There’s never been a middle class. The illusion of the “lazy poor” is fabricated by the wealth class to divide the working class.
Yes there was.
In 1960 the US minimum wage was $1.00/hour and the average house was $11,000.00.
Two kids could get married on high school graduation day and be self supporting homeowners by the time they turned 25.
Of course in those days, the rich were content with a mere $1 million…
You are correct! And it’s crazy how effective those high corporate tax rates were at distributing wealth to better society and create a healthy middleclass of consumers to fuel an economy and prevent it from collapsing.
Weird how everything’s turning to shit now that corporations don’t pay taxes and use all their earnings to influence government elections instead of needing to actually be accountable to them.
“Too big to fail” was actually just “too big to stop.” So now where there used to be a US government, there is a handful of billionaire cultists.
The middleclass 100% existed. Billionaires just stole it. The money that drove US spending across 3 decades is now all in 5 people’s bank accounts doing jack shit to help anyone but those 5 people.
Higher corporate taxes = a middle class. See most Nordic countries as a great example that still exists.
Thank you for making this point. A middle class is the sign of a functioning society.
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The top income tax bracket in 2025 is 37%, for income earned over $751,600 (~$69,000 in 1960, married filing jointly).
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In 1960, >$20,000 and <$24,000 was 38% (married filing jointly). (~$219,000 to ~$263,000 in 2025 dollars). The top tax bracket then was 91%, with all sorts of steps between 38% and 91%.
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You’re right, but that’s not middle class–that’s working class. Making minimum wage and having a comfortable life is working class. The concept of “middle” class was a method of pitting one half of the working class against the other, so the rich could move from millions to billions.
Now you’re just playing with definitions.
“Middle class” is the term most people use.
I mostly agree. They’re synonymous today, but I think there’s still an important distinction.
The term “middle class” is distinct from the “lower class.” But those two are more or less the same when compared to the “upper class” (what I would call the “wealth class”). Both lower and middle classes need to work in order to survive, while the wealth class has enough money to live without working (many of them still work, but it’s optional for them).
Any distinction between lower and middle class ends up harming both, and allowing the upper class to hoard more wealth. I generally try to promote the term “working class” because it doesn’t divide us, and more accurately portrays the differences between classes.
An illustration in this vein:
I’ve watched people like you shoot themselves in the foot with useless arguments like this since I was in high school.
You can’t just say “Tax the rich.” No, we have to analyze every term and only use proper nomenclature. Heaven will fall if we call a Social Democrat a Socialist and the seas will part if we confuse an anarchist with a Trotskyite.
I’ve watched it for years, and I’ve never once see it help anyone actually win an election.
Holy generalizations, Batman!
My purpose in making the distinction isn’t to be pedantic, it’s to help clarify the nature of the class warfare we’re dealing with. I don’t care if you want to use the term “middle class”. I only bring up the distinction because of the nature of the original post, which was explicitly noting the false narrative of the “lazy poor”.
Tax the rich, restore the middle class, use whatever terminology you want. But understand that the poor are not the enemy of the middle class, and they’re not the villains. The rich people are.
Holy genralizations yourself.
When did I say anything about the poor being the enemy of the middle class, or that we aren’t all at war with the rich?
If you’re going to put words in my mouth please order some chips and salsa to go with it.
It doesn’t matter if you wanted to be pedantic, you were.
Now we’re involved in a useless argument over terms.
I’ve made my point twice, and I’m not going to repeat it a third time.
I understand your point, and I disagree with it.
If you decide to continue, you’re proving my point; that you’d rather engage in an argument with someone on your side than step back and accept a minor disagreement.
If you don’t use proper nomenclature or explain what is meant in detail you have no hope of truly being understood. People’s ignorance of what things actually mean is used as a weapon against further understanding, like the good old fashioned “socialism is when the government does stuff and is also evil and any hint of it will introduce satan” or whatever
Being hostile towards proper understanding of a subject is not going to help you actually comprehend it
Two points.
