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This is total nonsense. The middle class can afford middle class things.
Vacations: For most boomers as kids, a vacation involved tents, a camper trailer, or extremely modest motels. Food was equally modest. The photo in the article shows a Caribbean Island beach at an exclusive resort. If you move the bar to define a vacation as a 1000+ mile flight and a high end resort, the middle class has never been able to afford that.
New vehicles: You can buy a Hyundia Accent with a 100,000 mile factory warranty for $17,000. You can reasonably expect to drive it for 10 years/150,000 miles without the car imploding on you. Compare that to a 1965 automobile that was unreliable garbage after the 3/36K factory warranty expired. It was worth a bottle of champagne if the car actually did 100,000 miles. In terms of cost per mile, inflation-adjusted, cars are cheaper and more affordable than years ago. Once again, the photo in the article shows a row of shiny new BMWs. Those are luxury cars. The middle class never was able to afford luxury cars.
Student loans: This one is an issue since college costs have radically out-paced the inflation rate. If you look at the reason for this, it's not because college profs make more or because college profs teach less students for their dollars. It's because today's generation demands all the expensive non-teaching stuff that doubles the cost. If we went back to the model that college is about classrooms and not about football teams and non-academic student activities and non-academic student support systems, college would cost what it used to cost.
Emergency savings: This one is covered ad nauseum in personal finance. 5% savings rate instead of 10% to 15% savings rate. It's all about burning discretionary income instead of saving it.
Retirement savings: The rules of the game today are that you need to save steadily for your retirement. People fling the money at discretionary spending instead.
Medical care: This is a national problem. Some of the middle class has excellent corporate health insurance. The rest are caught in the gap where they're too affluent to qualify for Medicaid but they're paying big premiums for not-so-great coverage.
Dental work: If you get fluoride treatment as a young adult and get to the dental hygienist a couple times per year, most people don't have huge dental restoration bills. The same nuts who are anti-vaxxers also walk around telling everyone fluoride is poison. There's no magic to this.
Living paycheck-to-paycheck: Well duh. If you live in too much house, drive too much car, and squander your disposable income instead of saving it, you live paycheck-to-paycheck and it's a dire emergency if you lose your job. Maybe if you lived in a 1,200 square foot house on a small lot instead of a 3,000 square foot house on a large lot; and maybe if you drove a base model economy car instead of a fancier brand; and maybe if you prepared your own food at home instead of spending your cash at Starbucks, going out to lunch at work, and at restaurants and doing takeout or buying processed food, you could save some money. ....like the middle class used to do it.
Actually meadian income is easy define, class or middle class is not. However if you make more than 1/2 of all earners you are in the middle and thus middle class
Yes it is easy to define. Your the one who suggested it was not.
Sorry you do not like that I do not accept the middle data point as representative of the data set, particularly when the data set being talked about is more narrowly focused than the data set your median is derived from.
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don't have specific figures because class is hard to define. You do go on to state50-140k so it does look like 50k is middle class
It is not specifically or universally defined to the exact dollar but lets not pretend it is that hard to define. What is accepted as middle class is fairly universally accepted which a fairly specific range. Median income is not the overriding factor in this.
Also, yes, $50K could be a middle class income/family, but taking that as representative of all middle class families is like taking the last qualifier for the NFL playoffs, and saying they represent the talent and ability of all NFL playoff teams.
It is just not true, or reflecive of the sample you claim it to be.
One thing that has happened has been that Middle Class has suffered from definition creep over the decades. Middle class housing was once a house of 1000 sq. ft. with one bathroom, one or maybe two landline phones, one TV, one or maybe two cars parked outside.
Also, and no one ever mentions this, but starting in the 1970s and accelerating into the 1980s and 90s, the workforce essentially doubled with women entering the job market in large numbers. That served to depress wages and now two income families are the norm making not much more than a single wage earner made fifty years ago. And you can also go back to definition creep for a cause.
State universities were originally designed to be tuition free or very low cost. Most public universities today are repurposed teacher's colleges. It is obscene how much they cost.
Private college was always expensive, but now much more so.
There are lots and lots of scholarships out there, especially with the internet there is no reason not to take advantage of them, kids are just lazy, don't want to write an essay or whatever.
State universities were originally designed to be tuition free or very low cost. Most public universities today are repurposed teacher's colleges. It is obscene how much they cost.
Private college was always expensive, but now much more so.
There was a time not too long ago, say around 2000, when a state general fund budget covered 70-75% of the cost to instruct a student. These days, it's around 30% and you can only do so much with external grant and endowment funding for the institution's bottom line so tuition increases it is.
