Here’s what I’ve been thinking about and I’m going to tell you up front that I’m not quite sure what to make of it. But it’s this chart.
If you look at the top crudely drawn line, you’ll see what’s been kind of my understanding of income distribution in this country. I assumed that there was a large bubble of abject poverty, then a smaller number of people who were poor but not that poor, who were working to make their way up the income ladder and that at each step of the income ladder, there was a slightly larger population, with the largest population being the middle class and the rich.
And, I guess if pressed, I would have been willing to revise my understanding of rich people down closer to the number of abject poor people.
But the point is that I believed that there were always a few more people who were doing a little better than the people below them. That was kind of my understanding of things.
That’s not what the data shows. You can make your own chart in Excel and see.
Instead, what we have is basically a pyramid, with each level containing fewer people than the one before it until you hit about $100,000.
I honestly don’t know what to make of that.
But it raises some questions for me. One is, on a graph like that, where do you locate the middle class? Yes, there are a lot of people who are making between $100,000 and $250,000, but they’re way over there on the right side. Can you have a middle on the far end? If “middle” is where most people fall, does that put the actual middle class in poverty? According to .gov, our mean income as a society is $67,000 a year, but the amount of households pulling that down is just over two million. Out of 110 million households, that seems like barely any.
If each level is smaller than the one below it, what does that really say for class or even income mobility?
I don’t know. I feel like I’m looking at something profound here but I don’t quite know how to wrap my brain around it.
Tiny Cat Pants 
you are indeed looking at something profound — a country becoming strongly polarized by income.
other countries currently so polarized tend to be third world banana republics (and Russia).
there are all kinds of sociological risks attendant to such demographics, but i think (if only for possibly bogus reasons of my own) that they won’t really strike the USA for another generation or two. in the meantime, this country will begin to ever more strongly resemble Putin’s Russia — which i take as yet another sign that America is doing something really, really wrong.
(i grew up in a European country fairly close to the then-Soviet Union, as i may have mentioned before. it can be scarily surprising how alike the U.S. and Russia really are; methinks you chose your enemy badly back in the cold war.)
This has been going on for quite sometime — the 1950s ideal for “middle class” isn’t going, it’s gone. Countless articles have been written on how it takes more and more money to be considered middle-class (because of housing, etc) and how the income gap just keeps getting wider. But there’s willful ignorance on the part of those “in control”* of what gets talked about and to many of the people in that 100K group.
* Yes, yes, I realize it’s a loaded term.
One note: On a distribution this skewed, “mean” is not a value that tells you much of use since it’s pulled around too easily by outliers. Median lacks that sensitivity to outliers.
I noticed on the data page you referenced they lump everyone over 250k and up together, which seems a bit odd — if they didn’t, I think you’d see a repeat of your spike pattern among those two million people.
I will note you read about the disappearing middle class quite a bit even if nobody ever really talks about what it really means. Because that would be unpleasant. Those stories usually appears next to a story about some rich asshole buying an extra house next to the high school so their kid had a parking spot for his SUV (a story that actually ran a couple years ago around here) or the latest trend in $500 haircuts.
Looking at the data, I’m confused by your chart — what exactly are you graphing? If it’s number of people in each income category versus income category, there wouldn’t be that big spike at 100k, just a little bump.
I’m trying to word this in a way that does not sound flippant, I think the word is? But it does tickle me that one would need a graph to fully grasp the disparities in income distribution. I was saving this for your “My Platform” post, but I’ll touch on it here while i compose a longer answer for that thread. To me, the core problem is that we no longer value work for work’s sake. That is, the person that stocks the shelves at the supermarket has seemingly less value than some anonymous investor in that supermarket chain. One of the reasons I do not invest in the stock market is that I feel that, as workers, we are betting against ourselves. This race to the bottom produces a never ending quest for more and more profit, at the expense of working people. I’ll try to spend some time later on the other thread, since this means so much to me, i want to get what i am saying right.
The chart divides the groups into spots of $2500, until you reach the $100K mark, then it jumps up to $50,000 per spot, so of course your spike is going to be way over to the right.
The problem isn’t a spike on the right (which starts at the $85,000 level, even if you divide those over-$100,000 incomes into segments of $2,500 each). It’s that the crest of the bell curve comes at the $22,500 income mark. That’s your mode: the income that the greatest number of households in the country make.
nm — exactly. And we give people shit for wanting to raise the minimum wage?
