The Other America : SHHH! WE DON’T TALK ABOUT MONEY-BUT THE AVERAGE FAMILY LIVES ON $36,000 A YEAR

WASHINGTON — IN SELLING HIS economic plan, Bill Clinton made fairness central to his message. Unveiling the program, he stressed that 70% of his proposed new taxes fell on those making more than $100,000, and that his income tax hikes start on incomes of more than $140,000. But from some circles a hue and cry went up: This was not fairness, but rank betrayal. Hadn’t candidate Clinton promised to tax only the rich? How could he reconcile that with taxing people making just $100,000? As one network pundit observed, “$140,000 doesn’t buy what it used to.”

Despite the occasional hysterical or sarcastic response, this could have marked the start of a useful national debate over what it means to be middle class, and what it means to be more than that. However, the discussion quickly fizzled. Hardly surprising, since social class remains our last taboo subject.

It has always been true that money and sex make America go ‘round, but it used to be that polite people didn’t discuss either in public. Today we’ve overcome our inhibitions on the latter, as airwaves filled with panels on multiple orgasms, cross-dressing and incest attest. But talking about how much money people make--and should make--well, these are delicate matters. Consequently, what is any society’s most fundamental question--who gets what--remains little explored.

Consciously or not, we have a kind of mental “map” of social class. For most of us, it’s the standard bell curve: a few poor people, a few rich people and, in between, a large and comfortable middle class. But if we ever overcame our fiscal puritanism and explored this forbidden topic, we’d see the reality is far different. We’d come face-to-face with the extraordinary pattern of inequality that is America’s dirtiest dirty little secret.

The numbers are astonishing: The top 20% of families have as much income as the remaining 80%. Within that fortunate fifth, the top 5% makes as much as the lower 15%. In that top 5%, the pie is again evenly divided between the top one-fifth (that is, 1% of Americans) and the remaining 4%. It’s like opening one of those Russian dolls--no matter how small the piece, inside you find still more inequality.

Statistics only give us part of the picture. Consider the average family--we’ll call them the Smiths. Jean and Bob Smith both work (Jean part time), and between them they bring in $36,000--before taxes. They have a couple of cars, but at least one is 10 years old. In the past year they’ve taken only one trip away from home. They own a house, but still owe most of the mortgage. They own no stocks or bonds, and have no money market account. In fact, beyond the house they have no net financial assets--zero. The entire family spends $28 a week on all meals outside the house (yes, per week). They hope their kids get into the state university when the time comes; private college is out of the question.

Now consider Bill and Judy Jones. They have two professional incomes, bringing in about $150,000 a year. They own two cars, one European and one Japanese. They will send their children to private primary and secondary schools, or obtain comparable educations by buying an expensive home in a community with top-notch schools. They say they are just getting by, and they mean it. But they couldn’t tell you where two people would want to have dinner for $28. And if you told them they had to get by on $36,000 next year, they wouldn’t know where to start.

The Joneses would say they’re not truly rich, and they’re right. They couldn’t afford never to work again, nor do they have the social and political power real wealth can bring. But they’re not the real middle class, either, which lives like the Smiths. Families with incomes of $100,000 and up are in fact quite affluent. Call them the Lower Upper Class, or “Luckies.”

People like the Joneses typically have no idea where they rank on the economic ladder. Try asking Luckies (or young Luckies-to-be) how many families earn more than $100,000. In my experience, they are almost never close to the real answer (about 1 in 20). They believe such incomes are common.

How do Luckies remain so ignorant of their own relative affluence? It’s maintained by the great genius of American social organization: de facto segregation by income. Our housing, workplaces and schooling keep us all surrounded by a narrow strata of people much like ourselves. It’s so effective we don’t even notice it. You basically can’t buy an expensive house adjacent to a cheap one, or vice versa--we don’t organize neighborhoods that way. Schools are tied to those same segregated communities. Within firms, we usually socialize with our economic peers.

