<p>ek4, I understand and agree. That’s how my street works,too.
I am very pleased that my daughter has learned at a young age that income level doesn’t demarcate anything except income. Certainly not “classiness” or “respectability”. I’m sure those life lessons you speak of are valuable to your kids, also.</p>
<p>Joev- said “hire me damnit Fifth Third Bank!”</p>
<p>Forget about working for a bank. Start your own business! If your your young , your risk is less than someone who is established in a career.</p>
<p>How do you do the quote with the grey box around it? DRAT!</p>
<p>put the word quote in brackets before the quote…then put /quote in brackets after it.</p>
<p>[<em>quote]insert quoted text here[</em>/quote]
Just eliminate the asterisks above, and you’ll have it.</p>
<p>to quote one of my favorite lyricists ( although I am not really sure what he is referring to)
<p>In our area- Seattle- ranking just above D.C. in median income and below Raleigh NC, the percentage of people living in poverty jumped- and since the poverty level hasn’t really kept up with the cost of living, the level of families really struggling has increased as well.
when are we going to raise the national minimum wage?
Our education rate is one of the highest in the country but our poverty rate jumped 40% in the county.
<a href=“http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/238741_countingpoor31.html[/url]”>http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/238741_countingpoor31.html</a>
<a href=“http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002460632_poverty31m.html[/url]”>http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002460632_poverty31m.html</a></p>
<p>ok I am gonna go have some coffee and calm down-</p>
<p>Our local paper (<a href=“http://www.dailyrecord.com%5B/url%5D”>www.dailyrecord.com</a>) today ran an article listing Morris county,NJ as having the 3rd highest median household income in the US ($83,583).<br>
Somerset county, just south of Morris, was listed second in the US.</p>
<p>My husband and I chose to live here 25 years ago. It has been a ‘great place to raise the kids’. But property taxes are out of control in NJ and it is unlikely we can remain here. Once our 16 year old is done with the very fine public school system, we’ll probably look for a more affordable state.
We hear a bunch about Delaware being retirement folk friendly.
Anyone confirm or contradict that? We’d love to hear from you!</p>
<p>Seattle has had an influx of immigrants–Asian, Hispanic, and African that tend to have larger families and have arrived in large numders over the last decade. White Center is now virtually all Asian and Burien has become Hispanic nearly over night. It will take some time to absorb all these new less skilled residents into the regular economy.</p>
<p>I don’t see how immigrants are neccessarily less skilled.
The ones I know had to have money to come here, and several were doctors and business owners in their own country.
Some of the people I know that are the most successful are immigrant small business owners. They don’t have the stigma that native born Americans seem to have about running a dry cleaner or a 7-11.
There are many illegal immigrants however, who are working some of these low paying jobs , are they being included in teh median pay scale?
Regardless of where someone is from- there just aren’t good paying jobs for them available. Example a friend whose has a MA in anthro and was working in health care, was let go when her job was sent overseas, she is now working at a shop that sells sewing machines and she is happy to have it. I see middle aged workers at the grocery store, at Target, at the mall, jobs that schedule you just under full time so they don’t have to pay benefits and jobs that have irregular hours.
Ive already cited my BIL with multiple grad degrees who is selling vinyl siding after he couldn’t find anything else, and my husband who hasn’t regained his job classification that he lost when the company was trying to cut costs after 9/11, but I know very few people, who are comfortable with their job stability and their ability to meet their expenses</p>
<p>Are we becoming economic fiefdoms with serfs working and sending most of their profit up the ladder via credit payments?</p>
<p>This country seemed to do quite well when there was a strong middle class.</p>
<p>The immigranst flooding into White Center and Burien and not doctors and highly skilled. However they have nearly completely changed the small business aspect of those communities. Sometimes I wonder how so many of these small restaurants and grocery stores survive. No doubt a few will become big successes and most will have marginal operations.</p>
<p>I admit I mostly stay in Seattle- unless I am going someplace like the ocean or vancouver- don’t go to Bellevue anymore since my mom moved to South Bend to be my nieces nanny 
Some of the restaurants amaze me. Check out Toys cafe on main street in Bellevue- it has been open for at least 40 years, no one ever goes there, and that is becoming quite an expensive area. ( My H and I went there once- just to see how they stayed open- we lived just south- the food was bleh and it was empty- I swear they are smugglers or something equally unsavory)
We do have several families from Africa/Asia at my daughters high school, the students are bright,and learning english quickly. They do have very large families- often the mothers are back in Africa with the younger half. Itisn’t uncommon for there to be 10-15 kids in the family, although I don’t know how they afford to feed and house them. We have a hard enough time with 4 people and one bathroom- what do you do you do with 15 people in one apt?</p>