I’m (bitter)sweetly amused, B, by your thought in the original post that “at each step of the income ladder, there was a slightly larger population, with the largest population being the middle class and the rich.”
Mack — I can’t wait to hear more from you on this.
But since you don’t know the distribution throughout the >$100 area (at least from that table), the only thing you could do is group together the lower ranges.
2500-50K=59,585
50K-100K=34,274
100K-150K=13,385,
150K-200K=4,7551
200K-250K=1,776
Well, Shill, you know I’m willing to make an ass out of myself on the internet just to seek some knowledge. Because, here’s the thing I just don’t get. If there are fewer slots above you–let’s take Exador’s numbers for the sake of distributing everyone equally–if I’m in the range of 2500-50k, me and 60 million other families and the group above me only has 34 million people in it, doesn’t that show clearly that it’s extremely difficult to get into that bracket?
I mean, presumably, we’re all striving to make more money (well, most of us). We’ve got our hustle on. And yet, it’s not the case that you just earn a little bit until you get the hang of things or figure out how to game the system and then we all move up into the land of prosperity and non-sucky cell phones.
There’s little moving up.
For me, it’s one thing to know that intellectually. But to see it graphed out like that is just startling.
Nomen, so… Are you saying that I should get into the vodka distilling business? Ha.
These income disparity numbers are often used as a cudgel because they imply that the numbers are static, which of course, they aren’t. How many of the lower end households are going to gradually increase their income as they acquire experience?
far be it from me to give anybody business advice, but i think it’d be hard to go bankrupt selling booze in this world of ours. harder the cheaper you could sell it, in fact.
exador, we can hope that number is greater than zero. however, we can also look at income distribution demographics from decades past and see if there’s any trend at work. i suspect there is, but as yet, i haven’t been bored enough to do that job.
But, too, even if lower end households increase their income, do the proportions really change or are their just different poor people to take their spots?
Poor people breed faster.
According to the Cato institute’s study (I know, all you libs can stop reading now)
In sum, studies based on tax return data provide highly misleading comparisons of changes to the U.S. income distribution because of dramatic changes in tax rules and tax reporting in recent decades. Aside from stock option windfalls during the late-1990s stock-market boom, there is little evidence of a significant or sustained increase in the inequality of U.S. incomes, wages, consumption, or wealth over the past 20 years.
Click to access pa586.pdf
actually, i would agree with that. low standards of living, especially coupled with bleak prospects for improvement and low educational baselines, have historically been strongly correlated with high birthrates.
the solution is obvious — to reduce birthrates, improve overall standards of living, make good education accessible to more people, and generally make life better for everybody, we should institute strong income redistribution schemes. these have historically worked well where they’ve been tried.
I haven’t looked at the data yet (standard engineer’s disclaimer), but I would have expected something similar to the distribution you said you found. With the majority being in a bump and lower levels to either side. The question is… where is the bump?
I would have expected it in the $50k-150k range somewhere. Depends on how the figures are done. If they are per capita or per family.
But anyway, I’d expect less people to be in the poor and rich categories with the majority in some middle class range. It would be intersting to figure the area under those curves, which would represent the amount of actual money in each range.
Well yeah. Even when birth control is relatively accessible, every incremental drop in wages makes it harder to attain. Not to mention the fact that in a lot of ways, having children early is a relatively rational decision under common impoverished circumstances – and earlier childbirth tends to correlate with more children over a lifetime (if only because one has more time in which to raise ’em).
Yes, but Ex, is anyone arguing that there was some ideal moment in U.S. history when the income disparity was not appalling? I mean, I’m just not sure what the Cato Institute’s point is. That things suck, but they’ve always sucked, so suck it up America?
Ha, come to think of it, isn’t that the unofficial libertarian motto?
This would be what I’d like to see. Some rich people, some poor people (because given the way our system is set up, stratification is going to happen … although we can and should work to see the definition of “poor” rise), and a lot of people who are doing okay.
That said, I expected pretty much the figures given. A really small group of fantastically wealthy people, a slightly larger number of rich people, a smaller-than-you’d-think group of well-off people, a fair (but still smaller than TV would suggest) number of people with income and lifestyles that qualify as “middle class,” a lot of working-class people, and a damn lot of poor people.
Mag, plus, as we feminists know, the longer women put off having kids, the better a position they end up in financially. But, if you don’t have access to birth control, it makes it very difficult to control when and if you’ll have children.
