I don't know how you solve that, but I do know that I have the choice of getting rich fast, never raising children, or getting the fuck out of RI.
If I had to live in New England, I'd probably live in Vermont.
It's cold and wicked expensive to live here. We have a bit of a brain drain problem because most of our youths go to college and then leave the state because they realize there is very little opportunity for a decent job and the cost of living is very high. I was one of the fools that stayed here.
Well, IIRC, New Hampshire's dry, I always felt Conn and Mass are kinda hoity-toity, and Maine's full of people in hiding (kinda like Alaska)... so where's good to go up there?
The weather in the northern states is pretty fuckity. NY can't decide if it wants to be winter or summer yet, I think we had a day and a half of spring.
bowen on
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
Also the whole system is fucked up. Why do people who provide entertainment generally make the most money (Actors, tv hosts, etc who coincidentally work maybe 3 hours a day) but generally contribute the LEAST to society (besides their tax money)
when you have a farmer down the block growing beans (for human survival)(and who put in 12+ hour days 7 days a week), but can barely make a living?
It is fucked up.
I might just be down on farmers, but my experience has been that they get to lie on what they produce and what they have for income and the government will still cut them a check. The successful family farm is a thing of the past and while I don't like the practices of corporate farms, I feel they are the direction that farm production is headed. I do however agree that sports figures and celebrities make too much money and invest it in all the wrong places.
My family is middle class, we live comfortably, but not above our means, and I know my father works harder then the majority of people in north america. He puts in 9 hour days at work, then splits wood and a bunch of other house chores for an additional 4 hours just so he can afford the gas to go to his trailer every weekend during the summer... and with the gas prices skyrocketing he may not even be able to do that anymore.
That's really not that much work. If you said he had two jobs or that he was pulling 12 hour days then I'd sympathise with you, but working only 45 hours a week and then doing house chores, which are basically part of the responsibility of owning a home, isn't huge.
The weather in the northern states is pretty fuckity. NY can't decide if it wants to be winter or summer yet, I think we had a day and a half of spring.
Try Colorado weather. Yesterday it was 80, today it has been snowing and raining all day.
Public education is 'free' in that we all share a small cost, just like roads and sidewalks are 'free'. Quotes.
See, my problem so far is that public education is so locally centered that you end up with either: shitty schools but it's a decent town/city or: the town is nothing but a campus for the schools because 80% of the taxes go to the school system. Rather than everyone paying a bit for an important service, it's rich people paying a lot for a good service, and poor people not really having the option to do anything but pay for the cut-rate version.
I don't know if other places run into this, though. Are there any systems that distribute taxes to public education equally across the state? If so, does it improve anything?
Also the whole system is fucked up. Why do people who provide entertainment generally make the most money (Actors, tv hosts, etc who coincidentally work maybe 3 hours a day) but generally contribute the LEAST to society (besides their tax money)
when you have a farmer down the block growing beans (for human survival)(and who put in 12+ hour days 7 days a week), but can barely make a living?
It is fucked up.
I might just be down on farmers, but my experience has been that they get to lie on what they produce and what they have for income and the government will still cut them a check. The successful family farm is a thing of the past and while I don't like the practices of corporate farms, I feel they are the direction that farm production is headed. I do however agree that sports figures and celebrities make too much money and invest it in all the wrong places.
My family is middle class, we live comfortably, but not above our means, and I know my father works harder then the majority of people in north america. He puts in 9 hour days at work, then splits wood and a bunch of other house chores for an additional 4 hours just so he can afford the gas to go to his trailer every weekend during the summer... and with the gas prices skyrocketing he may not even be able to do that anymore.
That's really not that much work. If you said he had two jobs or that he was pulling 12 hour days then I'd sympathise with you, but working only 45 hours a week and then doing house chores, which are basically part of the responsibility of owning a home, isn't huge.
Yeah, my dad puts in 50+ hour weeks because of the overtime just to keep pace with what he otherwise would have been making had his old job (of 35 years) not been moved to San Antonio after having been bought out for the patents.
If I wasn't still living at home I'd be working 2 jobs at roughly 56+ hours a week to afford a nice studio, the ability to eat protein, and still be putting some money in the bank for grad school.
