What does it take to be "middle class" in America today?
What does it take to be "middle class" in America today?
Can retire
I will never be able to retire, I will just become feral and wander into the woods to diemy retirement plan is dying in a socialist revolution
Ah, an optimist!
If I retire, I'm probably going to be sharing Marxist and Anarchist extremist content on Facebook the way boomers still post about Obama today.
This was the common "retirement" for peasants living under heavy serfdom. They faced hunger every year so the old people unable to work "went to forest for firewood" or "go to hunt" to die there with some dignity and remove the excess mouth. A lot of time this was forced, and it happened not only to old people but to disabled, women and children, especially in worse years.
A tweet
Kinda surprised owning your own home wasn't a part of this. For a long time that was the signature marker of "you've made it into the middle class."
USians can't fathom taking a fucking vacation.
I love that "can afford to raise children" isn't even here
The society of freedom and family values
A tweet
Was reading about the three-legged stool the other day re retirement and realized too many people probably do not even know the term or what it refers to. Our politicians have stolen the American dream with zero consequence.
I'm older than most of you but I still didn't know that term and I had to google. I almost laughed when I learned the definition.
Three-Legged Stool: Meaning, Overview, History
The "three-legged stool" is an old phrase that many financial planners once used to describe the three most common sources of retirement income: Social Security, employee pensions, and personal savings. It was expected that this trio would together provide a solid financial foundation for the senior years. None of the three was expected to support most retirees on its own.
They removed the employee pension part of the leg and replaced it 401k's which have only been around since the 80's and there is not a generation of people that have retired on them.
The concept of a pension was retired. But financial "innovations" like gig economy, copays, deductibles, medical bankruptcy, student debts, etc have been greatly expanded. Capitalism, baby!
401k's which have only been around since the 80's and there is not a generation of people that have retired on them.
damn, somehow I know that after all my 401k-less comrads die in the freemarket famines, of 2050, probably the last rugpull on my generation will be the collapse of 401ks. Then in 2070 there will be YouTube videos explaining why 401ks were an obvious scam from the beginning, but you probably won't find anyone explaining/claiming that today. It's just going to happen somehow I know it lol.
the term "middle class" originated from the aristocratic ruling class of european feudalism
when people's place in society was determined by blood, by birth, there were two classes: peasants and nobility (and also there was clergy but there's always more detail, isn't there, so lets ignore the more fiddly categories...). As industrialization and market relations grew out of the early modern period, a funny thing started happening: there were people, born as peasants, who, through their property, started to amass wealth equal to (and often greater than!) the nobility. The nobles didn't like that. They looked down on this strange class that was caught in the middle of two worlds. Middle Class has historically referred to the Capitalists.
I know today the term just means a sort of vague gesture to some 'average of people'. But that's fucking useless. It only really acts to obfuscate the real defining characteristic of modern class; birthright has been replaced with the right of property (specifically property that generates a passive source of income for the owner). I highly advise to rail against, or at least avoid, the term "middle class". It just serves as a wedge to divide different levels of working class people from one another -- that's not a successful way to talk about and promote working class interests!
Nowadays, in the US (and other anglo nations), it means "Not literally starving in the street and not a billionaire". At least, that's what it feels like
That's bullshit that 35% of Americans have all six. Only 50% Americans even have a job. Mayyybe 35% of Americans have the first one.
It's probably counted by household rather than individuals, to be unreasonably generous to them
Yeah that doesn’t even pass the sniff test. How do they even print garbage like that?
Sniff test...
I thought everyone rich enough not to live somewhere with holes in the walls and poor enough not to own a golf course considered themselves "middle class."
A thoroughly useless term.
folks with holes in the wall still imagine themselves "middle class" if washed thoroughly enough in ideology. you ever talk to those old folks that say shit like 'we never thought we were poor' and then talk about getting a coal stipend to not freeze in the winter as a core childhood memory
No one has a “secure job” btw
Feel free to believe your job is secure all you want, but when the stock market dips or your soulless company wants to take in more profits, workforce reductions affect everyone
What if my retirement plan is to fix my credit, get a small business loan and defect to Cuba with the money?
I've had this thought for over a decade now. Get my credit to the point where I could borrow like $1m and just disappear to Laos or some shit. I don't have any plans of coming back to this place.
That is essentially what big companies do. So that means it is a viable plan, and probably arbitrarily hard for us
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I wonder what this would have looked like in the 1960's and 1970's.
I bet if you removed people over like 50-55 that number would drop to single digits due to 6)
Does anyone else get these videos on TikTok where it's like:
- working class - £20k
- lower middle class - £30k
- middle class - £40k
- upper middle class - £50k
- upper class - £60k
- ruling class - £70k
and the comments are so uninformed that they just accept this stratification as a given. Try to explain to people that if you have to work for a living and if you stop working you die then you are working class and it doesn't compute. Nevermind that you can't actually raise a family comfortably with a single income of less than £70k in this country, if you try to explain to people actually yeah we should all be getting paid a hell of a lot more they will look at you like you've just tried to fuck their dog.
In my opinion, if a middle class exists, it is small business owners and doctor couples with a combined income of £400k, and anyone that has started to accumulate rental properties in addition to owning their own home.
Yeah the working class is undoubtedly divided along multiple lines, it's just about figuring out what those lines are and how they influence things.
Middle is too loose of a signifier and salary brackets only have a soft correlation with material interests.
Arguably things like retirement investments and home ownership could be materially impactful differences between subsections of the working class.
“Middle class” is a term used by other working class people with puritanical brain rot who just want to distance themselves from the poor as much as possible
Can retire when?
I'm missing 5 and 6
I pay my bills on time, mostly
Unless you're over 50 you're not going to "retire", the planet was already destroyed and this hell isn't going to last another 30 years lol.
You'll never retire because life expectancy is going to be like 500
You'll never retire because life expectancy is going to be like 50
This tracks... "middle class" is an income band encompassing those who fall between 2/3 and 200% of median. The US is a terribly unequal society where something like 40% of the population falls within this band, with high degrees of wage compression near/at subsistence-level... the distribution of those within the technical "middle class skew to the low end of the range. Because poverty is best conceived in relative versus absolute terms, it's fair to say that the "Middle America/the average person" in the US lives in poverty.
bullshit can 35% of americans retire, absolute bullshit