A few days ago I wrote this article where I realized that the true Middle Class in America actually goes from 50,000 to 500,000 dollars so I decided to revisit my previous calculations and put together the following two charts.

Just so you will know, the categories are broken down this way:

• Working Poor – 1 to 50,000
• Middle Class – 50,000 to 500,000
• Rich – 500,000 and up

Yep, I don’t really consider the area from 100,000 to 500,000 to be Middle Class either, but if you will look at the previous article I wrote, you too will realize that in today’s economy, it is.

Interesting isn’t it?

50% of all Americans make less then 50,000 dollars, yet they only made 13% of all wages in 2007 according to this spreadsheet taken from this IRS site.

But after double checking the numbers, I got skeptical because it only showed about 96 million people and I’ve been through these numbers enough to know that we have about 154 million people earning wages and salaries.

So I decided to use the new numbers that they released last week per this article to check things out further.

Unfortunately the spreadsheet hasn’t been released yet, so we will need to type the numbers in, but so far, so good because now they are showing around 143 million people (that still leaves about 10 million unaccounted for, but perhaps there were that many already unemployed back then because as I have repeatedly said, this crisis did not start in the fall of 2008 like the experts say that it did)

So now lets take a look at what should be some charts that are pretty close to being as accurate as I can get them without actually working for the IRS and having access to the data.

Interesting perspective isn’t it.

Apparently the really rich don’t control as much of the wealth as I always thought that they did and in fact it is those that make between 50,000 to 500,000 that control the majority of our wages in America.

If that is so, I owe an apology to Rick Santelli per this article because it is beginning to look like it is the Middle Class that is squeezing the Working Poor and Not the Rich squeezing out the Middle Class like I have always been led to believe.

Very interesting!

Posted on November 27th, 2009 by vbierschwale
Filed under: Wages from 1948 to 2008