“California used to be home to America’s largest and most affluent middle class.”
Stopped reading right there.
CA is STILL home to America’s largest and most affluent middle class.
AND homeless and poor.
Once you get out of the bottom 30%, you find a home owner with a job and two cars in the driveway.
Don’t be misled by somebody with an agenda, whatever it may be.
Um... if the poverty class in CA is at 20%, or 8% above the national average, how do you figure that CA has the largest and most affluent middle class? Given those numbers, it appears that the middle class is at least 8% smaller than the national average.
Don’t they teach math or deductive reasoning in CA schools any more?
Nope. It is impossible to live as a middle class person here. Not possible. If you make what a middle class person makes in most US states, here you are struggling. You don’t go out to eat unless it’s a fast food place, and you don’t have any vacations. You sacrifice food and medicine to buy extras like sports equipment or braces or lessons. If you earn middle class income, you live a working class life. Your kids don’t have their own rooms either.
The upper middle class here live like the middle class. There are a lot of them. They don’t feel like they are poor, they take vacations, they can afford nice clothes and restaurants, but not too much and not too often. They are mortgaged and have car payments and they live the typical stressed life of middle class people elsewhere, some fun and lots of work. Their salaries would put them in the upper middle class elsewhere.
The poor and the Illegals have it better than the middle class because they get education, medicine, dental, food, all services, free. It can make a lot of resentment for the actual working middle class.