When you realize how high cost of living is in cities paying those salaries, how much education (for potential kids) is, how you must save for your retirement entirely on your own... and then of course insane out of pocket medical costs... you soon realize that when you adjust for lifestyle you may be in fact much better off than the person with stratospheric salary.
I'm in the bay area. For what it's worth, my personal out of pocket max for healthcare is something like $2500/year, and they were only half-joking when I got the "million dollar work-up" last year at UCSF. I spent 3x that when my dog ate a corn cob... There is the additional cost of premiums for the rest of my family, but it's not absurd.
Real estate and property tax is rediculous, state income tax is high, and restaurants around here charge $18 for a hamburger these days. We're going to have to move once the kid(s) are old enough to be hindered by the bad schools. It's enough to perhaps make the high salaries not quite so competitive, and especially so if you need to pay for private school.
Salary is only a partial picture of compensation in the bay area, though. If you're a software engineer at a FAANG type company, you're potentially getting 1-2x your salary between bonuses and equity. If you joined early on at a start-up that's doing well, you're perhaps getting set up to spend your 40's mowing lawns like Forrest Gump if you want. It's enough that, even if you take very conservative career choices, you could work hard out here for a decade while living comfortably, then move somewhere else, buy a nice house outright, and work for fun while not stressing out about money ever again.
Right. A very, very ordinary apartment in NYC is $6000/mo. Figure 30-40% of your salary for taxes. If you made only $240K in NYC, your apartment would use up fully half of your take-home.
Even assuming this is true ($6k a month sounds absurd), this is a bad argument. The old "rent should cost no more than one third of your income" rule is basically for people around the poverty line. For them it's a question of whether they can afford to eat that month.
Just to give an extreme example: if Jeff Bezos uses half his income this year to build the largest estate the world has ever seen, he's still sitting pretty on the rest of it and has the largest estate the world has ever seen.
At a 35% tax rate, your take home income is $156K. At $6K per month ($72K/yr), you have $84K left over after rent. If this is you then YOU ARE WEALTHY. There is simply no getting around this. You are making more alone, after taxes and after rent than my partner and I have ever made together total in a year in our lives, and we live in a city with a relatively expensive rental market and are not "poor".
The absurd talk about "only" making over two hundred thousand dollars a year (plus whatever your partner makes if you have one) needs to stop. It's so out of touch with the norm in virtually every city in the world that it would be laughable if it weren't kind of sad.
People taking in $200k are not in any sense "very, very wealthy", except from a third-world viewpoint. $200k in today's dollars approaches what would have been called "middle class" a few decades ago, when there was one. Now you are only low, below $300k, and high, above $1M, with very few left between.
(In countries with regular health care and education, life costs less, so this about the US.)
The plutocrats have been very successful at deceiving American voters that they are not almost all now lower-class. The Powell Memorandum, 50 years ago, laid out the plan. It has been followed since then, and Americans now are routinely persuaded to vote against their own interests.
Wealth produced in the US has been rising as fast since 1975 as it did between 1945 and 1975, but normal Americans' income since 1975 has been flat. The whole difference has gone straight into the pockets of the extreme rich, and they are who are very, very rich. You and I have no concept of how different their lives are.
In 1975, regular parents could pay for putt their kids through college while paying their mortgage.
>>People taking in $200k are not in any sense "very, very wealthy", except from a third-world viewpoint.
Mate, I don't know what to say. You live in a bubble made out of solid stone granite. Literally anywhere else outside of US that kind of salary makes you "very very wealthy". Within top 1% definitely. So I don't know if you think anything outside of US is third world? Or what?
>>(In countries with regular health care and education, life costs less, so this about the US.)
Simple: Outside the US, $200k is very comfortable, except in certain places like Moscow and London.
In the US, it would be lower middle class, if there still were a middle class. So, instead, it is high in the lower class. If you consider it wealthy, then congratulations, the propaganda is strong with you.
