On Being Rich-ish: Lessons I learned becoming suddenly middle-class

The hell of it is, he still isn't middle class. The US doesn't even have a middle class anymore. He is just no longer at the very bottom of the underclass. He is now mid-lower lower class.

It is impossibly hard for most people not in the upper class in the US to conceive of just how impossibly far they are from that upper class. $100k/yr? Lower class. $200k/yr? Still lower class: you still can't afford to send your kids through college, and still make your house and car payments, replacing your car every year or two. Yes, that was what middle-class people used to do.

What happened to the middle class? It was eliminated, by explicit political policy. The US income curve is now strongly bi-modal. One hump for upper class, another for lower. Very few people are near the middle, where the middle class once was. Those few are either tacking to get to the upper class, probably futilely, or are well on their way out of it, and won't be back.

The Republican Party discovered that they could get lower-class people to vote against their own interests, and for the interests of the upper class, by convincing them they were not lower class. Now half the country votes mainly to try to keep the desperately poor from taking what they have managed to scrabble together, and in the process ensure the extremely rich get extremely richer and don't have to pay for anything, and especially not let any of it go to those same voters.

Up until around 1970, Americans' income was on a relentless rise. That had stopped by 1980, and has been more or less level, since. The income didn't go away, at all. The total amount has skyrocketed, since, going up at the same rate as before. Just, rich people get all of the difference, everything from that line down to the flat line describing what they have left for the rest of us. All this is policy, and the program to get there was spelled out in the Powell Memorandum, which you can read online.

During COVID lockdown and supply-chain upsets, they got insanely more money, somehow, again at the rest of our expense.

> The US income curve is now strongly bi-modal. One hump for upper class, another for lower. Very few people are near the middle, where the middle class once was.

Evidence? Because I don't think the US income distribution looks like this at all.

[Edit: Oh, you've got your own definition of "middle", which is completely different from what everyone else in this conversation is using. With your definition of "middle", I could see there not being many people there. I still don't think the distribution is bi-modal, though.]

There is no middle class anymore. What you mention are lower class pressures.

Middle-class pressures, back when there was one, meant you were expected to get a new car every year. There were reasons for that, back then: tetraethyl lead additives in the gasoline destroyed engines in no time. But it was not a big drain on middle-class people, just an expense to keep up with.

"They" have been very, very good at convincing lower-class people they are now middle class. It worked! Fully half the voting population imagines, when they think they are voting to keep their own money away out of the poors' hands, really are voting to keep extreme rich peoples' money in the rich peoples' hands, along with most of what could have been the voters' money, besides.

They have got so good at it, people actually elected an out-and-out confidence grifter to the Presidency, and helped stage a coup attempt to keep him there.

I know someone who was doing the equivalent of the bartending thing. Her grandfather was loaded and all major expenses taken care of. She kept it quiet but would give coworkers a ton of shit for general life things that she didn’t have to worry about. “sorry I’m late I had a flat tire.” “That’s not an excuse. You should have found a way to get new tires so you’re not late like me.”

This may be more of an indictment on medical costs in the US than on income distribition.