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Are $250k Earners Middle Class?

Is $250k a year middle class?

  • Total voters
    91
  • Poll closed .
RJKarl said:
Buying shares of going concerns doesn't necessarily create jobs. Demand creates jobs. If there is no new demand for your products, you could have $50B in floating shares that regularly change hands and lose jobs as you become more efficient.
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If no one had invented a workable personal size computer and if no one had managed keep enough money away from the taxman to allow those inventors to produce those early computers, would there be any demand for personal computers?

Going concerns use whatever capital they can get to produce things that help people so much that the people want to buy them. There was no demand for the pills that harden your penis until a going concern created it with money contributed by people who bought shares. These selfless capitalists are just trying to help your penis.
 
This post should be framed.
 
2&2 Slider To Leyritz said:
Because they get screwed more than anyone else at every other level. They are paying the same real property taxes, business personal property taxes, state taxes, etc, and now Obamacare taxes, that the larger companies pay, but without the economies of scale benefits. If a public company is paying a 4% combined real and business personal property tax rate on a 100,000 square foot plant that provides them with a 16% profit margin, that is a much lower burden than a small business paying that same 4% combined rate on a 20,000 square foot plant that gives them a 9% margin. So if you want to say that's their problem then okay, but you end up with a nation of WalMarts, which I think most people would like to avoid.

One other thing - I don't view accelerated depreication as a benefit. In most cases it serves to be an cashflow anchor for a lot of businesses. The equipment purchase is usually financed, so in years 2-5 the loan payments still need to be made, but there is no deduction other than the interest. So if the company has $32,000 of taxable income generating a $10,000 tax bill, but $25,000 of principal payments on the loan, then the company has a negative $3,000 cash flow. Yes, they got the benefit in the first year, but 9 times out of 10 that money had to be spent on other things, not socked away. The biggest problem most small businesses have is focusing on income instead of cash flows, because that is the way our tax system forces them to think. In the absence of my preferred overhaul of the code to focus on consumption (cash flows) as opposed to income, I would prefer an option whereby the business owner could tie depreciation dollar for dollar with the loan principal paydown (but only if a standard amortization of the loan to keep it simple).
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You obviously have much more in-depth knowledge of deprecation and cash flows than me, so I am not going to try and engage that second paragraph other than to say that's an interesting analysis and that I also think a cash flows-based system of business taxation would likely be more investment friendly than the current system.

On the first paragraph, I certainly agree with you that large companies benefit from economies of scale, but I question the wisdom of a tax policy that attempts to "level the playing field" against such important and basic market forces. My preference is that the government stop trying to use the tax code, a blunt instrument at best, and usually a warped blunt instrument, to meddle with the market. If I have successfully built a large business and achieved, at great expense, economies of scale at the cost of a larger business bureaucracy, I would object to the government giving special treatment to my smaller and already more nimble competitors just because they are small.

Furthermore, again from a macroeconomic angle, we have to take a clear-eyed look at the mythology that is being built up around these alleged "small businesses". This op-ed from Bloomberg is a useful take: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-04/time-to-debunk-the-myth-of-small-business-as-job-engine.html. Small businesses "create" jobs while they are growing and unprofitable. In the phase while they are creating all these jobs, they just aren't getting taxed that much. Once they mature into profitable businesses, the job creation stabilizes and they may even start cutting jobs to get more efficient. In other words, tax policies like the reduced small business rate you are suggesting are not going to benefit the fast growing, unprofitable startup that is actually creating jobs - it's going to benefit the mature, stable "small business" that is spinning off profits to its owner but not creating many more jobs. It's also going to benefit a bunch of people who are highly paid and form S corps to conduct business, but don't really employ much of anybody, like lawyers, professional athletes, authors, consultants etc.

In my view from my days representing real small businesses - the mom and pops, the sole proprietorship consultants, the 10 employee construction companies - the tax code is a very minor challenge. Not that they like paying taxes, but the tax aspect is minor in comparison to the much bigger governmental challenges they face in overcoming protectionist trade lobbies, silly licensing regimes, excessive compliance costs, and the uncertainty created by the failure of DC to settle on a permanent tax and spending policy for the past decade plus. Giving a big tax break to trial lawyers who hit the jackpot on a contingency case is not the answer to these challenges.
 