Yeah, my dad puts in 50+ hour weeks because of the overtime just to keep pace with what he otherwise would have been making had his old job (of 35 years) not been moved to San Antonio after having been bought out for the patents.
If I wasn't still living at home I'd be working 2 jobs at roughly 56+ hours a week to afford a nice studio, the ability to eat protein, and still be putting some money in the bank for grad school.
My dad works in a factory and does the 50+ hour a week thing. He's been working there for 30 years and I can remember four times he has been laid off. The last time he was laid off they closed the plant and the town had to get involved with giving a huge tax break to a prospective company in order for them to make the sale and keep everyone employed.
I'm curious as to where you live, Aldo. And that's not some passive-aggresive veiled attack on your opinion (this is the Internet after all), just curious.
I'm from Holland.
--
About the whole "famous people earn $texas"*: it is a thing we as society do. Why do we pay $50** to see some tall dudes throw balls through a hoop? Why do we purchase gossip magazines? Why does everyone tune in on MTV to watch the latest show of the Hilton sisters? Why do we pay twice as much money** for a show of Alicia Keys than for one of Melody Gardot?
These people are rich because we, as society, value them higher than others.
* I'm leaving the "they don't work hard for it" alone, as that will turn in a clusterfuck
** rough estimates.
The weather in the northern states is pretty fuckity. NY can't decide if it wants to be winter or summer yet, I think we had a day and a half of spring.
Try Colorado weather. Yesterday it was 80, today it has been snowing and raining all day.
My brothers live there, and I've visited. It's shittier than NY.
bowen on
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
If someone made 7500 bucks a month and was still 'treading water' I would look for more immediate things to blame than the government. That's a goddamn decent amount of money.
It would really be something like 5000 a month after taxes and everything. Thats still a rather large sum of money and if a person is just treading water they probably have a house that is too expensive and some stupidly expensive leased cars.
CommunistCow on
No, I am not really communist. Yes, it is weird that I use this name.
In recent years economists have found that rising college expenses contributes far more to income inequity in America than increasing CEO compensation or "losing ar jerbs" due to globalization.
Basically, the main problem is that America cannot keep up with the increased demand for high-skilled labor. And since the demand for low-skilled labor is decreasing due to technological progress, what you end up with is a widening of the income gap - rich getting richer, poor getting poorer, and the comfortably-middle-class folk making posts about it on online forums.
I don't know how you solve that, but I do know that I have the choice of getting rich fast, never raising children, or getting the fuck out of RI.
Well you can move like ten miles north or ten miles west to Massachusetts or Connecticut, both of which have top 5 in the nation public school systems. Last I looked, they were actually 1-2, but that was a couple years ago.
I agree with the thing quoted in the OP. America's poor are "poor" in an a-historical sense. During the Great Depression, poor Americans literally had to struggle to survive; they went hungry. Now, obesity is a bigger problem amongst American poor.
The Breakthrough Institute talks a lot about America's shifting ideas of poverty and actually seems to support the contention of that banned objectivist dude. Americans who are worried about sliding into poverty are not worried about surviving, or even going hungry. They are worried about social status, about moving from a house into an apartment, about having to limit their ostentatious consumption choices, etc.
A lot of Americans, especially evangelicals, are classified by people like us as "poor," but they don't care at all. They are simply not concerned with material wealth. They've basically opted out of the whole poverty-richness spectrum.
A lot of Americans, especially evangelicals, are classified by people like us as "poor," but they don't care at all. They are simply not concerned with material wealth. They've basically opted out of the whole poverty-richness spectrum.
Really?? I had never heard of an association between being evangelical and being poor.
CommunistCow on
No, I am not really communist. Yes, it is weird that I use this name.
In recent years economists have found that rising college expenses contributes far more to income inequity in America than increasing CEO compensation or "losing ar jerbs" due to globalization.
It still seems like in-state tuition is pretty reasonable everywhere and all your undergrad loans could be paid off in a year or two if you went into a engineering or hard science discipline.
CommunistCow on
No, I am not really communist. Yes, it is weird that I use this name.
A lot of Americans, especially evangelicals, are classified by people like us as "poor," but they don't care at all. They are simply not concerned with material wealth. They've basically opted out of the whole poverty-richness spectrum.
Really?? I had never heard of an association between being evangelical and being poor.