… and finishing my thought, I think that this distribution would be… if not okay, then not nearly as reprehensible if being poor didn’t entail so much personal risk. That is, if being poor in America meant not having money for luxuries (which would still suck like nobody’s business, but is kind of one of the things that being poor entails) and not having as many options as you’d like, instead of having neither necessities nor opportunities to do anything about it. If we could say that things like food, shelter, healthcare (including mental and reproductive), and education were available and accessible to all those people on the bottom of that pyramid, I’d find it easier to sympathize with the ‘suck it up’ and constant social mobility arguments.
And, of course, that just having places where one can obtain birth control doesn’t mean it’s accessible, particularly for marginalized populations. If your job has you by the balls but the clinic is only open during standard daytime hours, you aren’t going to be able to get what you need. If a place is supposed to stock BC but is always “out of stock,” or happens to only staff people wtih religious objections to dispensing it, you aren’t likely to be able to get what you need. And the harder it is for people to do this, the less likely they are to try.
we should institute strong income redistribution schemes. these have historically worked well where they’ve been tried.
Like China, and the Soviet Union, and Cuba, …
Exador: that the numbers are static, which of course, they aren’t. How many of the lower end households are going to gradually increase their income as they acquire experience?
We have an aging population, but the median and mode household income (inflation-adjusted) has been dropping for 35 years or so. This suggests strongly that poorer households do not increase their income as they gain experience.
W is right that in a random or a truly free-market situation, household incomes (which is what the tables report, according to the top line) would be distributed along a bell curve, with mean, median, and mode more or less identical. When the mean (= arithmetic average) household income is $66,570, the median (half of households above and half below) is $55,000-$57,499, and the mode (highest number of households/peak of bell curve) is only $30,000-$32,499, as in the census data, this demonstrates a non-random skew. That is, the market is not acting freely but (in this case) is funneling income away from the poorer sections of society. (Like W, I’d like to know the area under the curve — the median at least lets us know where the midpoint is — and I’d like some info about standard deviations as well, but we have here the picture of a skewed economy.)
So when you rail about redistribution of wealth, kindly include the current system as your target.
no, Exador, not like those countries at all. countries like Sweden, Finland, Denmark, France, Norway, …
pretending that social democracy has anything at all to do with communism would be odious, were it not such a certain sign of ignorance, which makes it instead pitiable.
How Nordic of you.
That must be why France is such an economic powerhouse.
I’ll go with odious.
As for your bell curve, me thinks you’re mis-reading the data.
The table shows the “number of households that make this much or that much”.
Now, certainly in a non-communist, socially democratic utopia, the same number of people would be doing every type of job, but here in the real world there’s more of a tree structure. Ya see, you only need one department manager to manage say 30 people. Generally that individual makes more than those that work for him. Extend that to McDonalds, or a school; you get the idea.
So, what you’re saying is that you agree with that Nazarene who noted that the poor will always be with us? For, truly, if we have one manager already, what hope have the thirty below him to advance?
Ha, never mind. That writing in Biblese is more difficult than it looks.
To take Ex’s example, we have a fast food conglomerate. The employees make $8/hr. The floor manager makes $10/hr and benefits. The regional manager might be salaried, but with benefits, maybe he or she is making $17/hour. The CEO, on the other hand is making $4000 or more an hour.
See, a reasonable explanation! The rich are rich because they are rich! This really is the best of all possible worlds! Settle your brains and grab a hamburger, provided you can afford one.
Ex, I’ll stack my grades in economics and statistics against yours any time.
y’know, i hate to invoke Malthus, butthe man did indeed have a point; the total amount of resources we have available is indeed finite, limited, and capped.
now, living in an “economic powerhouse” is nice and all, but if (1) it can only come at the cost of most people living in abject poverty and (2) by definition cannot be supported indefinitely anyway… it makes me sort of wonder if a slower economy might just be a worthwhile price to pay for a better shot at sustainability and a higher average standard of living.
because France, you know, is not one of the things i associate with the phrase “miserable hellhole”, nor with “third world country” either. France, in fact, has a standard of living i’d be perfectly happy with, on average.
just sayin’, ya know, that “economic growth forever” shouldn’t need to be either a gilded calf or a sacred cow. leastways i can’t see any reason it should.
