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Originally Posted by UNDERBYTE
A little digging shows that the UK's median household income is 21,700 pounds/year. (I picked this up from a secondary source, a Guardian article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/s...051551,00.html.
The PPP for various nations is available at the IMF. The PPP rates I used were linked from the wikipedia article here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity . The UK's PPP rate is shown as 0.685.
This means that the UK has a PPP median household income of $31,700, compared to a US median household income of $43,500 (in 2003, http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/incom...statemhi.html).
That means the US median household income is about 35%-40% greater than that of the UK. By most accounts the UK is the wealthiest of the major European countries, so comparisions to other European nations are likely to be even less flattering.
So at 31,700 USD median household income(middle class) your hiring maids and nanny's for the kid's, plus send their kids through private school, paying a mortgage etc. seems unlikely to me.
As an equalizer many poor in the US can get daycare subsidzed ($10 to 15K annually per child in my state) Plus many options for collage for the poor - scholarlships etc.
middle class generally pays their own way.
Vacations , well that's a national choice or preference
Do not take this personal I love the UK - |
yes that's what i meant by your use of "middle class" being different to ours - there is no way that someone on
UK median income would be described as "middle class" here...
(that is about what an average University graduate earns
as a starting salary..)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/3890313.stm
if you look at that guardian article - i fixed the link btw. - you'll see that it also says that Median household income for
skilled manual and non-manual workers is about £27,000 before tax - these are people who would be described as (skilled) "working class" in the UK.....
the "middle class" benchmark is more the example it gives as "galaxy man", in the top 20% of the income distribution.... at a family income of £60k *- so $87,600...
and don't forget that he has no need to shell out on health insurance here (he may well do, or get it from work, but it's cheaper because of the NHS as a backup for extremes and because drugs/costs/wages in healthcare are lower than the states...), and he can send his kids to oxford/cambridge for a fraction of the cost of harvard/yale etc.
*£60k is about what 2 (reasonably experienced but unpromoted) teachers earn in england/wales (london would be higher, as is scotland where they pay teachers more) - and is low compared to private sector/professional wages - so i guess then equates to a 1.5 earner couple maybe. one-earner couples are rare here, at least in the south, except at the extremes of the income range...
a measure of just how bizarre the UKs welfare setup has become under the Bliar junta is that it is quite possible for a family on this level of income to recieve state help towards childcare/a nanny....
