Yes it is. Middle income is a range of wages. $40 grand is on the lower end but it's there.
https://money.usnews.com/money/pers...-i-fall-in-the-american-economic-class-system
A couple things: that data was from the first half of 2023, so it's a little outdated now (not a lot, but a little). The current BLS data covers all of 2023.
But also, its definition of lower/middle/upper income is based on Pew's definition that defines "middle" as being between 2/3 and 2x the median. That's not an unreasonable guideline, but it is a bit arbitrary and it doesn't account for the way incomes are distributed above or below the median, which can matter if you're talking about a number on the cusp of a threshold, like we are.
Say you have 9 people, and their wages are $1/hr, $2/hr, $3/hr, etc up through $9/hr. The median is $5/hr.
But if you have four people making $1/hr, four making $9/hr, and one making $5/hr, then the median is still $5/hr.
What constitutes "middle income" for both of those groups is quite different, even though the median is the same.
Here's the BLS wage data broken down by quartile and top/bottom decile:
www.bls.gov
$20/hr or $800/wk puts you just over the top of the first quartile, by $8/wk. So probably 26th percentile. According to Pew, you're still in the "middle" if 3/4 of workers make more than you. Granted, this is subjective, but I think Pew's definition of "middle" is too broad. The lower bound of their definition extends down into the first quartile and the upper bound extends well into the fourth quartile. Using the current median of $1170/wk, their "middle" covers $780/wk - $2340/wk, or $40,560/yr - $121,680. Does that look right to you? That doesn't look right to me. Do you consider $40k/yr to be as "middle" as $120k/yr? Because that's how Pew's range defines it.
I noticed you didn't answer how easy you thought it should be. And don't really know what you want to happen. How easy should it be for someone to earn middle income wages? Cause you complained that $40 grand isn't enough. Yet it's middle income wages. What exactly do you think is enough and how do propose to get there?
I didn't answer because it's a hard question with multiple answers.
I think minimum wages should be raised and I think education and other support services need massive investments. I think efforts should be made to increase worker mobility, like severing the link between employment and health insurance, requiring every job posting to list a reasonable (and accurate) wage range. I think some requirements should be instituted to give workers more regular, predictable, and consolidated schedules so that if they want to work multiple jobs, they have the availability to do so (e.g. first shift at one job, second shift at another). Non-competes should be outlawed everywhere except in very specific circumstances for very high-level workers. Union power should be strengthened (which I concede doesn't increase worker mobility, but makes it up in other areas). There are ways to get more money into workers' pockets without handing them a fistful of cash.
On a much larger and longer scale, I think there should be efforts made to make our population less diffuse - not because I have anything wrong with rural living (on the contrary, I think it has many appeals), but because it's clear that isolation and low density is expensive and leads to problems over time. This congregating of people could result from many efforts such as subsidized relocation, increased immigration, and zoning and other legislative changes. But we have a lot of small towns that are slowly dying but are too big to become ghost towns but too small and remote to attract enough people to thrive.
As dumb as I think Trump's future megacity plan is, I think some of the concepts embedded within it have merit. I think civic planners will have to be more deliberate and involved in choosing where to allow certain industry to set up so they can construct dense cities with diverse economic bases instead of letting everything sprawl and/or set up around a single employer.