So Bridget, you make the same salary as say, grad students, right? Still got that cable spool diningroom table?
nm, no pissing contest here, tough guy. I’ve always hated BOTH economics AND statistics. Both subjects always bored me to tears.
As for the Old Country, it’s my understanding that their middle class lives at about our poverty level.
Except they aren’t as portly as our poor, downtrodden poor.
As a British friend of mine explained it, ‘You don’t have disposable income.’
the ignorance just went from “pitiable” to “friggin’ hilarious!“.
still not sure if Ex is ignorant about U.S. poor folk, or European middle class people. doesn’t really matter, i suppose.
full disclosure: i was born and raised in a European middle class family, and have made my own life here in the U.S. on the borderline between working-poor and lower-middle, as i would define them. (anybody who’d think the way Exador seems to, would call me U.S. lower class without the slightest doubt. people who know what the U.S. lower class really looks like seldom think like Exador, in my experience.)
Pardon me for jumping in here at this late date but I do want to add a few points:
1. The United States is infamous for not having stationary incomes. My household is a good example of this. 10 years ago we made less than $30K/year. Now, we’ve moved up several brackets.
2. Fast food companies get a lot of grief, but in reality they actually pay pretty well. (I had linked to a survey, but it’s apparently something you have to pay to read.) I also know a few managers in other fast food companies who make more than my husband and I put together.
Ex, I’m making about twice what I made as a grad student and my benefits aren’t as good. (I moved from a unionized university to an ununionized college.) Luckily, I am a whiz at writing grants — that’s what I’m doing on all those days off you think I’m taking as a working mother. I am using my parent’s hand-me-down formica table that they bought used in the 1950s and there’s nothing retro-chic about that piece of lopsided shit. But I have other spending priorities right now and a fancy table will have to wait.
i’ve worked (briefly) for the golden arches. the pay wasn’t impressive, but the job was obviously meant as a way for teenagers to earn extra pocket money; you had to get at least two steps up the ladder to find any “real adult jobs” in that business. and that’s okay, every country has such jobs, teenagers everywhere need something to keep them honestly occupied and teach them a work ethic.
the problem was mostly that everybody kept getting scheduled for two hours per week less work than would have entitled them to any health insurance at all, even the miserably awful package that was hypothetically offered to the non-adult positions. i know a way to fix that problem, but universal health care is another of those income redistribution schemes…
(i’ve also lived, for a time, in a trailer park. i take it all as part of my ongoing americanization. still need to learn to shoot; i’ll skip learning to drink awful sex-in-a-canoe “beer”.)
a different problem comes when any large group of real adults can’t manage to find any better jobs than such entry-level positions, or can’t advance past them into the “serious” levels of pay and benefits. i have a sneaking suspicion that, were i to go browsing blogs hosted by people of color and/or latin@s, i might find complaints about just such phenomena. i’m fairly sure that illegal immigrants are frequently trapped in precisely such situations, too.
NN, I bow to your experience. Having never been to Europe, I based that on what Euro-folk have told me.
My wife used to place programmers from England. They all told the same story, but that may have been because they could make far more money here than there, although a number of engineers I’ve spoken with have also said that. Maybe it’s just the engineering field?
As for US-poor, I’ve been there. We even dreamed of a hole in the middle of the highway.
bridgett, maybe your being discriminated against!
; )
Whoops, slow refresh!
NN, I’ll take you shooting, if you get around Atlanta.
and that would be “you’re”
It’s true that income levels change in the US. But they change in both directions, and it isn’t true that there’s a clear correlation between increased experience and increased income — it’s true up to a limited point, but falls down once a few years of experience have been passed. And it is true that the inflation-adjusted median income in the US has been falling since the early 1970s, which suggests that more households move down than move up (or that they move down farther than they move up).
I think that actually has a lot to do with the thing I pointed out earlier – that being poor sucks a lot less (and is easier on everyone, government and other taxpayers included) when you can still go to the doctor and have a decent education. If you don’t have to pay for healthcare and private education to provide these things for your children, you can support a middle class lifestyle on less money. Which, magically, produces the illusion that our poor are better off than theirs, because they technically have more money.
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Amen, Mag. Healthcare and private education– hell, even public education– can suck up ‘disposable income’ with a quickness. Those aren’t the only two things that cost more after being trusted to the invisible hand of the market. Transportation comes to mind: those feminized, backwater western European hellholes pay more for gasoline, but their distances are shorter and they usually have invested in public transit infrastructures; our enlightened market republic puts public money into roads and tax breaks for oil companies and auto manufacturers, which translates into- um, people driving more and having little or no comprehensive public transit outside of a few major cities.
