United States | News & Politics

Alternative question: Do you feel that a household making the median income as “poor”?

Quite likely, yes.

If I plug the median (~$62,000) into an income tax calculator and select Iowa to include state tax, the effective annual household income is ~$50k.

The average mortgage payment as of 2023 (and yes, it should be median ideally, but that wasn't available) is ~$2,300 per lendingtree.com.

~50,000 - (12 * ~$2,300) = ~22,400 annual remaining.

Playing a bit of hearsay with nerdwallet (and their referenced Experian), the average used car payment as of 2023 is $516/month. If we assume our average family is paying for a car...

~22,400 - (12 * ~$516) = ~16,208 annual remaining, or ~1,350 per month... for the entirety of utilities, interest payments, groceries, clothes, school-related/extracurricular (for any kids), daycare, etc.

But let's look at it from the other side - if we don't assume these averages, here's what your median household is looking at.

~50,000 / 12 = ~$4,166/month... for the entirety of mortgage, any auto payment, any fuel/maintenance, any home improvement/supplies/maintenance/repairs (hope that water heater doesn't go), any groceries, any utilities like water, gas, electric, internet, cellular, any day care costs, any costs of kids education / extracurricular activities, etc. This is expected to somehow cover 2+ people.

Yes - I'm pretty confident in stating that the median household income is likely to be lacking sufficient money to live at a standard considered comfortable or normal in a society. Or, if poor is to be directly compared to wealthy, I'd say they're exceedingly unlikely to manage having a great deal of money, resources, or assets; rich.

I feel attempting to tie concepts such as poor and wealthy to arbitrary points of income is largely futile, as the real indicator would be the relative ability of a household to cover average/expected expenses and save/amass cash.

That previous "top 10%" benchmark of ~$210,000 will be pulling ~$153,000 annual/$12,750 monthly after taxes. Subject it to the same considerations- average mortgage, average car payment, etc. - and they're looking at $119,200 annual/$9,900/month.

I'd say they're much less likely to be in the situation defined by poor - factor in the entire gamut of expenses and they'll still have some discretionary income - but they're also not at the point of qualifying as wealthy. At best, they'd be able to retire more comfortably.

Compare this to, say, the $995,000 pre-tax / $593,251 after-tax annual / 49,437 after-tax monthly of the 1% margin and that... changes. The relative gap between the entire gamut of usual expenses and actual monthly income is immense; wealth aggregation is almost unavoidable.

That's wealthy.

Edit: Per latest Census Bureau data, the median household income in the US is ~71,000, compressing the gap between them and that "top 10%" a bit.