That headline caught my eye. This is from The Fiscal Times. The whole article is called Down and Out on $250,000 a Year.
My first response was to see how far I could read before I got the joke. But I was wrong. This is not a joke story or a satire. From the article –
By most measures, a $250,000 household income is substantial. It is six times the national average, and just 2.9 percent of couples earn that much or more. “For the average person in this country, a $250,000 household income is an unattainably high annual sum — they’ll never see it,” says Roberton Williams, an analyst at the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C.
But just how flush is a family of four with a $250,000 income? Are they really “rich”? To find the answer, The Fiscal Times asked BDO USA, a national tax accounting firm, to compute the total state, local and federal tax burden of a hypothetical two-career couple with two kids, earning $250,000. To factor in varying state and local taxes, as well as drastically different costs of living, BDO placed the couple in eight different locales around the country with top-notch public school districts, using national data on spending.
A reader begins to get the idea that we are going to explore the difficulties of getting by on this sum of money each year. So, you read further on, things like this –
Some of the expenses incurred by couples like the Joneses may seem lavish – such as $5,000 on a housecleaner, a $1,200 annual dry cleaning tab and $4,000 on kids’ activities. But when both parents are working, it is impossible for them to maintain the home, care for the kids and dress for their professional jobs without a big outlay.
And it keeps going like this. If I was from a distant part of the world with no knowledge of the United States, I might have gotten teary eyed. However, I do live here and I’m not going to cry over those suffering with a quarter of a million dollars in income.
Why don’t you read the article? If you feel sorry for them and wish them better, please let me know.
James Pilant
Pilant's Business Ethics Blog 
All I could think of while reading that article is “are these people serious?!”
I think the problem is that the accounting firm doing the study just assumed that many of these “burdens” were necessary for a four person family with a large income. Not having time to keep our houses immaculate is not just a burden for the upper class. I think thats a burden that families of every class (especially ones with children) face. The difference is that lower and middle class families FIND the time to keep their house in relatively livable condition.
Dry cleaning tab?! Are you serious? I guarantee you that our men and women in the armed services must keep their uniforms to a higher standard than corporate executives. How do they do this? They learn how to iron and starch a shirt after coming home from their watch. Something tells me that corporate executives probably don’t work as many hours either.
$4000 for kids activities? Ok, I understand that some childrens activities can be expensive. I am the oldest of 6 children. My father was able to allow all of us to play baseball, football, and/or soccer with our counties recreation department for just a few hundred dollars a season. I suppose the upper class children are too good to get their baseball uniform dirty with lowly middle class children?
Yeah, its SOOOOOO hard being them.
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I was appalled by the article. Sadly it’s not the first that I’ve seen. I’ve actually seen quotes of people saying they “only make ten million” as if they were stuggling to buy meals.
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