I'm not sure how strong a correlation it is, and it's been a while since I've read the book. But the authors wrote a chapter responding to this kind of uppity liberal book called What's the Matter With Kansas which, among other things, spent some time pointing out the shabby and tacky houses of relatively poor evangelicals in Kansas. The thesis of this book and others like it was apparently that poverty motivates people to become evangelicals. Whereas the Breakthrough people argue that it's actually the other way around—their evangelical outlook makes them content with a level of living commonly described, today, as "poverty," because they don't really care about many of the metrics that make one middle class or rich. (I imagine that both theses could be true and form some kind of self-reinforcing cycle).
I was under the impression that evangelicals were, on average, one of the more affluent christian groups. Not Mormon rich, but still pretty up there. Now Baptists... those guys are poor.
In recent years economists have found that rising college expenses contributes far more to income inequity in America than increasing CEO compensation or "losing ar jerbs" due to globalization.
It still seems like in-state tuition is pretty reasonable everywhere and all your undergrad loans could be paid off in a year or two if you went into a engineering or hard science discipline.
I know your photography. Oh, and I agree btw. Then again, you and I are in engineering related fields.
I was under the impression that evangelicals were, on average, one of the more affluent christian groups. Not Mormon rich, but still pretty up there. Now Baptists... those guys are poor.
Wait a minute. Aren't many baptists ... evangelicals?
And again, I wasn't trying to claim that evangelicals are necessarily poorer on average than other demographics. But there are a lot of them (20% of Americans) and this is apparently how some of them deal with being "poor."
Qingu, what is your opinion relating to the OP? Should the government continue not caring about the poor in the US based on the factoid that some of them are happy regardless of how well they are doing from an economic perspective?
I was under the impression that evangelicals were, on average, one of the more affluent christian groups. Not Mormon rich, but still pretty up there. Now Baptists... those guys are poor.
Wait a minute. Aren't many baptists ... evangelicals?
I don't think so. Unless evangelical is meant as a philosophical style/outlook/tradition taken towards your own sect rather than being one in itself. But then, I'm a lapse Catholic. All those heathens look alike to me. They need to get themselves some hats to help symbolise what they are. Eastern Orthodox knows what's up.
moniker on
0
Casually HardcoreOnce an Asshole. Trying to be better.Registered Userregular
Second of all, people need to stop the never ending treadmill of valuing materialistic possessions over social investment.
People dont need to work so hard/long if people stop craving things that they dont need. Why do need 900 DVDs if you only watch them once, and 2/3s of the collection is still in plastic?
Qingu, what is your opinion relating to the OP? Should the government continue not caring about the poor in the US based on the factoid that some of them are happy regardless of how well they are doing from an economic perspective?
No, not at all. I'm pretty socialist.
I just think it's important to remember that for many Americans poverty is a social status problem, not a survival problem. A lot of the mechanisms we've developed to deal with poverty date from the Great Depression, and both the nature of society and the nature of poverty have changed a lot since then. I'm just going to copy and paste the summary from this book I was talking about, because I'm basically just parroting their ideas anyway:
Poor Americans during the Great Depression developed a sense of solidarity, in large measure because there was no denying their fall. Materialist appeals worked because people could see that they weren't alone. Fortunes evaporated, in some cases literally overnight. One-third of the work force was unemployed. Standing in a breadline, pleading with your neighbors for food, and walking all over town looking for work-these were public acts of poverty.
If waiting in a breadline was humiliating, then you could at least be comforted by the fact that so many of your neighbors were standing in line with you. "When one-fourth of the entire country's labor force is unemployed at once, and a much larger fraction suffers joblessness at one time or another during the course of the crisis," Friedman noted, "people have a tendency to think that, whatever is happening, they are in it together."
Today, life for the poorest Americans is quite different. Thanks to cheap foreign labor, new supply-chain efficiencies, and increased productivity, even the poorest American has seen his purchasing power rise greatly over the past twenty years. The prices of many consumer products, from televisions to video games to air conditioners, fell dramatically, allowing the low-income Americans to purchase products that just a few decades earlier would have been prohibitively expensive.
As a result, when Americans look around today, they don't see the suffering of their fellow man, as they did during the Great Depression. They don't see the Joneses family's credit card bills, mounting debt, and rising anxiety. Instead, they see the Jones family buying an even bigger SUV and moving into a larger house. An American today can be poised on the edge of bankruptcy and have a brand-new pickup truck in his driveway for all the neighbors to see.
