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I think ajross hits the nail on the head here. These people are all very well off, comparatively speaking and they're complaining because their kids can't go to private colleges costing $40+K/year.

I think the only really valid point the article makes is about the unpredictability of these tax credits. Look at the graph for marginal tax rate for a single parent - it is sort of progressive but the rates are all over the map, rising and falling as income goes up.

I'm a strong advocate for progressive taxation as I believe it is essential for fairness but I also think the tax system should be simplified and the number of deductions and credits reduced. Ideally, the IRS would send me a bill at the end of the year and that'd be that.

A lower paying position is still full time work, after all.

There's 9-to-5 full time and there's chained-to-your-Blackberry, I'm-going-to-need-you-to-come-in-on-Sunday full time.

Either or both of which might be true of the $60k or $120k position. That's another problem with the article (and your response): it's making the assumption that salary correlates directly with hours worked. Clearly it doesn't, as we all know from experience. There are "easy" six-figure jobs out there, and some folks burning out in $30k office work.

The point is that it's a big world with lots and lots of variation. This particular woman has a financial incentive to work less. But to argue that we need to drop (or "reconsider the effects of", as the article euphemizes) assistance programs like financial aid or mortgage relief based on her particular situation is ridiculous.

"The article is cherry picking this small population of kinda-sorta-unfortunates (they're still making $120k a year!) and using it to argue against a bunch of government programs that provide real benefits to people with a fraction of their income."

It's a regular NYT feature - The Plight of the Not-Quite-Rich-Enough. Sure it sucks for this lady, but 2/3 of the families in this country would be thrilled to have a single wage-earner making $60k. However, Mrs. Not-Quite-Rich-Enough gets NYT articles, and Joe Schmoe, who's struggling to send his kids to college at all, gets ignored.

Edit: This is a Forbes article, but it reads just like any of a dozen NYT articles over the last year. It makes more sense in Forbes, because that magazine is targeted at the people in the upper income bracket.

"$120k per year is in the top 10th percentile or thereabouts -- it's at the very edge of what most people would consider "middle class"."

If 90% of the people are making less, I don't see how it can be considered "middle class".

When did middle class become a synonym for a particular range of pay? The majority in the $120k+ USD pay range may be middle class but I'm sure there are working class folk in there too. Consider sportsmen, Beckham and Rooney are very high paid but they're not members of the traditional middle-class.

Membership of various classes is a huge quagmire. If you want to refer to people solely on what they are paid then talk about wages and steer clear of notion of class.

Edit: not so stupid now.

I'd say "Class" can be used to refer to the types of economic problems or challenges facing people, regardless of salary. In this case, if the question is "what's the best way to pay for my daughter going to an Ivy" and not "how on earth can we afford this", they're not middle-class. If mortgage is the topic and "how are we going to ever pay this off" isn't the question, you're not lower-class.

I'll certainly agree that the lines are far from clear-cut, but I think it's best defined in a problem-oriented manner. The middle class gets these tax breaks because they can't otherwise afford to send their kids to good schools or own houses, while the upper-class can. They're facing different problems, and so the solutions are tailored differently for them. This causes confusion when you have income-to-SoL disparities in the country ($60k goes further in Kansas than in NYC), so people at different income levels can be facing the same problems.

Thanks, your last para clears up the need for a classification, here we'd probably say middle-income as middle-class is not necessarily related to earnings.

I guess as class and income in the UK are not coterminous this leads to confusion. For example I earn well below the poverty line in the UK but would be described as middle class due to my education and parentage.

Beckham, for example, would probably come in as working class - son of a kitchen fitter and hairdresser (according to Wikipedia) low academic achievement, low IQ, no titled lineage.

Here in America, I'd find it hard to classify Beckham as anything other than upper-class (upper-income, if you prefer). He's got enough truckloads of money (and his former-pop-star wife is also likely well-off) that he doesn't deal with middle-class or lower-class issues like affording his mortgage payments or saving for retirement or paying for college educations for his kids.

I suspect it's a cultural difference. Here in America, people don't really care much where your parents came from or how you did in school, they measure success and class by what you have. We haven't really discriminated on "old-money"/"new-money" lines in decades at least, and we've never had much in the way of titled lineages. We don't have the centuries of cultural history of class immobility that Europeans have (I don't mean that judgmentally, I'm just saying we don't have that history in the back of our minds).

This was just linked on Reddit an amusing look at British attitudes to class: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/sathnam_....

I chatted to a younger friend about it and he couldn't believe I'd be so gauche as to classify people based on their background, parenting and education but felt class was and should only be about your income.

In the US, "middle class" has always been a measure of income only. I'm sorry if that was confusing.

And David Beckham is very much not a member of the middle class, indeed. He's as upper crust as they come by US measures

That's the new middle class.

The ones who thought they are the middle class have to move one step down.

My sentiments exactly. Thank you for expressing it so well. If I could upvote your comment more than once I would.