A Surprising Find in the List of Median Income By State
Following up on my post earlier today, and considering the impact of inflation in the year since, Atrios definition of $90K as below the middle class doesn’t really hold. It’s possible $90K is dead-on middle for NJ and CT, but after the first six states, no median comes within $15,000 of that mark.
In the year 2003, the last year available via the census, the median for a 4 person family is shown in order from the highest to lowest.
NJ 87,412
CT 86,001
MA 82,561
MD 82,363
NH 79,339
MN 76,733
DE 72,680
IL 72,368
AK 72,110
VA 71,697
CO 71,559
HI 71,320
RI 71,098
NY 69,354
WA 69,130
WI 69,010
MI 68,602
PA 68,578
CA 67,814
OH 66,066
VT 65,876
—– USA 65,093 —–
IN 65,009
IA 64,341
KS 64,215
MO 64,128
NB 63,625
NV 63,005
GA 62,294
UT 62,032
OR 61,570
ME 59,596
SD 59,272
FL 58,605 *
AZ 58,206*
ND 57,092
NC 56,712
SC 56,433
DC 56,067
WY 56,065
AL 55,448
TN 55,401
TX 54,554
ID 53,376
KY 53,198
LA 50,529
OK 50,216
MT 49,124
AR 48,353
MS 46,570
WV 46,169
NM 45,867
Notice anything else odd about this list and the way I highlighted things? For one, I bolded and asterisked FL and AZ because they’re the two principal retirement states. Nevada, a growing retirement state near Las Vegas, is not much higher in the list.
There’s 9 Southern states below Florida in that list and only Georgia and Virginia (VA being influenced by the higher income DC govt related workers) are above.
And then there’s the US median, with the states voting for Bush in red. So although this wasn’t the point Atrios was after, it supports a point I made even stronger than I would have believed.
In fact, if anyone planning to run for President doesn’t see a major platform point here, they shouldn’t be running at all. Namely, programs for lower income workers under the US median, such as job training and college aid opportunities and even raises in the minimum wage (bolder than the slow phase-in plan Kerry offered) could go a long long way to appealling to more voters in red states.
Further, considering that Karl Rove needed every bit of that 14% evangelical vote to get past the record turnout for Kerry, I’d say there’s an old Democratic base of lower-wage workers that feels the party’s abandoned them.
DC, because of its strong Black vote, ME and OR are the only Kerry areas under the median. And OH, barely above the median, is where Kerry supposedly lost the election by a mere 2% of its vote.
If this data doesn’t demonstrate what I maintained all along - that economics remains the biggest key to any election - I don’t know what will. Where I miscalculated though is that the lower middle class and the working class don’t view the Democratic Party as their advocate.
Better Dem proposals and better PR on this point alone will be the key to the 2008 election if the Dem candidate will simply recognize it and respond.
May 2nd, 2005 at 6:52 pm
Kevin,
My first two impressions are, one, having a hard time connecting the phrase ’strong Black vote’ with the state of Maine, and two, knowing Black Republican Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele recently insist that $100K is middle class, that Kos is wrong - again.
Do not allow any partisan Republicans or nitpicking Democrats to quibble with your simple equation, because Bush’s plan benefits only when comparisons to the facts you’ve provided are considered irrelevant.
The only other comparisons I’d be interested in seeing are the rank of bankruptcy filings by state, and the percentage of employees owning stock outside a 401K-type plan.
May 2nd, 2005 at 8:12 pm
To clarify, I meant the Black vote in DC, not ME. And MD, with a median of 82.5K in 2003, is likely a little higher now, around 84K or 85K.
If that’s median, or middle middle class, you might say 40K each way is still middle class (or whatever), so the lower middle class would be 45K, and the upper closer to 125K. In that case, Steele would be correct.
And it was Atrios, not Kos, who began the discussion. I maintain that 90K is middle to upper middle class anywhere and at the border of ‘rich’ in the lower cost of living states.
