Hello all, Garland E. Harris here,
Below you will find a reprint (w/o permission) of an article by The New York Times (hey, if they want me to, I’ll remove it.)
Can you actually believe that an American would respond with excitement to, “Who Wants to Be a One-Hundred-Thousand-aire?” We must be letting our ideal of American exceptional-ism get sucked away by leaders that don’t really believe that we, as – Independent individuals – can. They only believe that we – the Collective – can.
Look, if you or I fail, we have only ourselves to blame, Not God, not the devil, not your parents, not your next door neighbor, not your spouse and certainly not America. Take a good long look in the mirror…it’s your own fault. Whew! Now that you and I have taken responsibility for our misses, we can take responsibility for our hits.
I am not denying the grace of God, I am simply saying that with the grace of God you and I still have to get off our butts and get to work and believe for the abundance that is available from God and in this great country of ours – America! You can still be a MILLIONAIRE!
Now that we have proven that anybody, no matter what lack of qualifications, can be President, certainly we can still be really rich. We can be rich without hurting anyone, because there is plenty to go around.
Thanks,
Garland E. Harris
Thanks,
Garland
Who Counts as ‘Rich’?
By CATHERINE RAMPELL | New York Times – Fri, Dec 9, 2011 5:35 PM EST
We’ve written plenty of times about how little Americans know about the distribution of income in the United States, and how many rich people don’t realize they’re rich, at least relative to the rest of the country.
Now Gallup has surveyed Americans to ask what they believe the cutoff for being “rich” should be. The median response was that a person would need to make at least $150,000 to be considered rich. Here’s a breakdown of the responses:
According to the Tax Policy Center’s calculations on income distribution, a household earning cash income of $150,000 would fall somewhere between the 89th and 90th percentiles. In other words, the typical American believes anyone in about the top tenth of the income distribution counts as “rich.”
President Obama and others, on the other hand, have set the cutoff around $250,000 when discussing “raising taxes on the rich.” Households earning cash income of $250,000 are somewhere between the 96th and 97th percentiles.
As you might expect, answers to Gallup’s survey question on the threshold for being “rich” varied tremendously by demographics and geography. For example, men cited a higher bar than women did — $150,000 versus $100,000, respectively:
Note that respondents with children under 18 said they would require $200,000 before considering themselves rich, whereas the childless were satisfied with a $100,000 benchmark. (That reminds me of this xkcd cartoon.)As you might expect, those who live in urban areas — like New York City, where the cost of living is very high — or in suburbs had higher standards for being “rich” than did Americans who live in towns or rural settings.
Readers, I’m curious: What’s your definition for who counts as “rich”?