First, you can cut out a third of the words in a sentence and still comprehend the gist of the message. ‘Proper nomenclature’ might be important in a college essay or a legal writ but in the real world people slur their words and mishear the replies and still manage to get the point across. Words aren’t numbers; any word can have a dozen different meanings.
Look at former NYC Mayor LaGuardia. Back in the day he ran on a Fusion Ticket that included Socialists, Communists, and Republicans? You could spent a lifetime trying to sort out the exact definition of what he was. Do you think Nazi Germany was ‘Socialist’ because of National Socialism.
Second, how much comprehension is actually needed? Do you need to understand the difference between alternating current and direct current to know when to use batteries and when to plug a device into the wall? Do I have to understand aerodynamics to buy an airline ticket? Does someone have to know every single position a candidate holds in order to decide to vote for them?
Was going to bring up interest rates, but apparently a 30 year mortgage in 1960 was something like 7%. Which…isn’t that bad.
Lyndon Johnson wanted to have a massive war in Vietnam without raising taxes, so he printed money to pay for it. Nixon doubled down on LBJ’s plan. The OPEC oil embargo really made inflation soar. Jimmy Carter hired a man named Paul Volker to run the Fed and bring it under control. Carter’s plan worked, but only after Reagan won. Then Reagan turned around and started cutting taxes without a way to pay for the cuts.
In 1968 when Nixon came in, ‘middle class’ was one Union job supporting a family of four with enough left over for a few luxuries. By the time Bush Sr finished, ‘middle class’ was two incomes. In 1968 $1 million was a massive fortune; by 1993 it was what a rich guy paid for a party.
Mortgage rates were in the teens in the early 80s.
Yeah, that’s why I brought it up. I always assumed they were high in the 60s too.
Adjusted for inflation, 11k in the 60s is equivalent to 120k today. You can get a house for that money. Not a big house, but houses weren’t that big back then either.
“Adjusted for inflation” is a pretty silly term. It might mean something in an economics class, but it’s nonsense if you try to apply it to the real world.
$1 million in 1960 would buy you an estate in Beverly Hills, a townhouse in Manhattan, a few luxury cars, and you’d have enough left over to invest and live comfortably forever.
$11 million today might get you a bungalow in a pricey neighborhood.
I don’t see what’s silly about it. It’s the purchasing power that matters - not the numeric value.
That’s exactly the point I was making.
So it makes sense to adjust prices for inflation because the numeric value itself doesn’t illustrate the purchasing power accurately.
That’s exactly the point I was making.
The rich 1% are the middle class. America discarded the hereditary upper class when we banned titles of nobility.
In our free society there are only two classes : those with enough money that they never have to work again, and those without.
There is no middle-class. There is the working class and the aristocrats.
That reminds me of a joke.
The working class walks into a bar . . .
In this economy‽
I’m about to walk into my fav microbrewery… Cheers! 🍻
Lower, middle, and upper class is such an antiquated way of dividing people into groups to keep them at odds with each other.
The fact of the matter is, there are truthfully only two classes. The working class, and the capital class. 95-99% of individuals fall into some strata of working class. If you earn a wage, a salary, or a commission in order to purchase basic necessities- you are working class. If your money makes you money simply by existing, and your assets passively appreciating in value mean that you do not have to work for a living in order to buy basic necessities, then you are in the capital class.
The working class and the capital class = The slave class and the ruling class.
It’s class warfare
Always was…
Most people are a bit of both, no?
Ideally, everyone would be in a position to break into the lowest strata of the capital class by the time they reach retirement age and can no longer work. For most people, that translates into a, IRA or 401k built over decades of years working, assets like a house appreciating in value (so that you can borrow against that increased value), and perhaps a pension or some other form of investment that yields dividends.
Even then. I’d argue that if you retire knowing that if you live within your means, your funds will last you for 20 years, you’re not actually in the capital class. It doesn’t matter for most people, because few people expect to be able to live for that long past retirement and they can always adjust their spending habits to push the number out a bit farther if it looks like they will outlive their retirement savings. But that’s just it, it’s more like a savings and not endlessly accumulating more and more wealth. For the true capital class, their money passively grows and generates more wealth faster than they can spend it.
