From the New York Times'
Captain Obvious files:
Last year, the median net worth of upper-income families reached $639,400, nearly seven times as much of those in the middle, and nearly 70 times the level of those at the bottom of the income ladder.
Now, I don't know about you but I'm just shy of $600k this year. I'm so shy that I do not think I fall into the low end that "median" range. If you too aren't making those big public school teaching dollars you are clearly, like most of us, not "upper-income."
“The Great Recession destroyed a significant amount of middle-income and lower-income families’ wealth, and the economic ‘recovery’ has yet to be felt for them,” the report concluded.
Pew, which used data from the Federal Reserve, defined middle income as $44,000 a year for a family of four, while a yearly income of $132,000 for the same-size family pushed a household into the upper ranks. About one in five families qualifies for that higher status, while 46 percent occupy the middle range.
So $44,000 for a family of four is considered middle income? Sweet. Looks like we will have toilet paper on the roll all year, everybody! I joke because I was born in 1975:
The median household net worth last year for those in the middle was $96,500, only slightly above the $94,300 mark it hit in 1983 (after being adjusted for inflation). A poor household actually had a higher median net worth 30 years ago ($11,400 in 1983) than it counted last year ($9,300).
Compare those results with the top fifth of income earners. In 1983, when the Fed began collecting the data, that group had a median wealth of $318,000; in 2013 it owned more than twice that.
Michael Jackson's "Thriller" came out in 1983. The "wildly expensive" sneakers my father wouldn't buy for me were $49. ("I don't know where you think that money is coming from.").
The only reason that the NY Times article doesn't say "historic" is because the statistics PEW used have only been collected for 30 years. About a month ago I wrote here about wealth inequality actually being at historic levels. People really should stop wondering why there are bodies in the street.