http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/fashion/08halfmill.html?_r=1 PRIVATE school: $32,000 a year per student. Skip to next paragraph Related In Curbing Pay, Obama Seeks to Alter Corporate Culture (February 5, 2009) Mortgage: $96,000 a year. Co-op maintenance fee: $96,000 a year. Nanny: $45,000 a year. We are already at $269,000, and we havenât even gotten to taxes yet. Five hundred thousand dollars â the amount President Obama wants to set as the top pay for banking executives whose firms accept government bailout money â seems like a lot, and it is a lot. To many people in many places, it is a princely sum to live on. But in the neighborhoods of New York City and its suburban enclaves where successful bankers live, half a million a year can go very fast. âAs hard as it is to believe, bankers who are living on the Upper East Side making $2 or $3 million a year have set up a life for themselves in which they are also at zero at the end of the year with credit cards and mortgage bills that are inescapable,â said Holly Peterson, the author of an Upper East Side novel of manners, âThe Manny,â and the daughter of Peter G. Peterson, a founder of the equity firm the Blackstone Group. âFive hundred thousand dollars means taking their kids out of private school and selling their home in a fire sale.â Sure, the solution may seem simple: move to Brooklyn or Hoboken, put the children in public schools and buy a MetroCard. But more than a few of the New York-based financial executives who would have their pay limited are men (and they are almost invariably men) whose identities are entwined with living a certain way in a certain neighborhood west of Third Avenue: a life of private schools, summer houses and charity galas that only a seven-figure income can stretch to cover. Few are playing sad cellos over the fate of such folk, especially since the collapse of the institutions they run has yielded untold financial pain. But in New York, where a new study from the Center for an Urban Future, a nonprofit research group in Manhattan, estimates it takes $123,322 to enjoy the same middle-class life as someone earning $50,000 in Houston, extricating oneself from steep bills can be difficult. ....... continued in the nY times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/fashion/08halfmill.html?_r=1
Bills filled with pork and socialist policies that will backfire on him like Big Daddy K's 5 Alarm Chili http://www.cooks.com/rec/view/0,1626,133176-253195,00.html
This is very true indeed you need at least 2 mil a year to be upper middle class now a days USA will split into very poor and just plain wealthy kind a like mexico
In New York, LA, Bay Area, (insert seriously overcrowded metropolis of choice here) maybe. But not in the Heartland. In most of the country, 200k a year puts you at the top of middle class if not in the bottom of upper class. That's the point of the article, though. For most folks, 200k is serious money. But it depends in a big way on where you live and work, and for some large areas that's chump change. Which makes 500k a great weapon in the class war. Country bumpkins who don't know any better scream that is way too high. Urban snobs turn up their noses and proclaim that is laughably low. And BAM! the next rounds are fired in the war on the rich that empowers the democrats so much.
Boo hoo....They should know that "Beggers can't be choosers". They have an option here. Don't take the taxpayers' money.. file for bankruptcy and make zero, or take the money and make less than $500,000.