Category Archives: News commentary

Critics of Mitt Romney laughed when he said that “middle-class income” was “between $200,000 and $250,000” when what he actually said was that it was “between $200,000 and $250,000 or less” meaning that the $200,000 to $250,000 was the upper limit. As the Huffington Post points out, Democrats including Obama and Pelosi have also used that definition. Of course, both Romney and Obama have incomes well above that amount.

But all of these views are wrong, because classes such as middle class are not defined by income. As Michael Zweig writes in The Working Class Majority, “just looking at a person’s income doesn’t tell us anything about how the person got the income, what role he or she plays in society, how he or she is connected to the power grid of class relations.”

What Romney, Obama, and the various pundits are referring to is middle income, not middle class. As only 16 percent of U.S. households earn more than $100,000 a year, and only 4 percent more than $200,000, the upper limit for middle income is probably much lower than $200,000. But I suspect Romney stated it the way he did to preserve the claim that he has no desire to raise taxes on anyone below that limit.

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VP candidate Paul Ryan has been accused of lying when he claimed that Obama broke a promise by letting a Wisconsin auto factory close, when in fact the factory closed before Obama took office. Although that isn’t precisely what Ryan said, there is some validity to the accusation that his statement was deceptive.

But numerous Obama supporters are playing just as loose with the facts when they say that, if Obama hadn’t rescued GM and Chrysler, far more factories would have closed permanently. That is simply untrue. While news agencies have fact-checked some of the things being said at the Democratic convention, I haven’t seen any challenges of this claim.

Both GM and Chrysler were headed for bankruptcy. If they had gone bankrupt under chapter 11, most of their factories would have stayed open and they would have continued making and selling cars. Bankruptcy would have allowed the companies to avoid interest and dividend payments for a time, and to renegotiate union contracts. Under bankruptcy laws, stockholders would have lost the value of their stocks, but bond owners–who have first claim to company assets and profits–would have been paid off, if not in whole than at least in part.

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Liberals accuse Republicans of engaging in class warfare. Conservatives accuse Republicans of engaging in class warfare. Cynics accuse both parties of existing “solely to hurl rhetoric at each other and pander to the the most ignorant of their base constituencies.”

While the Antiplanner is sympathetic to the cynical view, I also think the idea of class deserves more attention than most Americans give it. Too many people use the term “middle class” when they mean “middle income,” which is something quite different. Classes have distinct cultural values, which may be quite independent of income. Classes also tend to be rigid, with various barriers prevent people from moving from one class to another, whereas income levels like “1 percent-99 percent” are quite porous.

The Antiplanner sees four main classes in America today. The upper class includes people who are so wealthy that work is merely an option. Perhaps only 1 or 2 percent are in this group (which is not the same as the “1 percent” which includes people who do work but earn large amounts). The middle class includes people (and their families) whose work involves thinking more than labor. For the most part, they are college educated, which allows us to estimate their numbers: just under 30 percent of working-age Americans have bachelor’s degrees. The underclass includes people who are permanently poor, not just people who are between jobs or recent college graduates who do not yet have jobs (who are included in Census Bureau poverty numbers). Around 10 percent of Americans fall in this category.
Finally, the remaining roughly 60 percent consists of working class people (and their families), whose work is physical or repetitive rather than knowledge-based.

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