Burn of the Day
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
Or, said another way, if we exclude all these inconvenient facts that point to a different conclusion., our point is proven. Having said that, there’s no question that are political overlords are decimating the middle class with little regard to the pain that it causes.
The figures in the meme are fabrications.
Art:
I knew they had to be, although they make the point that averages can be deceiving and that a few folks doing exceptionally well can mask the struggles of their neighbors.
My sister and I live with our 89-year-old dad in a house he bought 60 years ago for $15,000, now worth near a million (even though we’ve added nothing to the structure). Between her salary and our pensions, our HHI is great, but none of us could afford to buy this place as individuals and only I (maybe) could pay taxes and upkeep by myself. There’s a lot of folks with the sort of “wealth” on paper that doesn’t translate into liquidity or discretionary income.
Back of the envelope calculations, if the average income in the US is $74,500, and factoring in inequality, it drops to about $50k if you exclude the top 20%.
All right, I’m not going to admit how much time I spent on this, but by my calculations, if you exclude the top 12700 households, you get an average household income of $69,844. At least, that’s based on an estimate of the income of the top .01% of all households in 2019. So their guess of $35500 is slightly higher than half.