Can retire

I will never be able to retire, I will just become feral and wander into the woods to die

A tweet

Kinda surprised owning your own home wasn't a part of this. For a long time that was the signature marker of "you've made it into the middle class."

the term "middle class" originated from the aristocratic ruling class of european feudalism

when people's place in society was determined by blood, by birth, there were two classes: peasants and nobility (and also there was clergy but there's always more detail, isn't there, so lets ignore the more fiddly categories...). As industrialization and market relations grew out of the early modern period, a funny thing started happening: there were people, born as peasants, who, through their property, started to amass wealth equal to (and often greater than!) the nobility. The nobles didn't like that. They looked down on this strange class that was caught in the middle of two worlds. Middle Class has historically referred to the Capitalists.

I know today the term just means a sort of vague gesture to some 'average of people'. But that's fucking useless. It only really acts to obfuscate the real defining characteristic of modern class; birthright has been replaced with the right of property (specifically property that generates a passive source of income for the owner). I highly advise to rail against, or at least avoid, the term "middle class". It just serves as a wedge to divide different levels of working class people from one another -- that's not a successful way to talk about and promote working class interests!

A tweet

Was reading about the three-legged stool the other day re retirement and realized too many people probably do not even know the term or what it refers to. Our politicians have stolen the American dream with zero consequence.

I'm older than most of you but I still didn't know that term and I had to google. I almost laughed when I learned the definition.

Three-Legged Stool: Meaning, Overview, History

The "three-legged stool" is an old phrase that many financial planners once used to describe the three most common sources of retirement income: Social Security, employee pensions, and personal savings. It was expected that this trio would together provide a solid financial foundation for the senior years. None of the three was expected to support most retirees on its own.

No one has a “secure job” btw

Feel free to believe your job is secure all you want, but when the stock market dips or your soulless company wants to take in more profits, workforce reductions affect everyone

I thought everyone rich enough not to live somewhere with holes in the walls and poor enough not to own a golf course considered themselves "middle class."

A thoroughly useless term.

That's bullshit that 35% of Americans have all six. Only 50% Americans even have a job. Mayyybe 35% of Americans have the first one.

What if my retirement plan is to fix my credit, get a small business loan and defect to Cuba with the money?

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I wonder what this would have looked like in the 1960's and 1970's.

I bet if you removed people over like 50-55 that number would drop to single digits due to 6)

Does anyone else get these videos on TikTok where it's like:

• working class - £20k
• lower middle class - £30k
• middle class - £40k
• upper middle class - £50k
• upper class - £60k
• ruling class - £70k

and the comments are so uninformed that they just accept this stratification as a given. Try to explain to people that if you have to work for a living and if you stop working you die then you are working class and it doesn't compute. Nevermind that you can't actually raise a family comfortably with a single income of less than £70k in this country, if you try to explain to people actually yeah we should all be getting paid a hell of a lot more they will look at you like you've just tried to fuck their dog.

In my opinion, if a middle class exists, it is small business owners and doctor couples with a combined income of £400k, and anyone that has started to accumulate rental properties in addition to owning their own home.

“Middle class” is a term used by other working class people with puritanical brain rot who just want to distance themselves from the poor as much as possible

Can retire when?

I'm missing 5 and 6

Unless you're over 50 you're not going to "retire", the planet was already destroyed and this hell isn't going to last another 30 years lol.

This tracks... "middle class" is an income band encompassing those who fall between 2/3 and 200% of median. The US is a terribly unequal society where something like 40% of the population falls within this band, with high degrees of wage compression near/at subsistence-level... the distribution of those within the technical "middle class skew to the low end of the range. Because poverty is best conceived in relative versus absolute terms, it's fair to say that the "Middle America/the average person" in the US lives in poverty.