Most people are living paycheck to paycheck… But if you mean owning stock or a retirement portfolio makes you a capitalist then I think that is still incorrect. People who actually own the company of whose stock you “own” can make decisions that will ultimately decimate your retirement savings while enriching themselves.
The GP earning 6 figures for prescribing boomer cunts opioids is clearly in the same social class as the construction worker whose life expectancy is below the retirement age.
The construction worker and the doctor have more in common with each other than either of them do with the billionaire.
That mentality, that the two working class individuals are too different from one another to ever unify because of the fact that one makes more money than the other, is exactly the kind of mental attitude that the wealthy elite have cultivated for years to keep us at each other’s throats instead of theirs.
There is no middle class. There are only working class and wealth class. Just because you are high earner in an office job doesn’t mean you’re not working class.
Where is the line though? Many people that could be considered middle class are realistically rich enough to never have to work again if they didn’t want to. But they want their flash cars and private school for the kids so they do need to work to keep that level of luxury. Even if they could still live comfortably without working.
If I was to start van living (hard as I can’t drive) and rented out my house I wouldn’t have to work another day in my life. Does that make me part of the wealth class, despite having always been at/close to minimum wage? Getting enough rent to pay for my mortgage and leave me with many hundreds extra would not be difficult. Go for a HMO and turn the living space into more bedrooms like a standard scumlord would possibly even leave me with over £1000 a month. The only work I would have to do is paint over some mould occasionally.
I don’t know why everyone is avoiding the Marxist terms, as they are far more accurate than low/middle/upper or whatever people are talking about in this thread.
Those wealthy workers are petit-bourgeoisie. They own enough capital so that they no longer have to struggle in the rat race of capitalism, but not enough to be controlling entire industries or multibillion dollar companies like the bourgeoisie.
Initially wanted to say petit bourgeoisie isn’t the right term here but now the more I think about it, yeah?
It doesn’t really fit the normal examples of petit bourgeoisie but economically I think they are in the same place even if they are not small business owners or sole traders.
I thought petit-bourgeois made their money through assets? So they aren’t workers. High earners are still proletariat if they are selling their labor.
The rich are the lazy ones
how expensive it is to be poor
For anyone that needs the read, Terry Pratchett said it so well it is an economic theory now, the Boots theory.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. … A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. … But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socio-economic unfairness.[4]From Men at Arms by Sir Terry Pratchett
Also, a history of “people don’t want to work” bullshit going back to 1894: https://thunderdungeon.com/2024/07/14/nobody-wants-to-work-anymore/
People don’t want to work and are lazy is a bullshit talking point even older than 1894.
The first ever modern self-help book ever published (literally called self-help) was made a man with a lifelong history of business and financial failure and yet also still believed that it was no legislation or social assistance, but personal ‘morals’ and ethics are what gets people out of poverty and into comfort.
It was bullshit then and bullshit now. It is such a dark realization that what causes so much quality of life increases is not productivity or technology but legislation and policy.
It is such a dark realization that what causes so much quality of life increases is not productivity or technology but legislation and policy.
And that’s how we got Prosperity Gospel: rich folk trying to justify their lazy asses hoarding wealth and complaining about the people who actually do the work wanting fair compensation for their time and effort.
Prosperity Gospel is a bit older than that. There was a time when people thought that being rich or becoming rich was a direct blessing from god… ironically the people who really first disputed that in Europe were the Dutch, whose trade and double-entry accounting laid the foundation of modern capitalism.
I should mention that in 1001 Arabian Nights, at least in the story of Sinbad the Sailor, Sinbad (as an old man telling his story to a young man coincidentally named Sinbad as well) that his fortune was more luck than anything. At least he acknowledged that.
In general it can be said that poor people do not have the capital to make upfront investments which become profitable over time. Not even just literal investing, but investing in things like a more fuel efficient car, upgrading the insulation in your house/apartment to save on heating, buying non-perishables in bulk when there’s a good deal, buying a dish washer instead of hand washing…
So many things that let you save tons of money in the long run, require relatively large upfront investments, that poor people can’t afford. That’s a big reason why poverty can be such an insidious vicious loop, that can be extremely hard to escape from.