<p>Curmudgeon, with all due respect, I think you’re finding offense where none was intended or reasonably taken. I never said that a job paying less than $50,000 wasn’t respectable. I said that <strong>most</strong> couples, with both working full time at respectable (i.e. serious) jobs, in my part of the country, with seniority, will end up with combined earnings over $100,000. And I noted some jobs - teachers and policemen - which are customarily not considered to be high paying. So that affects what you view as being “middle class”. This is California: I understand that incomes and expenses are higher here than in most parts of the country - your mileage may vary. But experienced teachers are paid well over $50,000 a year here, as are experienced welders, policemen, government workers, etc. Not everyone is, and that’s no knock on those who are not (including, for a variety of reasons, my wife!) But my point was that in California, a combined income of $100,000 is common in families where both parents work full time at jobs they have developed skills at over a working career. I don’t see that as being elitist, simply an observation.</p>
<p>Kluge,
I think the offense was the notion that any legal job might not be deemed “respectable.” I think it was Walter Mondale who coined the disparaging phrase “hamburger flippers,” and I’ve never really forgiven him for it. My first ever job was as a McDonald’s counter girl. Years later, we were applying for a mortgage to buy some beachfront property–a big enough deal that one of the big VPs at the bank wanted to go over some of the details with us personally. We were led into the mahogany-panelled offices of a gentleman, who, it turned out, had been the assistant manager/hamburger -flipper at my McDonalds while he was working his way through Wharton. We had a good laugh about our hamburger-flipping pasts.</p>
<p>You did it again. “i.e. serious jobs”. Like the guy washing your dishes at a California restaurant is not in a serious job because he doesn’t make half a hundred K. </p>
<p>Kluge, if your offense was unintentional (and if you say it was I’ll assume it was) I’ll help you out.</p>
<p>People will take offense when you demean their jobs and their efforts by differentiating between jobs with the following words or phrases: real jobs, serious jobs, respectable jobs. What do your words say other than their jobs are unreal ? Or that they or the jobs they do are not serious or worthy of our respect?</p>
<p>To then go on to describe what they are doing to put food and tuition on their table as “something you do for money while you’re waiting for your life to begin” , also may tend to give offense. I really don’t see how you could not understand that. Yeah, I do think a reasonable person (whether I’m one or not is always in question) would take offense.</p>
<p>My take on this? Anything legal where you sweat and labor for pay is serious work. More real than most jobs. Respectable? Those who toil in invisble jobs earn a lot more of my respect than those who create nothing, help no one, and move money from place to place and call it “work”. That our society rewards one and financially punishes the other speaks volumes about what we are becoming. A nation of wannabe Millikin’s and Boesky’s and Lay’s without callouses or morals.</p>
<p>I have no idea where you’re extracting that entire overlay from. All I’m differentiating is jobs that people do for a long time vs. jobs that they consider to be temporary, until their “real” job comes along. Everything else you’ve loaded onto my comments is an issue of your own.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I didn’t “do it again” - you did. I’m talking about teachers, welders, and cops, and how much money they make. Logically, you’ve interpeted that as looking down my nose at anyone who’s not an investment banker (?) All I’m doing is distinguishing between short-term jobs, which people don’t pour their lives into, and long term jobs which they devote years to. I don’t expect a person to make a lot of money at a job they’ve only been working at for a few months - and which they don’t expect to be working at in a year or two. Most people aren’t in that situation by the time they’re middle aged, some are. The ones who have long-term jobs generally are making more money. In fact, around here, if they’re a married couple and they have those kind of jobs, chances are their total family income is over $100,000 - and I consider them to be middle class. That was my point (which was on point of the original post.) Your repeated insistence that I’m an elitist who is somehow demeaning the honest working man in favor of “wannabe Millikin’s and Boeskys’ and Lay’s” is entirely your own hobbyhorse.</p>
<p>If you remember how GWB’s two tax cuts affected you-
then you are middle class</p>
<p>or not.</p>
<p>two tax cuts?
which ones were those?</p>
<p>My mother and I are middle-class, and we never received any tax cuts, itstoomuch. I think you mean if you’re filthy rich, you received the cuts.</p>
<p>what is “filthy rich”?
for some people having only one dependent- two homes and more than double the national median income would make them feel like they were “filthy rich” ;)</p>
<p>
</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/30/AR2005083001727.html[/url]”>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/30/AR2005083001727.html</a></p>
<p>Looks like a million more people just fell out of the middle class boat. </p>
<p>Let me take a moment to agree with curmudgeon…sometimes a person’s career is cleaning rooms, waiting at a food counter…washing dishes it doesn’t make them “less than respectable” or less than serious jobs. I used to use the term professional, until someone reminded me that they were a professional carpet cleaner. </p>
<p>Your point is taken that there are some careers that if you marry someone else with a similar career then combined your salary is almost decent. Who would say, “Being a doctor is a good job, if you’re a doctor and marry another doctor then you might be able to afford a house.”</p>