Some well-meaning folks in my other diary made a counter-argument about $250,000 a year and whether or not households with that level of income are rich.
This argument was based on the idea that if you lived in New York, San Francisco, or DC, $250,000 is not a lot of money.
Believe me: If you make that much money a year, anywhere in the country, you are rich.
The Pete Peterson people say that, really, $250,000 a year is not much in high-cost "coastal" regions of the country.
SRSLY?
Let's take a look at the kind of incomes that people make in high-cost areas of the country and draw some conclusions.
So ... New York City.
What is the median household income in Manhattan for example?
$200,000 a year?
$300,000?
$500,000?
No.
The median household income in Manhattan is $64,000 a year, about $10k more than the national median.
New York City as a whole has a median household income of just $48,000 a year.
So -- if you are making five times the city median, honestly -- you have a lot of options. You are in one of the top percentiles of income-earners in the city. If you can't "make it" on five times the median income, you ain't too great at personal finance. And if you want me to subsidize your lifestyle from my meager earnings -- HA! That is just nonsense.
And it's not just living in expensive Manhattan.
If you are raking in $250,000 a year, you might be interested in living in a posher suburb of Connecticut or New Jersey.
Well, the median personal income in the richest town of Connecticut, New Canaan, is "only" about $85,000 a year. It's not an exact correlation -- but considering two earners in the household, $250,000 is seventy percent higher than the median in New Canaan.
I think the real issue is what I mentioned above:
Our piteous $250,000 a year family is simply lacking personal finance skills. They are trying to live above their means. If they are really struggling to get by, they should sell the house they can't afford, discontinue the cleaning service they can't afford, put the kids in public schools, cut down to one affordable car, etc.
These are things that most people do when they realize they are spending more money than they have.
Asking people like me to sacrifice so that folks who make multiples of my income every year can pay less taxes is insulting ... and abusive.
UPDATE: A commenter noted that my New Canaan math above is not correct. The data I provide is median per capita income, not median personal income. So, in order to arrive at the right comparison to $250,000, I would also have to know the average household size in New Canaan, etc. It looks to me that the median household income in that town would in fact be larger than $250,000, maybe around the $300,000 level. (But that is a guess.)