe should have compared Obama to Fred Astaire.

Gene Gene the Dancin’ Machine?

Think you should give 40% away to a squandering government?

Probably not, which is why income taxes are not currently assessed and won’t be assessed at 40% of your first $250,000 in income. Under the Obama tax plan, someone making $300k/yr would pay an extra $1500 in taxes.

Also, I think that supporters of the war, Medicare D, etc., would probably argue that more revenue is required to support the government in the liverstyle to which it’s accustomed. Like Egypt in Genesis 41, taxpayers making more than $250k/yr had “7 fat years” of low taxes, which I’m sure they realized were much lower than was possible to support the costs of government. The wise taxpayer would have accounted for this in expectation that in the future there would be “7 thin years” in which taxes might have to be changed to support the costs of running the country. It’s not clear why any taxpayer would think that their taxes would be able to stay artificially low indefinitely.

Meanwhile, I think calling Joe idiot is a little too much.  I’d wager he’s your typical upper class low information voter, the kind of guy who works 96 hours a week so all he takes in is McCain saying ‘I’ll lower your taxes and keep the scary brown people away’ and thinks he’s the neatest thing since sliced bread. 

Either that or a plant, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt for now.

I am so sick and tired of hearing about Joe-the-goddamn-plumber.  Yes, let’s all pity poor Joe and his quarter-million-dollar income.  I grew up the daughter of a small business owner, and I can confidently say that Joe is not anybody I recognize. 

My father routinely worked 10 and 12 hour days, doing hard, back-breaking, dangerous labor.  He never asked a member of his crew to do anything he wasn’t ready to do himself.  Then, *after* he had spent the entire day busting his ass in the Georgia heat, he’d come home and do paperwork, write up invoices or scrutinize blueprints to try and prepare for the next job.  Of course, this level of executive leisure was possible *after* he had retired from his other job - the one he had so that the whole family wouldn’t have to depend solely on my mom for health insurance.  And my dad never never made anything close to 250 thousand dollars in the course of a year - any year.

That’s the real world of small business.  You bust your fucking ass day in and day out; you deal with unreliable labor and customers who bitch about everything; you celebrate the good years and pray you make it through the bad ones; and at the end, hopefully, you can say that you conducted your business in an honest and honorable way and you can put clothes on your kids’ backs and food on the table.

So, John McCain can shove Joe the Plumber up his ass.  Where his head obviously is.

About thirty years ago I first heard my dad say, “Republicans ain’t never done nothing for the working man.”

It’s as true now as it was then.

$250K is upper middle class. It’s a couple, each with professional occupations or someone who owns a small business working 10-12 hours a day for 6 days a week.

Look, really, I sympathize with this. I know what you mean and what you’re saying. However, trust me: your perspective is blinkered by the sort of community you live in. You want to see why people think 250k is rich? Go to a city outside your wealthy coastal, flooded-with-wealth metro area. Visit Pittsburgh or Indianapolis. When you go to a place where a really nice house is a vibrant neighborhood costs $250k/yr, then you will realize that $250k/yr is rich.

When your income allows you to easily afford a mortgage in the nicest neighborhood with the best schools and not have to worry about the cost of getting a new car when your current one starts to get a little less reliable, then you are rich. For me, whose lived most of his life in expensive northeastern and west-coast metro areas, $250k doesn’t seem like it could do this, but in most other places, it does.

I just watched the Joe/Couric video Pam posted in the comment above, and Joe did what plenty of non-supporters of Obama do—assume that a cutoff of $250,000 is fluid, and that Obama actually plans to move that cutoff and tax people who make $100,000 (what Joe said) or $40,000 or $50,000 (working-class woman in a recent New Yorker article). Where are they getting this? Does it come from Fox News? Has Joe said somewhere that he’d make $250,000 if he bought the business, or does he just think Obama will tax incomes below that?