The problems of insecure affluence are exacerbated by America's failure to create a new social contract appropriate for our postindustrial economy. For the last twenty-five years, conservatives have led the political effort to cut America's industrial-era social safety net. Democrats, progressives, and liberals have either uncritically resisted those efforts or uncritically implemented them. What they haven't done is acknowledge the ways in which the new needs are postindustrial not industrial, postmaterial not material, in order to create a compelling agenda for a new social contract on everything from health care to retirement security to child care. http://www.thebreakthrough.org/stories.shtml
A lot of Americans, especially evangelicals, are classified by people like us as "poor," but they don't care at all. They are simply not concerned with material wealth. They've basically opted out of the whole poverty-richness spectrum.
Really?? I had never heard of an association between being evangelical and being poor.
I'm not sure how strong a correlation it is, and it's been a while since I've read the book. But the authors wrote a chapter responding to this kind of uppity liberal book called What's the Matter With Kansas which, among other things, spent some time pointing out the shabby and tacky houses of relatively poor evangelicals in Kansas. The thesis of this book and others like it was apparently that poverty motivates people to become evangelicals. Whereas the Breakthrough people argue that it's actually the other way around—their evangelical outlook makes them content with a level of living commonly described, today, as "poverty," because they don't really care about many of the metrics that make one middle class or rich. (I imagine that both theses could be true and form some kind of self-reinforcing cycle).
The "we don't care about money" response to Frank's Kansas argument struck me as a kind of rationalization. If that were true, they wouldn't care if they were taxed a little higher. They wouldn't self-identify as "rich" or "upper middle class" on surveys. (One of Frank's central arguments is that middle-class and lower-middle-class Midwesterners who vote Republican self-identify as being in a higher income bracket than they actually are - they oppose the taxation of the rich because they believe that they themselves are, or are close to becoming, rich, even when they're making $40k per year.)
They obviously care about money, they just don't want to be told that they've been, and are being, duped.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
I don't know about that. Most people think that 'wealthy' constitutes a lot higher up the ladder than it actually is. My mom was shocked to find out that the bottom/entry level of the 'top 5%' income bracket was around $150k/year. She figured it was in the millions.
... Americans who are worried about sliding into poverty are not worried about surviving, or even going hungry. They are worried about social status, about moving from a house into an apartment, about having to limit their ostentatious consumption choices, etc.
Except, for the most part, Houses are cheaper than apartments. But actually I think it's more along the lines of, cut down on consumption on the things you don't need and increase your consumption of the things you do. Cutting consumption tends to snowball recessions to a state of depression.
bowen on
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
I could have run the company into the ground for half that.
How do CEOs command such juicy severance packages? Either they know some dark secrets about the company or they've already installed people loyal to them in all the right places.
I was under the impression that evangelicals were, on average, one of the more affluent christian groups. Not Mormon rich, but still pretty up there. Now Baptists... those guys are poor.
Wait a minute. Aren't many baptists ... evangelicals?
I don't think so. Unless evangelical is meant as a philosophical style/outlook/tradition taken towards your own sect rather than being one in itself. But then, I'm a lapse Catholic. All those heathens look alike to me. They need to get themselves some hats to help symbolise what they are. Eastern Orthodox knows what's up.
Well if you look at where most Baptists actually live, you'll see they probably have severely reduced living expenses compared to the rest of the nation. Actually I usually quote the Baptist demographic map as the "true South" because it starts around South Carolina, extends to Oklahoma, and then loops back to Florida.
So yeah, Baptists might be poor, but they also don't need as much to live comfortably (I am a Southern Baptist from Arkansas, and my family was considered "middle class" for the area).
I don't know about that. Most people think that 'wealthy' constitutes a lot higher up the ladder than it actually is. My mom was shocked to find out that the bottom/entry level of the 'top 5%' income bracket was around $150k/year. She figured it was in the millions.
It makes sense if you think about it, though. Do you really expect every twentieth person you meet to have a $million+ salary? Also, what's the 10% cutoff, about $85k?
I don't know about that. Most people think that 'wealthy' constitutes a lot higher up the ladder than it actually is. My mom was shocked to find out that the bottom/entry level of the 'top 5%' income bracket was around $150k/year. She figured it was in the millions.
