America - Sliding Down The Shitter

[Amarok]

What's the income level or other defining traits of these people who are poor but think they're working class?

As I was reading this thread, I was thinking that the main problem might be differing thoughts as to what is or isn't middle class.

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https://money.cnn.com/infographic/econom...ss-anyway/

Classifying the middle class as income between $30ish thousand* to over six figures is pretty laughable IMO. You can separate it into subgroups (lower, middle, upper) but at the end of the day, considering what "middle class" means to most people, it's an incredibly misleading statistic. It tricks American workers who should be demanding more into thinking that income inequality somehow benefits them. Crazy stuff.

Those in the middle middle and lower middle are at serious risk of falling into a lower class because of one, large unforeseen expense. Somebody making close to or more than $100k has more than enough to establish a sizable rainy day fund and create a diversified investment portfolio that will provide them a sizable passive income, so that when that unforeseen expense comes, they will be ready. They will will not have to give up any aspect of their life that they were enjoying prior (for the most part). To me, that is the middle class. Everybody else is one mistake away from being poor. That is the working class. 

But, honestly, the working class and middle class are facing similar problems in terms of income inequality. Regardless of whether or not the economy is booming, only 20% of the population sees 90% of the benefits. Wages have also remain stagnated for quite some time, despite everything else increasing in cost. This is less of a Democrat/Republican issue and more of a problem with American state capitalism as a whole. That's why young people are turning socialist. They're disillusioned with our system and haven't lived through the 1980s (when everybody was conditioned to be content with income inequality.)

Both Democrats and Republicans have made the problem worse, like when Bill Clinton deregulated the financial sector. But nobody has had a worse impact than Reagan IMO. Check out income distribution before and after Reaganomics. 



[Chart taken from this Forbes article]

*I confused numbers from different sources, $46k is what the CNNMoney starts it at.

Republicans love to attack the concept of income inequality as it's a good criticism of Free Market ,Trickle Down , Privatize everything  religion .