My husband and I come in around halfway to $250,000, and our housing expenses are low. Compared to a lot of people we know, we’re rich. Certainly someone making double what we earn qualifies as “affluent.” Or maybe “affluenter.” They might think they’re middle class because the mortgage on their $750,000 McMansion takes a big bite out of their take-home pay, but having the $750,000 house places them squarely beyond the middle class in my book.

You want to see why people think 250k is rich? Go to a city outside your wealthy coastal, flooded-with-wealth metro area. Visit Pittsburgh or Indianapolis.

Hell, come right here to Toledo.  A guy making $250K here can live like a freaking EMPEROR.

My husband and I work a combined total of 130 - 135 hours a week.  We still make under $100K.

What I love is the idea that moving into a higher tax bracket is somehow so incredibly distorting that it is something you actively avoid.  We are talking a 3% increase in the rate, right?  And since it is a progressive tax system the only money that is getting shaved at the additional 3% is the income above $250,000.  You are indeed an idiot if that is actually a disincentive for going above $250,000.

Jim, how do you propose we fund schools, police, the military and any number of other socially necessary government functions without taxes?

You buy cheap shit from China and hire people under the table - just like Joe does!

There are plumbers named Joe all over the U.S.  Do you suppose there are any articulate Democrats who’d like some extra publicity?

We have two full-time professional incomes and live in a large and expensive metro area.  We come in about 60% of what Joe says that he makes.

We feel pretty well off for that, even with a house that needs some deferred maintenance, two kids, and the need to save for retirement and college expenses.  There were several years where the house interest and our personal exemptions for four people alone canceled all federal and most state taxes.  I’m plenty happy to give up some of that additional 80K to pay my share.

What ever happened to Josephine the Plumber?

I’m part of a “professional couple,” and our total income, if my wife’s job offer comes through and I manage to get renewed next year in my job, will be 86K, which is better than the majority of people with our education.  Only person I’ve met in our field (academic humanities) who makes a Joe the Plumberish amount (I’m told) is one of the handsome and brilliant co-bloggers here, who oddly enough is never held up by the Culture Warriors as a Regular American.

I make just a little over 10% of what Joe makes (or says this business would net him?  I’m a little unclear on the details).  I live in the most expensive city in the US.  I don’t own a home or have a fancy investment package or anything like that, and I could probably be saving more, but honestly I do OK. If I was partnered to someone with a similar income (putting our household income at about a quarter of Joe’s), most of my financial woes would be take care of.

Who the hell is Joe the Plumber? I’ve been watching your electioneering fairly closely (okay, mostly through feminist sites) and today is the first I’ve ever heard of him. I gather I would have heard about him yesterday if I’d watched the debate (I was going to, but I was so tired I just fell asleep). Suddenly he’s everywhere!

We can argue back and forth about what is and isn’t wealthy, but the real question is: why is a plumber (a recession-proof skill) with a household income of $250k who lives in Toledo, OH (as opposed to Manhattan or West L.A.) complaining?

I’m guessing it’s some combination of the following:

1. Joe has more than 2 kids. In which case, he should be complaining not about some draconian government policy, but rather about the “unfair” invisible hand of the market that imposes that cap, or perhaps a church still operating on the assumption of medieval child mortality rates.

2. Joe is living well beyond his means. We know the story: McMansions, expensive cars, maybe a boat, other toys—probably all financed with a crushing amount of debt. If that’s the case, he doesn’t need to point the finger of blame at Washington, DC when his bathroom mirror is so much closer.

3. Joe’s plumbing business was focused almost entirely on installs in new homes and renovations of homes to be “flipped” rather than maintenance of existing ones. Seemed like a sharp move for good o’ Joe, because, y’know, demand for new homes would go on “forever” on the basis of free and easy mortgages.

4. Joe has less access to short-term commercial paper. Who’s to blame for that: The government, which was hobbled by the GOP in its ability to regulate the markets; or the various extreme free market greedheads who gave birth to the credit crunch?

5. Joe had a serious illness in his family, which might have been mitigated by the presence of that evil universal health care that Republicans like him complain about.

