Hopefully, you've all read George Packer's article on the concerns and struggles of Ohio's undecided voters by now. If you haven't, do that and come back. If you have, I want to highlight this piece:
The problem is, elites have an availability bias. They know a lot of folks who make over $100,000. Charlie Gibson wasn't being malign when he named $200,000 as an average income -- he was being unreflective. But because of that, the elite class reacts harshly if a presidential candidate proposes to raise taxes on folks making, say, over $100,000 a year, even though that's a tiny minority of the country. It's a tiny minority of the country that includes a whole lot of journalists, television pundits, think tank workers, political operatives, etc. These are people who influence public opinion and, incidentally, this is the knowledge worker class that donates a lot of money to progressives, and so politicians shy away from touching their taxes.But more downscale folks have an availability bias too. Just as $100,000 is conceivably insufficient to Charlie Gibson, $250,000 is inconceivably luxurious to Barbie Snodgrass. She lives in Columbus, Ohio, where the median income is $37,897. People live near folks with similar incomes. The rich aren't randomly sprinkled across the country. Rather, a lot of them live near Charlie Gibson, and none of them live near Barbie Snodgrass. $100,000 will look common to someone living in Georgetown, but quite rare to someone living an a hollowed out community in the Rust Belt. And the difference in cost of living between the two places will further magnify the impact: $100,00 doesn't ensure a sumptuous existence in Georgetown, but it's all you'd need in Columbus. And so when politicians dance around the stage swearing that they'll never touch a family that makes even $150,000 a year, their populism rings untrue. Because it is untrue. To most of the country, no one makes $100,000 a year. It's five percent of the nation. And not a five percent they run into very often. But it's a five percent that pundits live amongst, that reporters live amongst, and that politicians live amongst, and all of those folks agree that it's not very much money at all, and so folks in the rest of the country rightly conclude that the political class is oriented towards itself and has no real understanding of how the rest of America lives or what they need.
She remained uninspired by Barack Obama. His Convention speech had gone into detail about his policy proposals on matters like the economy and health care, which seemed tailored to attract a voter like Snodgrass, but they filled her with suspicion. His promise to rescind the Bush tax cuts for wealthier Americans struck her as incredible: “How many people do you know who make two hundred and fifty thousand dollars? What is that, five per cent of the United States? That’s a joke! If he starts at a hundred thousand, I might listen. Two hundred fifty—that’s to me like people who hit the lottery.” In fact, only two per cent of Americans make more than a quarter of a million dollars a year, but that group earns twelve per cent of the national income. Nonetheless, the circumstances of Snodgrass’s life made it impossible for her to imagine that there could possibly be enough taxable money in Obama’s upper-income category—which meant that he was being dishonest, and that she would eventually be the one to pay. “He’ll keep going down, and when it’s to people who make forty-five or fifty thousand it’s going to hit me,” she said. “I’d have to sell my home and live in a five-hundred-dollar-a-month apartment with gang bangers out in my yard, and I’d be scared to death to leave my house.”She's absolutely right. Not just about the substance of Obama's tax plan, but about the reality of making $250,000 a year. Charlie Gibson might have called $200,000 "the middle class," but in fact it's within the top three percent. As a percentage of the country, very few folks make over $100,000. The following graph shows where each income bracket begins, and where those numbers are in comparison to an income of $250,000.
The problem is, elites have an availability bias. They know a lot of folks who make over $100,000. Charlie Gibson wasn't being malign when he named $200,000 as an average income -- he was being unreflective. But because of that, the elite class reacts harshly if a presidential candidate proposes to raise taxes on folks making, say, over $100,000 a year, even though that's a tiny minority of the country. It's a tiny minority of the country that includes a whole lot of journalists, television pundits, think tank workers, political operatives, etc. These are people who influence public opinion and, incidentally, this is the knowledge worker class that donates a lot of money to progressives, and so politicians shy away from touching their taxes.But more downscale folks have an availability bias too. Just as $100,000 is conceivably insufficient to Charlie Gibson, $250,000 is inconceivably luxurious to Barbie Snodgrass. She lives in Columbus, Ohio, where the median income is $37,897. People live near folks with similar incomes. The rich aren't randomly sprinkled across the country. Rather, a lot of them live near Charlie Gibson, and none of them live near Barbie Snodgrass. $100,000 will look common to someone living in Georgetown, but quite rare to someone living an a hollowed out community in the Rust Belt. And the difference in cost of living between the two places will further magnify the impact: $100,00 doesn't ensure a sumptuous existence in Georgetown, but it's all you'd need in Columbus. And so when politicians dance around the stage swearing that they'll never touch a family that makes even $150,000 a year, their populism rings untrue. Because it is untrue. To most of the country, no one makes $100,000 a year. It's five percent of the nation. And not a five percent they run into very often. But it's a five percent that pundits live amongst, that reporters live amongst, and that politicians live amongst, and all of those folks agree that it's not very much money at all, and so folks in the rest of the country rightly conclude that the political class is oriented towards itself and has no real understanding of how the rest of America lives or what they need. 
