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Middle-Class Values (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

4 min read

In their second debate last fall, Mark Pryor fumbled the question of how to define the middle class, saying that it would include income up to $200,000 a year.

Tom Cotton picked it up and scored, accusing Pryor of “hanging out with out-of-state billionaires if he thinks $200,000 in Arkansas is the middle class.”

A lot of Arkansas Business readers will be surprised to learn this because people tend to hang out with others in their own socioeconomic group, but (according to 2013 Census Bureau estimates) only about 2 percent of households in our state have income of $200,000 or more. (If we drop the definition to $150,000, only 5 percent of Arkansas households are above middle class.)

Now, Pryor said that he thought the middle class included almost everyone in Arkansas, and, having spent 12 years in Washington, he may have been answering based on tax policy that would have to apply to everyone in the country. But his answer was still tone-deaf, since almost 60 percent of Arkansans are dreaming of the day their annual household income will top $50,000 a year.

So Cotton pounced on Pryor’s wonkish answer and made hay. Few seem to have noticed, however, that Cotton never actually answered the question that Pryor blew so badly. (As I have pointed out before, answering questions as asked doesn’t seem to be part of our new junior senator’s game plan — but it sure is a winning game plan.)

Instead of defining middle class, Cotton said that the “typical” Arkansas household has annual income of about $40,000 a year, apparently equating the median point with what is typical. But Cotton never gave an upper limit to the income that he would consider middle class in Arkansas. If his answer was taken at face value, as he took Pryor’s, then the middle class begins and ends at $40,000 a year, and Arkansans making more than that are in the upper class — even though they may still be below the national median of $53,000.

I don’t think that’s what Cotton meant by his non-answer, although I still don’t know where he does think the middle class ends — except that it is presumably south of $200,000, at least in Arkansas. (I’m trying to figure out how a household with more than two people in it could manage even a middle-class existence on $40,000 a year. It was hard enough when I was trying to do it 25 years ago.)

The only reason I bring this up long after the election is because The Wall Street Journal and NBC News recently released a survey that showed that 41 percent of Americans consider themselves to be middle class.

The poll did ask respondents for help in defining the point at which middle class begins. Memo to Tom Cotton: “The largest share of Americans, 35%, say a household would have to make between $50,000 and $75,000 to be considered middle class … .” But that’s also the bracket that was most popular 15 years ago. As the WSJ noted, “Adjusted for inflation, $75,000 in 1998 would be worth more than $107,000 now.”

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I don’t have any reason to doubt the results of the poll, but I do have some quibbles with the way the WSJ reported those results under the headline “American Class Perceptions Weather Economic Storm”:

“Today, 41% of Americans identify as middle class, 17% as upper middle class and 29% as working class. Only 9% identified as poor. In 1998, 46% were middle class, 16% were upper middle class, 29% working class and 6% identified as poor. The changes were mostly within the survey’s 3.1 percentage point margin of error.”

Thank God for the margin of error: Without it, the WSJ would have had to report that the self-identified middle class shrank by 11 percent over the past 15 years and the poor grew by half. And only one-fifth of the change in the middle class can be explained by moving upward to the upper-middle class, while the “working class” remained unchanged.

NBC’s online article about the poll was even worse in ignoring its own data, saying, “The poll shows that the percentage of Americans who identify as middle class has budged very little since the 1990s.” An 11 percent decline in the single largest category sounds statistically significant to me.

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I’m not sure I like the WSJ/NBC poll’s questions anyway. A plumber might call himself “blue collar,” but his income might be middle class by anyone’s definition.

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Food for thought: There are a lot more households in Arkansas with annual income of less than $15,000 (about 190,000) than households earning $100,000 or more (about 150,000).

Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. Email her at GMoritz@ABPG.com.

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