6. Joe is a typical Republican voter: short-sighted, whingey, looking to blame anyone but himself for his current predicament (assuming the predicament is real, and not just made up to support a shaky ideological position).

As you might guess, I have very little sympathy for Joe’s support of McCain and the Republicans.

Who the hell is Joe the Plumber?

As Jesse notes, he’s an idiot—which makes him the perfect poster child for an increasingly desperate John McCain.

$250K is upper middle class.

Where, JimB? Wealth is like real estate—dependent on location, location, location.

Ah, you Republicans, always leaving out critical factors in your calculations. No wonder you guys hate science so much.

Rich is when you don’t have to work and can still afford to maintain your lifestyle.

How long did it take you to move the goalposts that far?

I got a proposal for this asshole.

I will take his $250,000 income, and he can take my $30,000 income.  Then I’ll pay his taxes and he can pay mine.  Even trade.  That’ll solve his problem!

I’m keeping my health insurance, though.

Who the hell is Joe the Plumber?

Apparently, a close relative of Charles Keating:

Turns out that Joe Wurzelbacher from the Toledo event is a close relative of Robert Wurzelbacher of Milford, Ohio. Who’s Robert Wurzelbacher? Only Charles Keating’s son-in-law and the former senior vice president of American Continental, the parent company of the infamous Lincoln Savings and Loan. The now retired elder Wurzelbacher is also a major contributor to Republican causes giving well over $10,000 in the last few years.

[Even before hearing about this I thought Joe the Plumber sounded like a set-up.]

This guy is an obvious plant.

He may or may not have been directly in cahoots with the McCain Campaign when he first encountered Obama, but you better believe that the McCain folks are going out of their way to milk this thing for everything they can, and have likely been in constant contact with him for the past 48 hours.

A few things.  The math doesn’t add up.  This guy is talking about buying a business which will turn him a $250,000 profit in the first year.  Most business experts believe in the 4:1 ratio for the cost of purchasing a small business compared to the profits you can expect to turn around on said business.  So if this plumbing company is really gonna be producing a quarter-million dollar profit right off the bat for Joe the Plumber, that means he has to have $1 Million available to buy the business in the first place.

Anybody actually believe this?

Second… the $250K figure being thrown around is being grossly misrepresented.  Obama would be hitting higher taxes on businesses whose PROFITS exceed $250,000 from what I understand… which means that this guy could deduct all of the costs of equipment, vehicles, and employees.  If he’s still raking in more than $250K AFTER all of those business expenses, I think he can afford the extra taxes.

Finally… the guy isn’t registered to vote, and his name isn’t listed anywhere in any Toledo area phone books.  Most entrepreneurial businessmen don’t leave their phone numbers unlisted.  This guy doesn’t exist, he’s off the map.  And probably non-union, as the Plumber’s Union was one of the very FIRST labor organizations to endorse Barack Obama.

This whole game is McCain’s feeble attempt at an October Surprise.  And while I believe that ultimately it will fail (thanks largely to sites like this, DailyKos, HuffPo, and the rest of the political mythbusting blogosphere), the MSM is thrilled to death to play a role in these shenanigans, and keep pitching Joe as Mr. Undecided Everyman, the guy who represents the real pulse of the Undecided electorate - despite the fact that Joe himself has been quite clear in stating that his mind has been made up for some time.

I hope this thing is quickly defused and debunked in our collective national dialogue.  It is a hoax, and it would be a real tragedy if this non-story were given the power to affect the outcome of this election.

Rich is when you don’t have to work and can still afford to maintain your lifestyle.

Well, in that case, homeless people are the wealthiest of all!  All they do is lay around all day, find free stuff, and live on handouts.

If only we all had such a lifestyle that we could maintain!

Wait.. now that I’ve reread the passage above before submitting, I think I’ve just described the life of a wingnut welfare recipient.  Wow.

I’m glad that someone pointed out that in the areas of the country where the housing market has gone through the roof, $250K *is* upper middle class, even though it’s wealthy in most of the country.