May 2nd, 2005 at 9:02 pm
Kevin–You are not accurately characterizing what Atrios wrote OR responding to his points. He stated that “To me, middle class is a four person two income family with health insurance with etc.” and went on about how $90k annually is not enough to purchase and support a 4 bedroom house in the “bubble markets” of NYC, Boston, or Southern California (along with all the other family needs). He was not talking about median incomes of states, but of incomes vs cost of living in certain areas. As a Long Islander, I am TOO familiar with the taxes+insurance+morgage totals and my $330k 30yr morgage++ is over $4k/m. Not counting energy and maintenance costs, the annual nut is over $50k. How realistic is that for a family of 4 with $90k BEFORE taxes? And I had substantial equity before getting into this house. Four bedroom houses in average areas here are now over $350k and new at least $500k. A contractor friend of mine told me that the capital of most of his customers is “the bank of Dad”. But again, this is the NYC metro area. Upstate is a different world for housing prices, but part of the “median income” statistics for the state.
May 2nd, 2005 at 10:39 pm
If you had data on some other variables, such as religiousness levels, crime and the level of federal government subsidies by state you could see what the controlled effect of income on voting patterns is. The problem just looking at these two variables is that there are other things that differ by the blue-red difference.
But I agree that the lower income voters should be for the Democrats. That this isn’t the case shows bad groundwork.
May 3rd, 2005 at 3:35 am
NEWS FROM PLANET EARTH:
30% of the “voters” who allegedly elected George Yeltsin Bush were forced to cast cyber-votes that no one can account for. Moreover, many very strange things are known to have happened on the signal path between all of those paper ballot scanning contraptions and the Big Mother Computer in Philadelphia.
You can bet both your bippys that the cyber-voting hackers were a lot more willing to switch the votes of the poorbuckers in the so-called “red states.” And you can bet all four of the bippys that you will then have that Kerry actually beat Bush by a margin of something like 70% to 30% in those so-called “red states.”
YOU MAY NOW RETURN TO YOUR ANALYSIS OF THE DEMISE OF AMPHIBIANS ON THE PLANET MARS.
May 3rd, 2005 at 7:18 am
Simon, I do understand what Atrios said. I just quibbled with his definition of middle class.
Or more accurately, with the notion that anyone can make up their own definition of what middle class should mean.
And Blues: I wrote And OH, barely above the median, is where Kerry supposedly lost the election to acknowledge voting irregularities. Pre-election polling would suggest at least 80%-90% of these states would remain red or blue without any voting irregularities. Considering your point and which were swing states, it would potentially only shift about 4 or 5 states across the US median point. The list would still be remarkably similar as OH, IA, MO and NV were all within $2,000 of the national median. Only NM would be a clear aberration from the general divide, compared to what’s displayed above.
May 3rd, 2005 at 10:50 am
Interesting stuff, I put a little chart together on my site with a few numbers from other sources (really wish I could find median home prices by state, but that doesn’t seem to be in the cards)
my thoughts & a nifty chart
Take a look at the chart linked in the blog, and I think the economic situation is fairly telling… One very interesting thing to note is that in the states that went Bush, it is still fairly affordable to buy a house, ie “the american dream” isn’t only a dream like it is in many of the die hard Kerry states.
May 4th, 2005 at 4:27 pm
Chris,
The reason it’s easier to buy a house in those areas (I’m in north Georgia) is because the cost of living is ridiculously lower. Case in point, I’m about an hour from Atlanta & am the sole breadwinner for a family of four in a 3,000 square foot brick home built in 1996 in a swim/tennis community. OR, I could quadruple my salary and have a one bedroom 700 sq ft apartment in Manhatten.
I appreciate Kevin doing the heavy lifting because any knowledge is good, but comparing (in any way) the median income in Alabama with that in CA isn’t really constructive.
May 5th, 2005 at 9:38 am
Yes, absolutely the reason its easier to buy a house in those areas is cost of living. And you do agree that its “ridiculously” lower, and if you look at the numbers, the median incomes are not proportionately higher in the areas with higher costs of living. In MA a family earning low six figures (well above the median income for the state) would need to spend in excess of 40% probably closer to 50% of their take home earnings on their mortgage payment (assuming they can save enough money for a downpayment to buy the average home at $460K), whereas the same family in texas earning proportionately above the median income, could easily afford a better than average home on less than 25% of their take home income.
The real point I was making with those numbers is that it is not a strange thing that people earning median levels of income in MA and people earning median incomes in TX vote differently. For the median earner in MA it has economically struck home that it is important to vote for the party whose policies better serve the “little man” because its much easier to be that “little man” in areas of the country where the cost of living is so disproportionate to their earnings. For the median earner in TX, where the cost of living is such that they can really afford to persue “the american dream”, it is easier to vote for the party who claims to preserve more of their income because a $400 - $1000 savings in taxes means that much more to them.