Monday I shared a link on my Facebook page to an article titled “Yes, the middle class has been disappearing, but they haven’t fallen into the lower class, they’ve risen into the upper class.”  This received the following response:

75k is not “Upper class”. To reach the top 20% household income needs to be about 250k/yr. To reach the 1%, household income needs to be about 1.6m/yr. This article is meant to quell the masses. If this article were true, the population would not be mad as hell, as they currently are.

There are some definite factual problems with this response as well as a more general evasion of the underlying data.  First I will address the factual problems.  To be in the top 20% of families does not require anywhere near $250,000 in income.  According to the census data cited in the article, 25.6% make $100,000 or more (2009 dollars).  14.9% of that 25.6% is from those making $100,000 to $150,000, so one can be certain that to be in the top 20% you need somewhere between those boundaries, or quite a bit lower than $250,000.  Top 1% is again greatly overestimated in the above response.  According to this article in the New York Times from 2012, the top 1% make $383,000 or more, a far cry from $1,400,000.  (The New York Times article also puts the top 20% at around $100,000 which matches pretty well the data from the original article.)

The more general evasion in the response is ignoring the facts about family income that are obvious if you actually look at the data at the source.  In looking at the long term trend from 1967 to 2009, no matter how you slice the data, the shift of family income is upward.  The article divides incomes into 9 brackets based on inflation adjusted income and no matter where you draw your line, there are always fewer people below the line in 2009 than in 1967, percentage wise, indicating a general shift in the population towards higher income.

The table below gives summary of the data but I encourage anyone who is interested to look at the original data linked above.  (It should also be noted that the method of inflation adjustment does a very poor job accounting for quality increases so people are generally better off even at the same level of income over time.)

Further, the median income in the United States (i.e. the level where half the country makes more and half the country make less) has increased roughly 40% over that time period, from $43,000 to $60,000.  As the saying goes, “a rising tide lifts all boats.”

In one final slicing of the data, an article in US News and World Report defines “middle class” quite literally as those families with incomes that occupy the middle 50%, which they define as between $51,000 and $123,000 in 2008.  These numbers do not entirely agree with the figures from the 2009 census, which with this definition would put the range as something like $35,000 to $100,000.   Even using the higher income numbers from the US News article, the trend is still upwards.  From 1967 to 2009, there was a decrease in low income (below $50,000 income) families, from 58.3% to 41.6% while there was an increase in middle income ($50,000 to $150,000) families, from 39.9% to 47.8%, as well as an increase in upper income (above $150,000) families, from 1.8% to 10.7%.

As to the last sentence in the response I quoted above, one has to wonder.  If indeed people are “mad as hell” while at the same time it is apparent in the facts that a greater percentage of families are better off than 40 years ago, one has to wonder: why?

Why are people that are generally more prosperous than in the past “mad as hell?”  And who might gain from that?