$95,000 a year is the new “middle class”

How America is running out of good paying jobs to support the middle class

Photo by Taylor Wilcox on Unsplash

We did it to ourselves. We got married, had kids, and wanted to raise a family. I chose a job with good work hours, she wanted to take an active role in our kids lives and is at home. According to most articles, we should be living a satisfying life.

Life is what you make of it — hogwash

You can argue being homeless in the United States is a satisfying life, say, compared to being a slum dwelling in Mumbai. This is the argument used to stifle complaints from the middle/upper middle class. It’s the 90% vs the 9% and somehow the top 1% keeps getting a bigger share of the pie.

We’re not complaining about innovation generating benefits for all. But lately a lot of disruption has been about taking money from people and putting it into the pockets of the investing class, the millionaires and billionaires. Has social media and online news made us connected and informed in the way we envisioned? Surely there was the promise of it, before we lost control of our privacy, the importance of the truth, and the quality of online discourse. These growing pains we’re going through all but decimated thousands of good paying news gathering jobs held by journalists nationwide.

The same could be said for our retirement savings. Low interest rates are great for homebuyers, but they also artificially inflated our stock market, leading to the encouragement of risky debt purchases that made companies unstable. Those same companies are being bailed out by taxpayer dollars paid by families clipping coupons every Sunday to buy groceries.

We’re not getting by

We were meant to be more than food delivery drivers for the VCs to profit from in Silicon Valley. Our houses were our homes, not a financial product for Wall Street bankers to bundle, mince, and get bailed out on when things went south. Our public institutions were there to serve us, not to be gutted by our politicians who passed unsustainable tax cuts for the wealthy.

The reality is that if you are a three person household, living on $50,000 a year, you are not middle class. You are poor. You stop being poor right around $75,000 a year…