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Comment by geebee | Hacker News Reader

This comes up a lot. Sometimes they talk about a car, for a while there it was always a "plasma tv". Financial advisors, talking about middle class debt and financial struggles, would ask you, do you really need that "plasma tv".

San Francisco is probably an outlier, but with the median house price at 1.1 mil, and full time child care costs for two preschool kids at $40-50k a year, a plasma tv is a minor rounding error in the cost of living.

So while I agree with you about the TV, and the car, and the consumerism in general, I do think it may be a way to blame the middle class for not paddling hard enough toward shore as the ocean current carries them out around the rocks.

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San Francisco, Manhattan, D.C. -- they're all outliers. My great-aunt runs a day-care facility in Kentucky. They charge $200/month/child. (This is definitely an outlier on the other end of the spectrum)

It's very difficult to talk about wealth, as wealth means different things in different places. My argument for a $100k/year salary being "rich" falls apart in expensive cities.

True, but keep in mind, 100k is a lot easier to achieve in those cities. Registered nurses and dental hygienists (and software developers), who all earn about 110k a year (median) in SF, tend to fall well below that threshold outside these centers.

Hygienists make 110K in SF? Do you have data to support this? These seem like outlier numbers to me even in a place like SF.

it surprised me too.

http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/dental-hygienist/s...

Personally, I'm glad dental hygienists make enough money that, with two incomes, they can live a middle class life where they work. But it really does put that "critical shortage of software developers" at an average of $110k a year in SF in perspective.

> My argument for a $100k/year salary being "rich" falls apart in expensive cities.

The vast majority of jobs that pay $100k/year are in expensive cities, so you can't just ignore the expensive cities.

> a plasma tv is a minor rounding error in the cost of living.

Also true compared to college tuition, bills for problem pregnancies, and other major medical events including the last two or three years of life.

It's probably time to admit that the child tax credit hasn't been keeping up with the cost of living and needs a major adjustment.

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