Firstly, if “rich” is defined, as most people think of it, as “able to buy whatever you want, whenever you want, without concern for money”, then $250K is probably not rich anywhere in the Northeast or the West Coast (I cannot speak to Ohio). My house, a three-bedroom city duplex on a postage stamp of a yard built in 1880, full of lead paint and falling down around my ears, cost $220K in 2005. In the suburbs of Baltimore, you can’t *get* a home in a nice neighborhood for less than $300K. My parents’ home, a modest three-bedroom ranch house on 0.3 acres of land in a suburb 1.5 hours north of New York City, is worth $350K. With a fantastic fixed-rate mortgage with a low low APR, I am still spending $1800 a month on my mortgage (part of this is high property taxes, mortgage insurance because we didn’t put anything down, homeowner’s insurance, etc.) I also have two children who are not school-age, and they are costing me $1600 a month in day care. So my $80K a year, which translates to $4000 take-home a month, pays my mortgage, my day care, and covers about half my food expenses after that. My energy bill is $300 a month in the summer and I don’t have air conditioning; in the winter it’s more like $600. My gasoline is costing $250 a month or more.

In other words, my $80K a year DOES NOT COVER MY MOST BASIC EXPENSES. When my husband was making $120K, we covered basic expenses and things like cable, high-speed Internet, and other stuff middle class families nowadays expect to have, and we could buy the kids new clothes every 6 months or so, but attempting to renovate our house (a court order to remove lead paint, and then all kinds of crap we wanted to do because the house was falling apart) put us nearly $100K in debt.

It is *quite* possible, on the East or West Coast, to make $250K a year and be upper middle class. It’s not about the fact that you’d be rich if you took your salary and moved to Indiana, because your salary wouldn’t move with you—you gotta go where the jobs are, and if you have a job that makes $250K/yr on the coast, odds are it would make a lot less or just not exist further inland. So while it’s true that $250K is a lot more than the average American makes, it’s not rich anymore, not after the housing boom and the price of gas and the general inflation.

HOWEVER. If my husband and I are lucky enough to reach that point next year, we will *happily* pay President Obama’s higher taxes. Someone has to pay down the debt that George Bush racked up, and sadly, I don’t see a taxation scheme based on whether or not you voted for Bush and/or approved of his tax cuts and his wars being feasible. We have an enormous military that’s been spending money like water; someone has to pay. We have people dying from lack of health insurance; someone *should* pay. I believe that it *is* our patriotic duty to pay taxes for the benefit of our fellow Americans, and if America is still for me, as it sadly is not anymore for so many, a place where I can rise into the upper middle class, I will gladly pay back to America for letting me achieve so much.

I want to tell people who make $250K/yr and whine about their taxes, “Why do you hate America?” When Sarah Palin says that paying your taxes is not patriotic, I want to ask her how she’d feel if Track and Bristol took her credit cards and spent $100K on them buying ostrich burgers and goofy knickknacks for their rooms and every DVD they ever wanted… would that be an act of love? Would refusing to pay the money back be an act of love? Would it show respect to her as a parent if her kids spent all her money and refused to pay it back? No? Then why does it show respect to America to refuse to pay back America’s debts? *Particularly* people who wax eloquent about our great military and its wars… those people, in a fair world, should have to pay *double* the taxes I do. If you want to support the Iraq War, you should have to put your money where your mouth is.

Joe the Plumber would be better off if he had to pay higher taxes but didn’t have to cover his employees’ health insurance and they didn’t have to pay for it themselves; if he pays for it, it’s a burden on his business, and if they pay for it, he’ll lose the talented ones to bigger plumbing companies that can offer it to them for free. Joe the Plumber would be better off if ordinary American citizens had enough money to worry about getting their plumbing fixed instead of having their homes foreclosed on, toilets that back up and all. Joe the Plumber would be better off if his retirement savings hadn’t been squandered. The fact that Joe the Plumber is not willing to pay higher taxes to ensure that these problems are solved tells me that Joe the Plumber is a moron.

