2021 is determined to deprive us of nice things, so some tired click bait has been making the rounds again: claiming that a $400k income somehow qualifies as middle class in some coastal cities.
I don't have to link to this junk, right? No, I don't. We won't. We don't have to give wealthy misanthropes the attention they thirst for.
Still, anytime that popular media goes off the rails with definitions of the middle class, it's a good time to center our understanding on what people actually earn in this country. As always, I'm using my favorite, easy to understand method: income quintiles.