We are “individuals” as opposed to “corporations.”

Rush Limbaugh, Mitt Romney, and Bill Gates are essentially corporations. If they aren’t actually incorporated, they draw their wealth from corporate activity.

We are “individuals” and “families.” Tax cuts should go to “families and individuals.”

The American Revolution was a rebellion of individuals against a corporation, the British East India Company.

When speaking about tax policy or anything else, always use “families and individuals,” never “average,” “common” etc.

http://www.visualizingeconomic…..bution.gif

The problem is that one’s ability to interpret graphical information may, on average, decline with income…. so that those who most need to draw political implications from this information may be least likely to do so.

Of course real politics happens based not on facts like these, but on how people feel about their lives and income, which is very much a relative-to-the-neighbors, relative to the coworkers, relative to my life expectations sort of thing.

in 1975 i had a great sociology teacher who set the entire class straight about classes, on one of the first days of class…….

he passed out strips of paper and had all of us write which class we thought we were in…………almost everyone wrote upper-middle or upper except for me……he set us all straight that there was no such thing as upper-middle class and informed us we were all middle…..i got a huge brownie point for writing middle, i was his pet after that…….(my family had upper friends, in connecticut, and cape cod, i knew we weren’t, and my dad-who was a corporate accountant told me that people created the phrase upper-middle to disassociate themselves from working-class people, being ‘posers’, so i wrote middle…….and i have to say, i liked that a few people from my neighborhood in that class were taken down a notch)

he went on to describe upper, lower and middle……..his former fiance was upper, from philadelphia…..he blew the class away describing her life growing up and what was expected of her…..and that he decided he couldn’t live that way…..described his own upbringing as middle, and described what he learned working in the inner city as lower…..i had already worked in the hills of kentucky at a methodist work camp, henderson ky, so i had already seen lower……some of my fondest memories are from that time…….

later, i went on to work outside for the phone company…….i saw it all…….inside and outside people’s homes…in their basements, garages, kitchens, bedrooms, you name it…breakfast, lunch, dinner, late at night, good moods, bad moods…..everything you can imagine, i saw in people and their homes……..coming from a background where i was exposed to all walks of life, what i saw was that it would amaze you how much the same people are, really.

my family has a saying about money-money buys you experience…..once you get beyond the roof, clothes, food, money buys you experience, and that’s what separates the classes, life experiences………

Why are these people running the government?

allan_in_upstate @ 18

Lots of information at Wiki

A common sleazeball statistical technique
(yes, David Brooks, I’m talking about you)
is to discuss mean income figures,
rather than median.

Thanks. The Wiki stuff is marginally helpful. Too crude w/respect to the strata delineations. I’d like to see a finer-grained tabulation going up all the way. “$100,000 and up” is not very illuminating.

Try the IRS Statistics of Income Bulletin. Should be available at http://www.irs.gov.

Class definitely has a cultural aspect, too. So people growing up in one class who come to live in another often carry with them preferences and values of their origins, or suffer through personal agonies as they experience the social pressures of their new class surroundings to shed old ways and habits of thought. This can happen as working class people go to college and become professionals, or as professionals lose their jobs or businesses and find themselves working in a working-class job.

Class is also established through social networks that knit individuals together who share economic circumstances, and tend to exclude from the network people from other classes who don’t “belong.”

yellowsnapdragon @ 51

P J Evans @ 46

The other thing is, being salaried and management doesn’t mean being high-income. You can be making less than the paid-by-the-hour people around you.

Exactly. A lot of union jobs like longshoremen and even truck drivers make salaries higher than some professional people. I see class as a cultural phenomenon that is heavily influenced by your and your family’s economic history.

Biodun @ 78

One obvious thing about the really wealthy: They simply assume the environment and context that they’ve created for themselves. That is, assume it to be “natural” and matter-of-fact. They “naturalize” their constructed environment.

As in Richistan

Yep…