'Middle class' is a con

[NapsForAll]

Concept taken from Gary Stevenson:

There are only two classes. The 'owning class' and the 'working class'.

'Owning class' primarily get all their money from investments and assets, and properties and land. They don't have to work, and they have so much wealth that their money makes money. They don't get taxed on that huge huge amount of money. The UK has 156 billionaires and 45,000 people that have more than 100 million.

The working class is everyone else - the rest of us. Yes there are spectrums within it, but we are ALL people who have to work to get money, and if we don't work, we can't live.

AIBU to say that the term middle class has been invented to sow division, and we are being ROYALLY played by identifying as middle class? It would make more of a difference to our lives and society if we focused on wealth taxes, not who claims child allowance or disability support.

YABU - no, smaller class divides are part of British politics
YANBU - yeh we are literally owned by the rich people in our society. Let's all start calling for a wealth tax.

This is a weirdly-framed AIBU that muddles lots of different things as if they all flow from each other. A bit like:

"The term 'Asian' is a con'". There are only two races: light or dark. Asian was invented to divide us. AIBU? Yes - smaller divides are traditional. No - there are only two races: we should ban stop and search.

The champagne socialist Tony Bliar said "we're all middle class", while he was taking his children to the Seychelles, when they should have been in school. If we're all middle class, why weren't we all taking our children on term-time holidays to the Seychelles? Net zero hadn't been invented then, the scary buzzword was still "the greenhouse effect".

He also awarded himself a 50% pay rise in 2001. What a middle class thing to do. It was the first move of the Blair Rich Project.

That's not true. Mabel isn’t making money from the labour of others. I don’t think Marx had pensions paid for by tax in mind in his definition.

The estate of Karl Marx should sue for plagiarism/breach of copyright.

Hardly a new or original concept.

@PeriJane , always just one more apparently. 🤦🏼‍♀️

Haven't read the thread yet, so perhaps my correction is redundant, but a stat in the OP seemed far-fetched to me. A 2018 Guardian article said that 50,000 people in the whole world have a net worth of more than 100 million, so I think it's fairly unlikely that 45,000 people in the UK do.

OK, but Mabel with her 20k/yr NHS pension and Milly and her 20k/yr private pension are surely the natural ones to group together in discussion of tax?

Not Milly with Mark (on his yacht) in one bucket because they are both owners, and Mabel in an entirely different category on what seems like quite a technical point that NHS pensions are unfunded.

If no-one knows who Gary Stevenson is, I can sum up his whole YouTube series in one sentence.

“Tax the rich. Then tax them some more”

Thanks Gary, can’t see any hurdles with that one love

I dunno, I do think there is an in between group who have some assets to fall back on, who could survive out of work for a while but long term do need to earn income.

For example, someone who owns a £700k house in the south east with £400k of equity, who earns £100k a year as a chartered accountant, and has £30k in a stock and share isa and a pension fund with £200k in it.

This person has a decent cushion in case they fall on hard times, as they have a good slug of equity, some savings. They have a professional qualification that tends to lead to higher wages.

They are clearly much more financially secure than, for example, a childcare worker earning £13 an hour, who rents privately and has nothing spare to save.

These endless threads remind me of DD when she’s been watching too much TikTok and starts going on about billionaires causing all the problems in the world.

It’s a sort of pretend left-wingery designed to let people feel virtuous and proletarian despite having grown up with a pony and a large trust fund. It’s a way of minimising your own privilege because, hey, unless you’ve got £100m at least then we’re all the same, no difference between a corporate lawyer and a cleaner.

That's precisely what Mabel is doing. Her NHS pension (or state pension) is paid from the taxes paid by current workers. If she has a private pension, it will be invested in shares - which also enable Mabel to be paid the fruits of other workers’ labour. None of those workers agreed to finance Mabel’s life but they have to do it anyway.

Marx didn’t consider pensions because they didn’t really exist (at least for ordinary people) when he was writing. But from a modern perspective they’re a major problem for his analysis, because they turn everybody into an asset owner living off the fruits of somebody else’s labour. Even Mabel.

Hey guys, go easy on Mabel! She’s had a hard life and is doing her best, ok? 🤣

The working class is everyone else - the rest of us. Yes there are spectrums within it, but we are ALL people who have to work to get money, and if we don't work, we can't live.

I think this is hugely insulting to people who live pay check to pay check. There's a huge difference between working hard and having to count each penny, versus working for a bunch of unnecessary material things, such as extra curricular activities for your kids and the latest SUV

👏👏👏👏👏👏👏

I can’t agree or disagree. Bezo’s earns 1.7 million a year, middle management in Amazon earns about 100,000 a year and an Amazon driver earns about 30k a year. If they have a family the Amazon driver will rely on some kind of benefits to survive. So this is a massively disproportionate array of wealth where the people at the top earn insane amounts and the people at the bottom can’t actually survive on their salaries.