And as for this:
Obesity among the lower income brackets is not a sign of prosperity. It is a sign of limited access to healthy dietary choices. Thanks to the continuing glories of the unfettered marketplace, fatty, starchy, nutrient-poor processed foods are cheaper and more available; while healthier, closer-to-the-earth foods are prohibitively expensive to many of our pampered, lazy poor people. This is another product of corporate socialism: the mass producers of mostly shitty food get subsidies and other favorable gov’t treatment; while smaller, more localized, and higher quality producers have to jump through expensive and prohibitive hoops.
And that’s the thing about socialism: It’s great if your one of the ones in the ‘to each according to his need’ category.
When you are healthy, paying into socialized healthcare sucks. The same can be said for any socialized program. The problem is that you don’t get a choice.
I know the speech on obesity and the poor. You can eat at McDonalds if you eat smaller portions and exercise. It’s not rocket science.
And yet, apparently, it is since we’ve been getting fatter and fatter even in the face of a booming diet industry and government “busybodies” preaching to us about good nutrition.
It may have more to do with the Republicans cutting recess and the fact that we eat corn all day every day whether we mean to or not because it’s in almost everything in the form of corn syrup.
You can’t feed a nation what you feed cattle to fatten them up and not have the same effect.
You can’t feed a nation what you feed cattle to fatten them up and not have the same effect.
Bingo.
Exador, you may have hit on one fundamental difference between your world-view and mine. See, to me, paying into Social Security while i am young doesn’t suck. I see it as a vital contribution to my older fellow citizens who paved the way for us to work in the first place. It makes me feel good to know that i am part of a system that says if you work hard, play by the rules, yet somehow don’t amass what it takes to retire in dignity, that the younger workers kick in a pittance (which it actually is) to help you in your elderly years.
Same goes for Socialized medicine. Again, to me, it doesn’t suck at all to kick in and know that some with less means can see a doctor now and then. What on earth is my money for? It does no good sitting in a damn bank, or when used to purchase plastic bullshit i don’t need. As energy, it can make enormous differences in people’s lives.
We are hardly overtaxed with respect to income. Now, property taxes are a whole other thing….
What. Mack. Said.
sure you get a choice. leave that horribly oppressive society and go live in some other one. all else failing, forswear civilization and go live as a hermit in a cave somewhere, preferably without letting anybody know where you went so they can’t have you thrown off their land as a squatter.
but if you want to live in a civilized society, you gotta pay the tab that finances civilization. this includes paying to help house, cure, clothe, and educate less fortunate citizens, because that is what society is FOR; that is the whole reason we live in social groups to begin with. we didn’t settle out of the treetops into troops, clans, and tribes so that we each individually could be better off — it’s never worked that way, it’s always been for the better of the group.
if we didn’t, by and large, want that, we’d all be hermits each in our own caves somewhere. lots of species of animals live mostly solitary, in that fashion, and haven’t gone extinct yet. but we don’t.
Well, of course, I’ve never met Exador. Maybe he is a hermit in a cave. With computer access.
Damn! My secret is out!
We finally come to the inevitable difference in schools of thought: the extents of the social contract.
You’re close, but we did not come down from treetops to join a hive. We came down for mutual protection. The short version is that we chose a society to protect our rights. That is not the same thing as mutually enslaving each other.
Aw, shuck. Really?
…goes off to return her thigh-high leather boots and spiked collar…
Actually, far as we can figure out, we came down from the treetops because we were running out of trees where we were. I’m kind of tickled that we say “we” about what happened millions of years ago, though.
Looking out for each others’ well-being is, of course, one facet of protecting each other. Unless you consider, say, parent-child relationships mutual enslavement?
‘Mutual enslavement.’ Now that’s a precious bullshit construction if I’ve ever read one. For your information, Exador, there is no such thing. Enslavement only works in one direction. What you are describing is something most kindergarteners learn as cooperation. Those of us who grow up sometimes call it community.
Seriously, Exador, now you’ve got me thinking that you’re pulling everyone’s collective chain. Unless, of course, you’re driving solely on private roads, drinking private water, and not spilling wastewater or shitting into a public sewer system. Oh, and you must never give a dime to any corporation or business that ever accepted a whit of subsidy from any level of gubmint.
