Middle Class: Bay Area residents have to earn a lot more to reach that threshold – 2 jobs for a combined $77k income
Here’s a six-paragraph excerpt from today’s San Francisco Chronicle article by Jean Ross, The Middle-Class Equation: Bay Area residents have to earn a lot more to reach that threshold–2 jobs for a combined $77K income:
To be middle class requires
an income that is at least large enough to make ends meet without help
from public programs. You need to earn enough to pay for the basics – a
safe place to live; transportation to and from to work; child care when
parents are at work; food; health care; and taxes.Yet defining middle class can be elusive. Clearly, families need to
earn more to stand on their own in San Francisco than in Arkansas.So, in order to inform the current policy debates, the California
Budget Project – a nonprofit research group based in Sacramento -
calculated the income needed for families to buy the basic necessities.
We found that in California, and in the Bay Area in particular, the
cost of a basic family budget often exceeds the earnings of two
full-time workers earning the state’s median wage…So here’s where our
calculation ends up: A single adult in the Bay Area without job-based
health insurance needs to earn $29,633 a year to cover the basic
budget. A two-worker family must earn $77,076 a year.Put another way, in the Bay Area it now takes two parents, each
working full time for slightly more than state’s median hourly wage,
just to reach the threshold of a middle-class life. In families with
just one earner, he or she must earn far above the median wage to cover
the same budget.Households near these middle-class thresholds don’t live in
desperate poverty, and millions of lower-income families are far worse
off. Many do, however, face daily insecurity, living paycheck to
paycheck. Consumer debt statistics indicate that others make ends meet
on borrowed money.