I think this is wrong but I can’t agree that people in the middle are having the same experience as the people on the bottom. There needs to be a fairer distribution of wealth.

It’s wild to me that we all accept that all of our taxes fund benefits for people who are earning substandard wages who are in turn working for the extraordinarily wealthy.

Bezos earns a lot more than 1.7 million a year. Try multiplying that by ten thousand. 17 billion is perfectly plausible in a good year when Amazon’s shares go up. And there’s plenty of Amazon middle management on closer to 1.7 million a year than 100k.

The benefits point is interesting. The UK Amazon driver on 30k probably won’t be entitled to any benefits if he or she is a single healthy adult with no kids working full time. The benefits only come if they have additional needs - likely children, maybe some kind of disability. The only real way to avoid this is to insist companies pay higher wages to people with children, which is currently illegal. Or else you could insist that the minimum wage rises so it’s enough for a single adult to raise a family of two or three children on one wage with no benefits. But then it would probably have to go up to £40k or more, potentially higher in London. The entire hospitality sector would probably disappear, and maybe also the care sector.

That classification sounds like it’s straight out of Jane Austen’s England. Nowadays almost everyone needs to work and houses are bought with large mortgages.

Even the hedge fund manager would retired at 50 worked to gain that wealth. The number of people who live entirely from the proceeds of wealth they didn’t create is infinitesimally small.

I don't think, growing up, that we even thought about being 'rich'. My parents thought abought not being bone-achingly poor, living in low quality housing with little prospect of improvement.
They knew that there was a better life to be had. Back then, education was the golden ticket so they got the best education they could for themselves and their children.
To some extent, they were right. We had a much wider range of job opportunities. Class? Back then I would say aspirant lower middle class.

Also, at one point, pensions were called deferred income.

Interesting, when I think deferred income nowadays I think stock options.

HRTFT

i think this was possible for a group of people who benefitted from boom economic times, Right to Buy (council houses but then also shares in utilities), and an expanding economy. The demographics also favoured them, with about 5 or 6 working people to every retired person. By saying that I don’t mean to denigrate them at all; my parents were in this group (a teacher and an electrician).

However, for people coming up later, there have been far more economic barriers: university fees meaning they have started working life with a sizeable debt; rising house prices, very few council houses and a private rental sector that’s been skewed in the landlords’ favour; and in the last 17 or so years, stagnating wages outside of the minimum wage, rising costs for food and fuel on top of housing, and fewer than 3 working people for every retired person.

All this means that for those who are starting life without any kind of intergenerational wealth (be that help from parents to the tune of a few quid towards a deposit, or parents outright buying your first home) it’s now far more difficult to improve on your birth standard of living. For many people it’s difficult to even achieve the same standard of living as you grew up with. I mean, even a UK camping holiday now isn’t a cheap option. Local to me is a popular site where 2 nights is £77; the place I went for childhood holidays, which in the nineties was under £10 a night for a family, now costs over £50 per night.

There was an interesting piece recently about this, about the difference that being lent a deposit in 2003 would potentially have made to someone. The article compared 2 men who did the same degree course and got the same kind of job after it, the difference was one had parents who could either have him at home rent-free so he could save up, or could lend him the deposit on a house (I forget which), while the other didn’t have that option. Over the years the difference between where they both were in terms of wealth was huge. Unfortunately I can’t remember where I saw it, but I’ll have a look and if I find it will share it.

Putting those in poverty in the same box as those on 6 figure salaries whining because due to col they can no longer afford 3 holidays a year. Ok then. I guess some people really do believe we all have the same 24 hours.

I’m in a different country, Ireland, and the person on 30k would be entitled to housing assistance.

My point is that the money is distributed in a very unequal way.

Look at Tesco (again in Ireland) CEO earns 11.5 million a year
A regional manager earns 258,000 a year and the person on the checkouts earns 26k

Again we have extraordinary wealth at the top and the person on the bottom cannot fully afford to live at all.

I agree but both sets in your example are ordinary working people as far as I am concerned. The way things are now, the surgeon / barrister couple are portrayed as rich wankers who are somehow screwing a system and deserve to have more tax burden placed on them to help "ordinary" people. That's what I have an issue with. I'd like Starmer and co to be more honest about who they are talking about when they say "those with the broadest shoulders" or "ordinary working people". I'm ordinary. I'm a teacher on just over 50k after three decades of service. To some that makes me part of the problem but I'm sitting here bouncing around debt and remortgaging and hoping to God my car doesn't break anytime soon.