19% would be the complacent middle class 🤮

  • deltapi@lemmy.world
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    9 hours ago

    What qualifies as “middle class” these days? Roughly 24% of Ontario public sector workers are on the sunshine list. While this doesn’t give us a ton of insight into the private sector, this would still suggest that if we say the 19% is the middle class that to be middle class you have to be making more than $100k/year…

    Not trying to argue, just trying to understand where the goalposts are.

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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      8 hours ago

      Ever moving, right? People in the top 0.9% all call themselves middle class, maybe “upper middle class” to shut down any contradictions. That’s because there’s a stigma to being a rich fatcat. For more complicated reasons, politicians like to sweep up most of the bottom 50% that owns basically nothing, as well. The only people who consistently get stuck into the lower class are basically people so powerless they might as well be a thing.

      That being said, do be careful that income distribution is quite different from wealth distribution.

      Lemmy tends rich and educated. So it would be my guess more than 50% are in the top 19%. Probably by both, since it seems to tend older than Reddit did. What you call that is another matter entirely; wealth and income levels all flow together smoothly in the raw data.

    • brax@sh.itjust.works
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      9 hours ago

      The problem with the sunshine list is that it never changes with inflation. It’s basically become a tool for morons to hate on the “overpaid” public sector instead of calling out their own underpaying employers.

      • deltapi@lemmy.world
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        8 hours ago

        Oh, absolutely. I’m just trying to use it as a marker to try to figure out where the goal posts should be for what we are calling “middle class.”

        I have a friend who works in central Ontario for a fortune 500 and they take home ~80k/year, and I’ve considered them and their family middle class for a while, but they also were telling me that they’re overextended and struggling to keep up on interest payments…while also being denied a consolidation loan. So maybe they are not really middle class…?