Since Bill Gates works, does that mean he’s Not Rich?

Hey Bill, You’re Not Rich! *obnoxious McCain guffaw*

I agree wholeheartedly that $250 K in Ohio is a metric fuckton of money. That’s “having a summer house” money in Toledo.

Since Bill Gates works, does that mean he’s Not Rich?

Your average Republican voter (those netting well under 250k a year) has a very confused and simplistic idea of how “wealth” is defined. The level of sophistication involved is similar to that of a certain self-affirming character in a Warner Bros. cartoon” “My name is Elmer J. Fudd, millionaire. I own a mansion and a yacht.”

Guys like JimB and Joe the Plumber basically Elmer Fudd wannabes. No wonder they keep shooting themselves in the face (lucky for Dick Cheney—he’s just one man, dammit!).

Well, in that case, homeless people are the wealthiest of all!  All they do is lay around all day, find free stuff, and live on handouts.

Wasn’t there an old Wall Street Journal editorial that described people too poor to pay income tax as “lucky duckies”?  This is how they really think.

Fox News’s take on Joe was, as usual, hella stupid.  Spreading wealth around?  What, you mean taxes pay for things?  Well, I never!  I must clutch my pearls.

I also like how he repeats the line so often used about Bush, “even if you don’t like what he stands for, you know what it is”.  Moronic.

And now the latest fun tidbit about our new friend Joe?

Turns out that he’s very likely related to this dude named Keating.  Yeah, THAT Keating.

http://gawker.com/5064474/who-is-joe-the-plumber

Wasn’t there an old Wall Street Journal editorial that described people too poor to pay income tax as “lucky duckies”?  This is how they really think.

Indeed there was. There were few editorial boards that drank from Reagan’s supply-side Kool-Aid goblet more deeply that the WSJ’s:

Who are these lucky duckies? They are the beneficiaries of tax policies that have expanded the personal exemption and standard deduction and targeted certain voter groups by introducing a welter of tax credits for things like child care and education. When these escape hatches are figured against income, the result is either a zero liability or a liability that represents a tiny percentage of income.

— “The Non-Taxpaying Class: Those lucky duckies!” WSJ editorial, 20 November 2002

Background:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_duckies

And the “Lucky Ducky” comix, which always make me laugh:

http://images.salon.com/comics/boll/2002/12/19/boll/story.gif

http://images.salon.com/comics/boll/2003/06/12/boll/story.gif

$250K is well off.  I don’t care if it’s called upper middle class, rich, or whozziwhatsit, but that’s a damn comfortable lifestyle.  If that’s his income he’s in fine shape.  If it’s revenue, things may be a bit different, but he’s still making a fine living.

If someone made $250,000 a year or more in the area in and around my undergrad college town in Ohio, that person would probably be well above the 99th percentile in terms of earned income in the area.  Then again, considering how economically depressed the area and Cleveland was when I was there, I doubt there was anyone who made anywhere near that much in my college town.  I doubt even the president of my college earned anywhere near that amount…...and the college was the main employer for the town and the surrounding area. 

Heck, the economy was so depressed that one could easily rent a LARGE two-bedroom apartment in the best parts of town for less than $200/month…..a reason why college students, faculty, and professional staff managed to monopolize housing in those areas as the rents in those areas was well out of the range of the majority of working-class town residents. 

It is *quite* possible, on the East or West Coast, to make $250K a year and be upper middle class. It’s not about the fact that you’d be rich if you took your salary and moved to Indiana, because your salary wouldn’t move with you—you gotta go where the jobs are, and if you have a job that makes $250K/yr on the coast, odds are it would make a lot less or just not exist further inland. So while it’s true that $250K is a lot more than the average American makes, it’s not rich anymore, not after the housing boom and the price of gas and the general inflation.

Speaking as someone who grew up and worked in two of the most expensive northeast coast cities, unless one has more than 3 kids, making $250 a year even on the coasts is at the very least the upper edge of upper-middle class and the low end of upper class. 