Two identical households, with identical income could have vastly different financial situations, just based on if their income was previously low, and they weren’t able to afford any of these investments, vs. If their income was previously high, having allowed them to previously make these large investments to reduce their long term monthly costs, and secure enough liquidity to be able to continue occasionally making these investments.
Thank you for the expansion.
Because middle class is used wrong in North America.
Poverty class is simple, you don’t have enough to live.
Labor class is divided into three;
Low labor, your barely paid enough to scrape by.
Middle labor, your paid enough for your work to live.
High labor, you’re paid well for your work. Perhaps you own your own small business.
Middle class, you aren’t paid a wage or salary anymore, you’re income comes from the things you own. As rich as a politician or nobility but not much political power.
Upper class, in old Europe this would be the nobels. Duke’s, Earls, Lords, that type of stuff. In modern north America this would be the ultra rich. You have political power and you own a lot of stuff. This is where most representatives are.
Politician class, former Royal class. You rule, extreme political power and wealth.
Most people in North America think they’re in the middle class when really they’re in the Labor middle class, it’s very different
Working class is everybody who must work to live.
Wealth class is everybody else.
There is no such thing as a middle class, that is a lie. Everybody seems to think they’re in the middle class, because that puts somebody below them, and gives them a reason to continue working under wage slavery. This is the purpose of the lie.
The fun thing is that everyone thinks they are middle class. When I was making €45k a year I thought I was middle class because I had an university degree and a leadership position. At the same time my boss, who had just spent €5mio acquiring a 50% share in a second company and owned three houses (two of which he rented out) also considered himself middle class because he wasn’t a billionaire.
I once had a friend, which gf had to send him like 10Euro per month, for him to get monthly more than minimal wage which was considered “middle class” for some fucking reason in this country.
He was so emotional about this shit, that I am still not sure if he was for real about that or not…
for some fucking reason
I’m very curious what the reason is
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Nah, he was too young and student too, so not bank income tax yet.
He just wanted to feel better than those “bottom class losers”. And I do not joke. He study economics.
He study economics
Checks out
A better metric is homeownership to me. Someone who is middle class is secure and doesn’t have to rent nor pay debt. They only really have to work when it’s mutually beneficial. That is basically impossible to achieve in the modern world with the hundreds or thousands of micro taxes and cartel controlled corporate markets and complete lack of land for the lease it’s to live on without virtual indentured servitude. Even if you did spend your entire life buying a house the state would just take it away from your children with the brutal taxation. Without a home you are always going to be a slave and have to work at any shitty job just to have food and a roof over your head.
Even if you own the house and land outright, you still need to pay real estate taxes, and feed yourself. Either you have the money in the bank to cover those expenses for the rest of your life or you don’t. You can have unexpected medical expenses, houses require maintenance which is generally expensive, and transportation is still an issue.
If you have to work to live, you are working class. Full stop.
I think of class like this, lower class, is people who start with nothing. Their parents can’t save any money for whatever reason. They have to start working as soon as they are out of school. They will probably never own anything.
Middle class is more like. The parents own a home, the child will probably own a home. They can go to college. They can move somewhere that better fits them.
Upper class to me is like “good” families, people who have homes and investments. Where the children don’t necessarily have to work. Where getting some type of education is almost expected.
The ultra wealthy to me are not upper class, they are just criminals.
The middle class does not exist.
Just about everybody draws a few lines around themselves, and describes everybody within them as middle class. It’s a meaningless distinction, because it means something different to everybody.
If you must work, you are working class.
Well sure there isn’t a physical thing like class. It’s just an abstraction that we as humans came up with but I like the idea of owning (not indebted) a home, which to me signifies middle class. This is mainly because it gives you a lot of sovereignty. You can choose not to work continually, if the market doesn’t pay a fair rate. You expenses are relatively low and controllable, since you don’t have taxable income and you can survive, even retire in this ideal society.