Only 1 person out of 2000+ folks in the organization I work for earns 250K. Only 25 earn over 100K. 250K is not middle class
 
JamesSokolove said:
Only 1 person out of 2000+ folks in the organization I work for earns 250K. Only 25 earn over 100K. 250K is not middle class
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If you or anyone in the organization you work for has loved ones who have suffered from mesothelioma, call the law offices of James Sokolove now. You may skyrocket right out of the middle class.
 
just click any of the numbers on the right side of the poll results.
 
Stan Gable said:
I work on Wall Street. live in Manhattan and I voted that it was middle class but its not. I clearly wasn't thinking when I voted. I know what middle class is. The problem in most parts of Manhattan is that there is the ultra rich and then everyone else. Most of the people in the "everyone else" bucket see such great wealth others have so they naturally feel different. I'm single, make 250k+ and I don't feel rich at all. I save (which isn't always a luxury for middle class) as much as I can and pay more in taxes than most people (outside of NYC) make in a year. I believe my tax burden is about right and will be glad to pay more when I make 500k+. 250k is not middle class but its not rich.
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for you BKF. I don't expect someone to remember a post I made but if you are going to call me a liar then you better know what the fuck you are talking about.
 
bobknightfan said:
I saw how you voted....so you called yourself a liar.
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Where did I lie? I referenced the post I made, not the poll vote. You really should do something better with your life in your twilight years. Someone put me down if I act like that when I'm 70+.
 
12 grand is probably middle class in ethiopia. it is ridiculous to compare middle class in nyc to middle class in alabama.
 
well, this has been a very interesting thread that i only read 1/2 of. but i think some context would be good if this hasn't been mentioned already:

Several years ago, when the world's pop was closer to 6B than 7B, the WHO was reporting 1B people lived off of one dollar a day, and 2B lived off of the equivalent of two dollars a day. This means half the worlds population at that time lived on two dollars or less a day. now do you think these people work the same 12 hour day six days a week that caturday works? no. Generally, they are subsistence farmers. In season, they work as much as 16 hours a day (dawn to dusk with brief intermittent breaks), in the sun, often having to bend over the entire time, for seven days a week, just to--literally--eat. and, assuming the crop doesn't fail that year, they dine on some sort of grain and that's basically it. they have very, very little, if any, meat in their diets. breakfast, lunch, and dinner, every day..grain grain grain. They can't even spice it except with salt.

these people do this for an annual income of 365-730 USD. half the world.

Some of you really need a reality check.
 
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and now lets talk about why we should give a shit. look at townie, idk why his rep is disabled, but it's fairly clear his intellect is superior to almost everyone's on this board, mine certainly included. Now with townies mind, townie would be better employed in the field he got his ba/bs/ma in, expanding human knowledge, for the benefit of every human after him. but he is unable to make a more meaningful contribution to humanity in this way, because he is "working poor" when income is compared to cost of living. (not that he would have chosen to go into research IDK just bear with me)

now of those three billion farmers i just mentioned in the above post... do you think there is one person among them who is smart like townie? someone that could well go cure parkinson's, if only (s)he didn't have to worry about what he was going to eat tomorrow? It's almost a mathematical certainty that such a person does exist. So lets say that (not caturday) but some hot shot broker/banker/trader/etc. who has been reeling in an average of 600,000 dollars for the past 25 years, he gets parkinson's disease.

Do you think if he was able to conceptualize and fully appreciate such a hypothetical scenario, that random rich guy wouldn't be made to realize why it's fundamentally bad to have 1 of the 7 figurative people at the world's table, eating 80% of the world's economic pie? i'm a pacifist but i think the other six should beat the shit out of that guy....and that DOES happen btw, it's called revolution.

and i've only hit this from one angle. go pick up a sociology book, any book, and search the index for "wealth inequality." they'll all say essentially the same thing, because this isn't rocket science (although a sad irony is that rocket scientists like my uncle really don't understand these sort of concepts. yes my dear uncle, who is mathematically gifted, cannot accept that there is someone living right now in sub-Saharan africa who was born with the same natural intelligence he has, just none of the other benefits).
 
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