Even given the ridiculous real estate/rental prices and the greater expenses of living in such areas, keep in mind there are a helluva lot more families who don’t make anywhere near that much…even in those coastal cities. 

Don’t mean to sound all snarky as even people who make $250k/year and above do have serious budgetary constraints.  It is just that this statement that “$250k/year is not rich” is exactly what my wealthier co-workers who worked in financial services along with some associate attorneys used to whine about while not realizing that:

1. The vast majority of their co-workers…much less the populace in the area make far less than they do…myself included.  Like my parents and most neighbors I’ve had, most families do not make anywhere near $250k/year. 

2.  One of the reasons why most of those high-income co-workers complain about “not being rich” are wasteful behaviors such as proudly replacing their already expensive high-end furniture, electronics, and computers every 3-6 months when most people I know keep them for a minimum of 3-5 years….and more often until they are worn out.  The fact those same co-workers accused me of being “cheap” for not conforming to their wasteful lifestyles and then have the unmitigated gall to not only complain about their financial woes, but then attempt to borrow money from me and feel put out when I turn them down doesn’t strengthen their case of being compelling sympathy cases.

My personal definition of “wealthy” (in financial terms) is currently at least $10mm in liquid assets per adult member of the household, plus maybe a quarter of that for each dependent child. That means that, in the worst economic conditions, the absolute worst that happens (barring a violent revolution) is you’re living an American middle class lifestyle, your principal is growing, and you don’t have to do a lick of work.

But that said, even I will acknowledge that a full nuclear family household grossing $250k a year is very comfortable/prosperous/affluent in most non-“millionaire’s row” (i.e. the vast majority of) American neighbourhoods. Certainly nothing to grouse about without looking like a greedy gut.

As it happens, $250k per year is also the lowest income level at which I can grudgingly accept one voting for a Republican on somewhat rational economic terms. But as it turns out, Joe the (unlicensed, non-business owning) Plumber isn’t currently grossing even a third of that—like many dupes (or plants) of the GOP, he’s just speculating about income he may never see.

Median income (for men), Charleston County, SC, the year of general crappiness 2000 : ~$26K US (women, subtract 10K).

I make a little less than twice this, my wife makes a little more.
We bought our first little house a year ago, both in our late 30s. We feel far from rich or secure. (Health insurance costs hurt a lot.)

By the standards of Charleston county, however, we are very well off.

$250K is 2.5x my household income, 5x my personal income, 10x the median income for county men. I’d feel very rich indeed, if I made that much.

(Link for anyone who cares: http://www.ors2.state.sc.us/abstract/chapter13/income1.asp)

Obama and the Socialist maniacs have finally revealed their real intentions. Obama has been faking like he is some kind of moderate while all along he intends to do all he can (his vision of “Change”) to institute Socialism. Given how little we know about this man other than his radical left connections (Wright, Ayers, ACORN Group, etc.), he might just be a communist. “Spreading your Wealth around” is a failed strategy…it has failed over and over again in history…it lowers the standard of living. Obama has declared war on the “American Dream” of being successful as reflected by the accumulation of some wealth and he has formally welcomed in the era of open class warfare against wealth in America. As a People in a Nation for the People we need to do all that is possible to stop this radical leftist movement…sign me up for the American Resistance.

Joe @3:19PM,

That’s an excellent guess as to how Joe the <strike>Plumber</strike> GOP Plant speaks and thinks when he’s not pretending to be a big-time bidnessman. Lots of empty cut-n-paste talking points, simplistic catchphrases, a handful of civil-rights era boogeymen, appeals to baseless fears and , etc.

The part about the “American Resistance” is funny, too—I picture an army of ignorant yahoos shooting each-other with automatic weapons because they were too incompetent to memorise the day’s call signs to enter the bunker.

A top-notch impression of the typical Know-Nothing voter. Nice work.