These days that’s very difficult with inflated asset prices, fiat currency, property taxation of the common people and things like that.
Yes my definition isn’t anymore or less true then anyone else’s because class isn’t something that exists, but personally this is how I see it. I only think in terms of working class when it comes to labor law versus business and stuff. It doesn’t have much use to me outside of thinking about workers rights. Most more left leaning people that I’m aware of these days don’t particularly care about workers and stuff much these days. They care more about things like welfare or equality which to me isn’t really a working class issue so much as a low class issue. I’m not anti welfare by any means. I just don’t think I have every heard like an American Democrats professional or not, advocate for giving workers time off, or protecting their wages from excessive taxation or forced profit sharing or anything like that.
America isn’t a right wing or left wing system. Democrats are mostly right wing and mostly liberals, they are also hard capitalists. The Republicans are mostly alt right and borderline to full blown Nazi. Workers come nowhere in the equation of political parties or the average worker. Most democratic and Republican voters seem to be mostly interested in building a massive surveillance state, rent capitalism via high taxation on the poor and low taxation on the rich, controlling each other, controlling speech and ideas. This is what most Americans for the past few decades regardless of party has found important enough to vote in. If you want someone to care about the working class you will probably have to somehow get your average American to stop being obsessed with spying on everyone in their society first because that is way higher on your average voters priority list.
If you’re going to talk about class society, you might as well use the Marxist terms: proletariat, petit-bourgeoisie, and bourgeoise.
Even well paid doctors are labor class mostly. Because even in the past doctors weren’t as well paid as today.
Were you really born in 1944?
Middle class IS below the poverty line.
The poverty line is a number made up by the wealthy to keep the “less poors” at odds with the “more poors” So that we don’t join forces and guillotine the motherfuckers.
There are conventional definitions of the poverty line. In France, it is defined by the national institute of statistics as:
The poverty threshold is conventionally set at 60% of the population’s median standard of living. It corresponds to a disposable income of €1,288 per month for a single person and €2,705 for a couple with two children under 14 years old. https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/5759045
Yeah, we do a lot of inner fighting and it is difficult to get through it. I even find myself getting frustrated at people, who earn twice as much as me, complaining about how they live paycheck to paycheck. The cost of living is not high here (and I save a lot myself), and I think about the wealth I could build if I had their income; basically I think, “why are you complaining??” But we have to remember we are on the same team. We are all ultimately getting screwed over by the owner class.
That guy earning twice as much as you is still far closer to you than to the guy above him. He may make twice the amount as you, but the guy above both of you makes literally 400 times as much (per day sometimes). It’s like you said, we’re all on the same team.
They also don’t understand that the impact of the “lazy poor” is exaggerated by the rich to turn your attention away from The Big Theft.
That’s a good explanation of generational poverty and why it’s so expensive to be poor, but if Vimes is looking for the real reason the rich are so rich, he should read about surplus labor value. He seems to have ignored the broader class dynamics at play under capitalism.
Or maybe things are different on Discworld, I haven’t actually read the books.
Funny enough he ends up marrying into extreme wealth lol
“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.” - James Baldwin
No truer words.
There is no true definition of middle class. People making only $30k a month consider themselves middle class and people making $1 million also think they are middle class.
There is no ‘middle’ class. There is only ownership and labour.
I would argue there are at least 3 classes:
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The impoverished class that makes their living from the charity of others
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The working class that makes their living from their labor
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The ownership class that makes their living from owning things
You basically can’t live on charity one of the classes you mentioned almost doesn’t exist
in sane countries you actually can go quite far on charity alone, most every civilized place on earth outside of the US fully understands that most crime is done out of desperation than anything else…so they insure there are plentiful safety nets.
rock bottom in austrailia doesn’t compare to rock bottom in (insert red state of choice)
Fair enough, but in a more just system, the impoverished class would barely exist, if at all.
Fair enough, but in a more just system, class would not exist, at all.
FTFY :P
Thanks
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There are people who are fully owners and don’t do any labour, and those who subsist entirely on their labour and don’t own anything. Would it be fair to say that the middle class is anyone who works but still owns a non-zero amount of appreciating or revenue-generating assets?
