...to not tax households making under $250,000.

But her claim that $250k is middle class is pretty darned funny.

At $250,001, you have hit the low end of Upper Class.

The break has to come somewhere. That's pretty much where it gets placed.

to remove the max cap on Social Security, Hillary said she did not want to raise taxes on the middle class ergo the $250,000. Many commented on Hillary claiming $250,000 wasn't middle class and now it is the normal.

Why not $200,000 or $150,000?

Also, what's with the snoring icon in your reply? What does that mean?

$250,000." My point is Bernie didn't make the claim that earning $250,000 puts one in the middle class, Hillary did. Your

Well, that doesn't bode well for the future of this particular conversation. Which is too bad, because we've had plenty of productive interactions before.

However, in the off chance you actually want to know my opinion, I think the reason Obama AND Clinton AND Sanders use $250,000 is that they wanted a threshold above which you can be absolutely sure that everyone above that is upper class.

In San Francisco, for example, the median home price just crossed $1 million. In a city like that, households that make $250,000 make a decent living, but they still have to rent and don't have the comfort that people who make quite a bit less do in other cities.

Ballpark median household income seems to be $83,222 in 2014, compared with $53,657 nationally.

http://www.deptofnumbers.com/income/california/san-francisco/

Now, to me, $250,000 seems like a lot of money, and I think households making (say) $200,000, which is about the 80th percentile in SF, could afford to pay more. But I'm just trying to provide an explanation as to why Obama, Clinton, and Sanders seem to have settled on $250,000 as their cutoff.

because that has been the traditional taxable cut off for decades. Introducing $425K or some such amount would be out of left field, and unworkable in the Congress.

Taxably dragging the upper-middle class who are hardly above $250K up to those making tens of millions, that is the real travesty.

The uber-rich get by by claiming that $275K/yr and $27 million per year ought to be taxed the same.

The tax code doesn't scale higher, nor do Social Security cutoffs. The uber-rich get a pass in both cases.

Cross a certain income threshhold and live it up - at the expense of ....

around today's cap then resume at around 200K was Barack Obama in 2008 and it was one of the issues that decided my vote for him. Hillary opposed the idea. Obama never pursued it, never mentioned it again. He also had the idea of just not taking income tax from Social Security beneficiaries making under 50K. Great idea.