It makes sense if you think about it, though. Do you really expect every twentieth person you meet to have a $million+ salary? Also, what's the 10% cutoff, about $85k?
Last I saw the top 5% (upper) of the middle class started around 85-90k. So if upper middle is at 90k then upper class starting at 150k doesn't really seem that unreasonable.
CommunistCow on
No, I am not really communist. Yes, it is weird that I use this name.
Posts
I might just be down on farmers, but my experience has been that they get to lie on what they produce and what they have for income and the government will still cut them a check. The successful family farm is a thing of the past and while I don't like the practices of corporate farms, I feel they are the direction that farm production is headed. I do however agree that sports figures and celebrities make too much money and invest it in all the wrong places.
That's really not that much work. If you said he had two jobs or that he was pulling 12 hour days then I'd sympathise with you, but working only 45 hours a week and then doing house chores, which are basically part of the responsibility of owning a home, isn't huge.
Try Colorado weather. Yesterday it was 80, today it has been snowing and raining all day.
I don't know if other places run into this, though. Are there any systems that distribute taxes to public education equally across the state? If so, does it improve anything?
Yeah, my dad puts in 50+ hour weeks because of the overtime just to keep pace with what he otherwise would have been making had his old job (of 35 years) not been moved to San Antonio after having been bought out for the patents.
If I wasn't still living at home I'd be working 2 jobs at roughly 56+ hours a week to afford a nice studio, the ability to eat protein, and still be putting some money in the bank for grad school.
My dad works in a factory and does the 50+ hour a week thing. He's been working there for 30 years and I can remember four times he has been laid off. The last time he was laid off they closed the plant and the town had to get involved with giving a huge tax break to a prospective company in order for them to make the sale and keep everyone employed.
--
About the whole "famous people earn $texas"*: it is a thing we as society do. Why do we pay $50** to see some tall dudes throw balls through a hoop? Why do we purchase gossip magazines? Why does everyone tune in on MTV to watch the latest show of the Hilton sisters? Why do we pay twice as much money** for a show of Alicia Keys than for one of Melody Gardot?
These people are rich because we, as society, value them higher than others.
* I'm leaving the "they don't work hard for it" alone, as that will turn in a clusterfuck
** rough estimates.
My brothers live there, and I've visited. It's shittier than NY.
Last time I checked the average US CEO made 400 times more than the average worker not 40.
Link for vague reference
It would really be something like 5000 a month after taxes and everything. Thats still a rather large sum of money and if a person is just treading water they probably have a house that is too expensive and some stupidly expensive leased cars.
Basically, the main problem is that America cannot keep up with the increased demand for high-skilled labor. And since the demand for low-skilled labor is decreasing due to technological progress, what you end up with is a widening of the income gap - rich getting richer, poor getting poorer, and the comfortably-middle-class folk making posts about it on online forums.
The Breakthrough Institute talks a lot about America's shifting ideas of poverty and actually seems to support the contention of that banned objectivist dude. Americans who are worried about sliding into poverty are not worried about surviving, or even going hungry. They are worried about social status, about moving from a house into an apartment, about having to limit their ostentatious consumption choices, etc.
A lot of Americans, especially evangelicals, are classified by people like us as "poor," but they don't care at all. They are simply not concerned with material wealth. They've basically opted out of the whole poverty-richness spectrum.
Really?? I had never heard of an association between being evangelical and being poor.
It still seems like in-state tuition is pretty reasonable everywhere and all your undergrad loans could be paid off in a year or two if you went into a engineering or hard science discipline.
I know your photography. Oh, and I agree btw. Then again, you and I are in engineering related fields.
http://quote.morningstar.com/Quote/Quote.aspx?ticker=MAT
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/04/24/financial/f161144D22.DTL&feed=rss.business
Even more outrageous:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/25/business/25pay.html?_r=1&ref=business&oref=slogin
Countrywide's stock was down 79%, and their CEO managed to be compensated to the tune of $245 MILLION DOLLARS through pay and stock options.
I could have run the company into the ground for half that.
And again, I wasn't trying to claim that evangelicals are necessarily poorer on average than other demographics. But there are a lot of them (20% of Americans) and this is apparently how some of them deal with being "poor."