If we guesstimate middle class by comparable lifestyle when the term was coined, it starts around 250k in today money. Comfortable house, lots of kids, multiple cars (but not luxury), at least one real traveling vacation every year, never worrying about paying bills or buying food, all while saving enough to retire by 55. There aren’t many people in the US with the income to match that. I’d say the middle class is dead.
I always take the middle class as the threshold where you have sufficient passive income to afford a dignified lifestyle without needing to work anymore but may choose to.
Examples would be landlords with a decent portfolio, business owners where all the work is done for them, and people with substantial savings and investments.
If you have to work to pay the bills, no matter how much you’re on, you’re working class. This can even include millionaires in high cost lifestyles.
If you’re so rich that you no longer need to care about the value of money then you are upper class.
“I always take the middle class as the threshold where you have sufficient passive income … Examples would be landlords”
Please don’t bring parasites into this
That’s a lot of caveats.
Yeah, I think people who say that don’t realize a few key things.
First, they don’t understand the ‘poverty tax’ - how not having money for things like a security deposit, reliable transportation, or bulk buying actually costs you more in the long run.
And second, they don’t see how thin the margin for error is for most middle-class families. One medical bill or job loss is all it takes to fall behind.
Earn 3 times the amount of a proposed rent? You’re golden.
Earn below 3 times the amount of a proposed rent (but still enough to pay it each month)? Now you have to pay a guarantor to back you up. Last estimate I got was $800 for that service. You’ve gotta pay that before a landlord will accept you.
So if you earn less, you’re forced to pay more. It’s so fucking backwards.
Source: currently homeless, on numerous “waitlists” for low-income apartments that can take years to get through, housing lotteries that have 10s of thousands of people also hoping for a home, and attempting to scrounge the bottom of the barrel with tiny studio apartments (which, even if I apply to immediately, I’m behind others who somehow got to them faster.)
The system is absolutely fucked. I’m just grateful I enjoy my job (which, yes, I work full time, and earn above minimum wage for. Modern US society has no mercy for any of us.)
There’s the Working class, who can’t live in society without trading their time for money in some way, or being given charity. And the Capital class, who can live in society without doing either.
I will add this to my vocabulary as I find it captures the issue in an easy to understand way.
Thanks, viewing it this way really puts retirement into perspective as well. The big promise of modern capitalist countries is that if you, the Worker, take 25% of your paycheck every day for 40 or 50 years and pump it into the stock market, that perhaps you’ll be able to live in the capital class (aka off money you already have) at an extremely low level for a while right before you die. That’s really all we’ve been promised and what a lot of people dream of as the peak achievement. Trading half your waking life away for decades to someone who is making more off your work than you are making, so that just maybe, if the market is good at the right time, you get a tiny taste of how the owners and investors have been living this entire time before you die.
Screwing the poor is a time honored tradition in capitalism.
From Cracked’s article, 5 Cruel Ways Being Poor Is Expensive
- Household Goods Like Toilet Paper Cost More For Poor People
- The IRS Audits Poor People More Frequently Than Rich People
- Poor People Have To Pay Extra To Access Money They’ve Already Earned
- “New Customer Fees” Are Thinly Disguised Penalties For Being Poor
- Nutritional Inequality Goes Much Deeper Than Food Deserts
From another article, 5 Screwed-Up Ways The World’s Stacked Against Poor People
- “Period Poverty” Is A Very Real Problem
- “Transit Deserts” Keep People From Finding Work
- Low-Income Housing Is Leaving Residents With Massive Energy Bills
- Low-Income Neighborhoods Experience Longer Emergency Response Times
- Low-Income Families Are More Likely To Be Audited
Finally, Why We Can’t Stop Hating The Poor
- We Have Laws Designed To Make The Poor Look Like Assholes
- The Hate Comes From Some Unexpected Places
- Poor People Smell Bad
- The Poor Remind Us That Sometimes The System Is In Fact Bullshit
- We Have To Believe People Deserve What They Get