Obama and the Socialist maniacs have finally revealed their real intentions. Obama has been faking like he is some kind of moderate while all along he intends to do all he can (his vision of “Change”) to institute Socialism. Given how little we know about this man other than his radical left connections (Wright, Ayers, ACORN Group, etc.), he might just be a communist.

As someone who took more than enough political science classes to be a minor as an undergrad and who has actually studied Marxist theory and Marxist derived, socialistic, and “free-market” regimes, I can say with great confidence that if you actually believe what you just wrote, you’ve just betrayed your complete ignorance of what communist, socialistic, and free-market ideologies actually espouse. 

What’s more funny is that the 8 years of corporate welfare combined with proposals for more tax cuts to large corporations by the GOP and their candidate is the epitome of “big government"socialism which their platform has been decrying.

The part about the “American Resistance” is funny, too—I picture an army of ignorant yahoos shooting each-other with automatic weapons because they were too incompetent to memorise the day’s call signs to enter the bunker.

If they are anything like the White supremacist militia groups I saw on a news program a while back….many of them are probably too out of shape to hike more than a few blocks at best with their cammo gear, guns, ammo, and other survivalist equipment…..

Oh, I’m not going to deny that $250K/yr is some serious money. Or that people who make that kind of money probably do spend a lot of money on frivolous crap. Hell, I spend a lot of money on frivolous crap (of the electronic variety, mostly) and my family doesn’t make that much.

I should say that for people who have *recently* come into that kind of money—young professionals—and who live on the coasts, it is not wealthy. It is comfortable, certainly, but it’s not wealthy. Because if you recently achieved that salary, and you bought a house while making that salary, and you bought it within the past 5 years, you bought an outrageously expensive house that may have been double, triple or even more what you’d have paid for the same house in 2001… which means that the exact same salary is “richer” in a guy who was lucky enough to buy a house in 2000 than in a guy who bought a house in 2005.

Of course this just says how fucking outrageously screwed the middle class is… you actually need to be sitting on the bleeding edge of “rich” to be able to afford to BUY A HOUSE right now. And they wonder why the housing market tanked? No actually middle-class person living in the coastal areas can afford to buy a house in an area with a good public school without it taking a giant piece of their monthly budget. $250K is about the point where you can buy a suburban house at modern prices and still put away savings while supporting the family you bought the house for.

As someone who has lived on $10K/yr (in Atlanta, as a grad student in 1992, with frequent bailouts from parental units), I do know that people with money do waste a lot of it in comparison to those who *have* to live frugally. But the median salary in the US is under $40K, right? Yet in Baltimore (City, not county—I don’t live in the suburbs), I cannot support my family on $80K/yr. This scares the shit out of me. I am a really well-paid professional woman pulling in close to the salary cap for my job category, and because we bought a house in 2005 I am dependent on my husband being able to make money as well, because my really good, twice-US-median salary cannot cover all of our *basic* expenses—mortgage, day care, food, gasoline, heating and electricity.

If our family can get up over $250K I will be so fucking grateful to Barack Obama for keeping the economy from completely tanking that I will *joyously* pay the extra taxes. Because the reason my $80K/yr cannot support my family, when I used to be able to support us on $60K/yr, is pretty much entirely George Bush’s fault.

Jim B. if you are using a Marxist definition of “middle class”, it might be helpful to say so, because it is not the default usage today.

Ricky: What I love is the idea that moving into a higher tax bracket is somehow so incredibly distorting that it is something you actively avoid.

Especially as it’s very easy to avoid. Work less, work for less, if you are self-employed, pay your employees more if you own a business. Raise expenses: invest, or if you are an employee, donate.

That said, I found myself in the highest tax bracket (which starts in a five-digit income here) recently because I had had insane amounts of travel expenses, which I got back from my employer, but which are considered taxable income—so my income was twice what it usually is. Had I realized that before it would have been a good moment to give a lot to charity for cheap…

killjoy: Wasn’t there an old Wall Street Journal editorial that described people too poor to pay income tax as “lucky duckies”?  This is how they really think.

It’s only their own laziness that stops them from becoming lucky.