I don't think so. Unless evangelical is meant as a philosophical style/outlook/tradition taken towards your own sect rather than being one in itself. But then, I'm a lapse Catholic. All those heathens look alike to me. They need to get themselves some hats to help symbolise what they are. Eastern Orthodox knows what's up.
http://consumerist.com/consumer/debt/snl-skit-dont-buy-stuff-you-cant-afford-252491.php
Second of all, people need to stop the never ending treadmill of valuing materialistic possessions over social investment.
People dont need to work so hard/long if people stop craving things that they dont need. Why do need 900 DVDs if you only watch them once, and 2/3s of the collection is still in plastic?
I just think it's important to remember that for many Americans poverty is a social status problem, not a survival problem. A lot of the mechanisms we've developed to deal with poverty date from the Great Depression, and both the nature of society and the nature of poverty have changed a lot since then. I'm just going to copy and paste the summary from this book I was talking about, because I'm basically just parroting their ideas anyway:
If waiting in a breadline was humiliating, then you could at least be comforted by the fact that so many of your neighbors were standing in line with you. "When one-fourth of the entire country's labor force is unemployed at once, and a much larger fraction suffers joblessness at one time or another during the course of the crisis," Friedman noted, "people have a tendency to think that, whatever is happening, they are in it together."
Today, life for the poorest Americans is quite different. Thanks to cheap foreign labor, new supply-chain efficiencies, and increased productivity, even the poorest American has seen his purchasing power rise greatly over the past twenty years. The prices of many consumer products, from televisions to video games to air conditioners, fell dramatically, allowing the low-income Americans to purchase products that just a few decades earlier would have been prohibitively expensive.
As a result, when Americans look around today, they don't see the suffering of their fellow man, as they did during the Great Depression. They don't see the Joneses family's credit card bills, mounting debt, and rising anxiety. Instead, they see the Jones family buying an even bigger SUV and moving into a larger house. An American today can be poised on the edge of bankruptcy and have a brand-new pickup truck in his driveway for all the neighbors to see.
The problems of insecure affluence are exacerbated by America's failure to create a new social contract appropriate for our postindustrial economy. For the last twenty-five years, conservatives have led the political effort to cut America's industrial-era social safety net. Democrats, progressives, and liberals have either uncritically resisted those efforts or uncritically implemented them. What they haven't done is acknowledge the ways in which the new needs are postindustrial not industrial, postmaterial not material, in order to create a compelling agenda for a new social contract on everything from health care to retirement security to child care.
http://www.thebreakthrough.org/stories.shtml
The "we don't care about money" response to Frank's Kansas argument struck me as a kind of rationalization. If that were true, they wouldn't care if they were taxed a little higher. They wouldn't self-identify as "rich" or "upper middle class" on surveys. (One of Frank's central arguments is that middle-class and lower-middle-class Midwesterners who vote Republican self-identify as being in a higher income bracket than they actually are - they oppose the taxation of the rich because they believe that they themselves are, or are close to becoming, rich, even when they're making $40k per year.)
They obviously care about money, they just don't want to be told that they've been, and are being, duped.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Except, for the most part, Houses are cheaper than apartments. But actually I think it's more along the lines of, cut down on consumption on the things you don't need and increase your consumption of the things you do. Cutting consumption tends to snowball recessions to a state of depression.
How do CEOs command such juicy severance packages? Either they know some dark secrets about the company or they've already installed people loyal to them in all the right places.
Well if you look at where most Baptists actually live, you'll see they probably have severely reduced living expenses compared to the rest of the nation. Actually I usually quote the Baptist demographic map as the "true South" because it starts around South Carolina, extends to Oklahoma, and then loops back to Florida.
http://www.valpo.edu/geomet/pics/geo200/religion/baptist.gif
So yeah, Baptists might be poor, but they also don't need as much to live comfortably (I am a Southern Baptist from Arkansas, and my family was considered "middle class" for the area).
Wii Code: 1040-1320-0724-3613 :!!:
It makes sense if you think about it, though. Do you really expect every twentieth person you meet to have a $million+ salary? Also, what's the 10% cutoff, about $85k?
Last I saw the top 5% (upper) of the middle class started around 85-90k. So if upper middle is at 90k then upper class starting at 150k doesn't really seem that unreasonable.