The state house may crow about but 'we increased higher ed spending 2% this year, but when enrollment growth was 4%, insurance costs went up 10%, utility costs were up 5%...' the gap between funding and keeps growing and growing and individual families shoulder that rather than state taxpayers as a whole.
Yes it is easy to define. Your the one who suggested it was not.
Sorry you do not like that I do not accept the middle data point as representative of the data set, particularly when the data set being talked about is more narrowly focused than the data set your median is derived from.
It is not specifically or universally defined to the exact dollar but lets not pretend it is that hard to define. What is accepted as middle class is fairly universally accepted which a fairly specific range. Median income is not the overriding factor in this.
Also, yes, $50K could be a middle class income/family, but taking that as representative of all middle class families is like taking the last qualifier for the NFL playoffs, and saying they represent the talent and ability of all NFL playoff teams.
It is just not true, or reflecive of the sample you claim it to be.
Why haven't you universally defined middle class if it's so easy? What a long response and multiple posts and you can't put your finger on it? Wonder why that is. Making the median wage in a national sense certainly is middle class and it's much more representative of middle class than the average income
There was a time not too long ago, say around 2000, when a state general fund budget covered 70-75% of the cost to instruct a student. These days, it's around 30% and you can only do so much with external grant and endowment funding for the institution's bottom line so tuition increases it is.
The state house may crow about but 'we increased higher ed spending 2% this year, but when enrollment growth was 4%, insurance costs went up 10%, utility costs were up 5%...' the gap between funding and keeps growing and growing and individual families shoulder that rather than state taxpayers as a whole.
This is not uniform across the country. Some states are low tax-low service. They've been passing on 100% of the cost increases to students for years. Some states have high tuition and fees but means test them. Low income people don't pay much of anything to attend. There are still colleges with inexpensive in-state tuition and fees that are well below $10K/year. Students routinely work their way through those schools working part time jobs while in school and full time when on break.
If you don't like it where you live, you're free to move.
Why haven't you universally defined middle class if it's so easy? What a long response and multiple posts and you can't put your finger on it? Wonder why that is. Making the median wage in a national sense certainly is middle class and it's much more representative of middle class than the average income
That's because there is no one definition that works universally anywhere in the country. In much of the country, the bottom edge of middle class is where you can afford to buy a starter home. That doesn't work in Silicon Valley or the other high cost of living areas. Most people who are clearly upper middle class identify themselves as being middle class.
One thing that has happened has been that Middle Class has suffered from definition creep over the decades. Middle class housing was once a house of 1000 sq. ft. with one bathroom, one or maybe two landline phones, one TV, one or maybe two cars parked outside.
Also, and no one ever mentions this, but starting in the 1970s and accelerating into the 1980s and 90s, the workforce essentially doubled with women entering the job market in large numbers. That served to depress wages and now two income families are the norm making not much more than a single wage earner made fifty years ago. And you can also go back to definition creep for a cause.
Well said. That 'keeping up with the Joneses' is insidious, because most people don't even realize they're doing it. And yet here we are, thinking middle class is now two late-model vehicles, large 4BR house, 1-2 international vacations a year, 10%+ savings, separate retirement savings, etc.
There's individual lifestyle creep (you get a raise, you spend a little more) and there's group lifestyle creep (everybody is spending more because they consciously or subconsciously think that's "how it is").
This list is about 50% garbage. Having said that, I'd agree that rapidly increasing costs for medical care and college, coupled with stagnant real wages and decreasing workplace benefits, have put a squeeze on many middle class Americans.
Student loans and Medical Care are definitely much more expensive than they were a generation or two ago, so I agree with these. One could argue that medical care has gotten a lot better and that is why it costs more, but I don't think you can say that about college. In the '90s, many people could graduate with little or no debt by attending school in state and working part-time and in the summers. Not true any more, plus employers increasingly want to see internships related to your field of study, which is hard to do if you are going to school full time and working.
With Retirement Savings I think the bigger issue here is that pensions have largely gone away for the middle class. You would have to save hundreds of thousands of dollars to replicate the income from even a modest pension that many older people had or have.
Dental Work has always been a significant expense which is poorly covered by insurance. I'm not sure this has really changed.
New Vehicles and Vacations are at least as affordable as they have been in the past. Given increases in quality, I would argue that your dollars actually go farther now than they used. People's expectations may have changed, but not the costs.
Skipped Paychecks and Emergency Savings are the same issue. If a middle income family can't afford a $1000 ER visit or a family making over $75K is living paycheck to paycheck, that is a choice. If people have these issues they need to rethink their priorities.
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