Item from the newspaper today (the source is supposedly the Congressional Budget Office):
In a recent poll, 19 percent of Americans thought they were in the richest 1 percent…
If your household income is about …
What does it mean to be poor? To be rich? To be middle-class? Mark and I have joked that in America, everyone believes himself to be middle-class, but apparently at least 19 percent of us either don’t believe that or have some serious cognitive dissonance.
You could start with a given middle class and define "poor" as what’s below that and "rich" as what’s above. So who’s middle class—the folks clustered around the median? $51,000 per year is not precisely the median—it’s the mean income of the 20 percent in the middle—but it will do for an approximation. But getting definitions of "rich" and "poor" from that is arbitrary. It all depends where you draw the dividing line that marks the bounds of the middle class.
Instead, you could start with given populations of "poor" and "rich" and define the middle class as whoever is richer than the poor and poorer than the rich. But, again, there is no inherent way to draw the line. Try it. "If you can’t meet your basic needs, you’re poor." Good concept, but who defines what needs are "basic?" This too is arbitrary.
Our pastor said something surprising in today’s Sunday homily. I’ll paraphrase:
"Sometimes the rich have figured out that money can’t make them happy. They’ve tasted it, they’ve experienced it. It’s the middle class who believe that a new car will make them happy. It’s the middle-class ethic that is always grasping for more stuff."
I call that surprising because I’m used to the rich receiving warnings from the pulpit, as if it is pre-supposed that the rich do not know, or are tempted to ignore, that money can’t buy happiness; as if it is pre-supposed that the non-rich understand this better than the rich do. Jesus seemed to think so, at least in the words that come to mind soonest:
"Amen, I say to you, it will be hard for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of God." (Mt 19:23-24)
If "rich" means "satisfied, not grasping for more" then it doesn’t match too well with what Jesus said. It seems that it would be harder to enter the kingdom of heaven if one was fixated on getting more material things.
What about the poor? The temptation is to think that Jesus included "Blessed are the poor" in the Beatitudes, but it was, of course, poor in spirit (see Mt 5). Theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
If some are poor in spirit, are others (less blessed) "rich in spirit?" Is there a middle class in this scheme? Is the "one who is rich" in Jesus’s camel in opposition to the economically poor, or to the poor "in spirit?" The young rich man who prompted Jesus to say this was told by him to sell what he has and give to the poor. Would that make him "poor in spirit?"
Some information about what the words "poor" and "rich" actually meant to Jesus and his contemporary fellow-men would be useful here.
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