Most of us thus spend our entire lives largely with people of our own social class. Even those who manage significant upward mobility over their lives always find themselves--at any given time--associating with people just like themselves. So we all feel, no matter how successful, “average.” As far as we can tell, we are.

It’s not surprising, then, that these two ostensibly “middle class” groups have little understanding of each other. It’s as if they live in parallel universes. To see the perception gap, answer these questions: How much income per year would you and your family need to live in reasonable comfort? And how much would you need to fulfill your dreams?

According to the Roper Organization, the average response of Americans is $36,000 for comfort, and $82,000 to fulfill their dreams. A public opinion expert says she loves to use these figures in speeches because it always elicits gasps from her largely professional audiences. Presumably they would shoot far higher, perhaps adding a zero to these modest goals. Your own answer should tell you a great deal about your class status.

Incredibly, the economic gulf between families like the Smiths and the Joneses is even larger than that suggested by their salaries. Luckies have a flexibility in their daily work lives--for anything from a doctor’s appointment to a parent-teacher conference to caring for a sick child--that lower-class workers can’t even imagine. Their firms take them to “conferences” in sunny climes where only a few hours of business are conducted. These luxurious trips are really unreported (and tax-exempt) compensation, as are the frequent flier miles they pile up for personal use while traveling at the company’s expense.

Luckies also often have revenue not technically counted as income. A typical example is the $10,000 annual tax-free allowance that Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. collects from each parent--called a “gift” to avoid income taxes now, estate taxes later. The affluent suspect that resentment from the lower classes is based on exaggerated notions of how well they are doing. The truth is that their income and lifestyle lies quite literally beyond the imagining of most average Americans.

These lifestyles, for many Luckies, come to be their own justification. “Getting by” proves elastic, meaning living as well as they can currently afford to. Zoe Baird reportedly told an American graduate student applying for her child-care position that she couldn’t pay more than the advertized rate. “Look around you. Do you know what it costs to maintain a place like this?” she asked, sitting in a home appropriate for a family making $600,000 a year. Privilege easily assumes the language of necessity.

We pay a real cost for this denial by the well-to-do, and even more for their failure to understand what life is like for truly middle class people. This strata of deniers includes television news producers, senior academics, politicians, think-tank experts, newspaper editors--the people who effectively conduct our national debates. This skews those debates, especially on critical economic issues.

Elites praise the new streamlining and efficiency of corporate America--but relatively few have seen their own income “downsized.” They praise free trade, but there’s virtually no chance their own job will depart for Mexico soon. They love consumption taxes, unaware that average people consume their entire income and so will be much harder hit by such levies.

Because they make our movies and television shows, Luckies also skew our own societal self-image. On TV, Bill Cosby’s Huxtables are the rule, Roseanne and Dan Connor the exception. But the reverse is true in real life. We see exceptional lifestyles as commonplace; all who fall short feel a little poorer, and our blindness before class continues.

I’m not suggesting that the Luckies should hang their head in shame. The vast majority have worked hard to get what they have. But they need to recognize that, as Jesse Jackson likes to say, millions of other Americans “work hard every day”--and remain poor or just a little better. And they should always keep in mind just how lucky they are.

Response to Clinton’s taxes was intriguing. Everyone scrambled for membership in Clinton’s forgotten middle class. No rich foxes here, was the message, just us middle-class chickens. I suppose we should be thankful the affluent feel compelled to deny their status. It’s a tribute to the strong streak of egalitarianism that coexists, if uneasily, with Americans’ free enterprise beliefs.

But we still need a serious discussion of the realities of social class today, and how it jibes with our egalitarian values--if it does. Fortunately, a consensus appears to now exist that the increasing inequality of the past decade--so long denied by conservatives--went too far. The Smiths of America will probably never live like the Joneses. But surely we can ensure that they keep up with the Joneses. And maybe we can even close the gap a little.