I bow to the wisdom of the senior silverback. When you’re not busy grooming yourself for parasites, Gramps, can you tell the rest of us more about what it was really like at the dawn of human existence? And explain why we haven’t come up with any new ideas since?
Oh…but we have? You mean, humans and their ideas change over time? Golly, Gramps, you really are smart for an old ape.
Geeze, I kid you guys about the NannyState, but I didn’t know that you Literally view the government as your Mommy.
Let’s stay away from the Strawman keys, there CS. As I stated, the fundamental question is one of the extent of the social contract. I thought you liked nuance and gray areas, and all that.
Now get these torches and pitchforks away from cave opening!
If you want to compare driver licenses, punchcard-girl, I’m ready.
My bad. It was either eyewitness or bullshitter…I figured you’d rather be thought old than full of shit (not that one can’t be both, as I am living proof).
Nah, we’re just saying that the core of community, and the only real model we have for establishing one, is the family. And I think I read somewhere that the political community of which most of us here are members wants its members to look out for each other’s wellbeing. Maybe you can remind me what I mean? Something about promoting the general … oh, something or other.
But didn’t you define the extent by saying that it was only about mutual protection? Wait, I think you did:
Which means that the things I describe fall beyond your limits. Unless roads and sewers can be considered protection, and health care can not. I don’t know, Exador. It’s really hard to build a Straw Man of your argument when I can’t be sure what you’re actually saying.
Or maybe you’ve got a labyrinthine sense of humor or you just like making trouble, Exador. Just so you know, though, regularly farting a cloud of smoke might keep you in a gray area, but that isn’t the same thing as nuance. (And like the great Bill O’Reilly, you can always claim you were ‘just kidding’ when you get called on it.) If only you could be as unequivocal as that other misanthropic, cave-dwelling yukmeister we all know and love.
You know how these guys feel about welfare, nm.
actually, i’d disagree with that as a matter of principle. i think society can and should be viewed as a bunch of individuals supporting one another, completely apart from any family ties, and i see no particular reason to use the family as a model either.
in actual practice, though, that’s likely hair-splitting.
Nomen, I think I may not have been clear enough. I don’t mean that a society can exist only when we all love each other as if we shared a high proportion of genes. I mean that the kind of interdependence that some of us are talking about as what a society is — the kind that Mack characterizes as not thinking that paying into Social Security sucks — is based on the kind of interdependence that exists within a family. And I think that history shows that all human societies have had an element of this, mutatis mutandis.
Actually, Captain ReadingComp, I said that was the original motivation for banding together to form clan, … society, as opposed to NN’s proposition, to quote:
this includes paying to help house, cure, clothe, and educate less fortunate citizens, because that is what society is FOR; that is the whole reason we live in social groups to begin with.
Who’s just stirrin’ the pot, here?
Is comparing one to Osama just an updated version of Godwin’s law?
The comments are flyin’! I meant to be in response to CS
Don’t take insult, mind you. I have nothing personal against you or bin Laden. I just think he’s more of a straight talker than you. I don’t think you mean to be evasive; it’s just that what you pass off as philosophical positions don’t stand up even to minimal scrutiny, so you have to keep your goalposts moving to stay in a debate.
We can all agree to disagree about how much we’d choose to invest in sound government as opposed to “every man for himself except when defending against wild animals.” But some of us are quite clear about where we want to draw the lines, or at least we admit that we’re open to discussion. You, Exador, come across as a reactionary curmudgeon. You bristle at the very idea of a social contract, then backtrack (e.g. claiming you were ‘just kidding’) when confronted with actual detail and nuance. It is very difficult to take you seriously, anyway; because, as Nomen Nescio points out, there are plenty of countries to which you could have moved by now if you had truly grown sick of this Nanny State. Many of these are places that have had their governments and economies subjected to heavy doses of Friedmanism; some simply have little or no commons worth mentioning. All places worthy of the self-reliant island of a man that you are. That you are still here, bickering with us pampered teat-suckers on a medium that originated from the public dime, doesn’t give your shifting position much credibility.
Or maybe you’ve got a labyrinthine sense of humor or you just like making trouble, Exador.
Can’t it be both?
I’m sure it can.
Cripes. So much for the “war on the middle-class,” ya think? Looks like it’s damn near over and we’ve lost. The income-cookie is looking a tad deprived of much middle!