Does McCain Really Need Another Mansion? Giving Him White House Is One Too Many

By Jared Bernstein, Huffington Post. Posted August 27, 2008.

So McCain is rich. Or, his wife is rich, and that makes him rich too. Wasn't there some movie where Dudley Moore was engaged to a women with megabucks, and he kept getting drunk and introducing her to people as my 'financier' (instead of fiance)?

For all the ink spilled over this last week, two related issues were under-explored, the latter of which is especially important: what's 'rich,' and why does it matter? What does McCain's wealth, and the way he talks about it, reveal about his ability to be a successful president?

On the first point -- what means 'rich'? -- there's no simple answer, no line in the economic sand that divides the rich from the rest. I'll get to the income data in a second, but they're only of marginal help here.

For one, there's tremendous geographical variation. If your family income is $100,000 in a rural area of a low-income state, you're well off. That income in Manhattan arguably puts you in the middle-class.

This example also suggests that there's a relative component to "rich." To be rich means you breath the rarified air in the upper reaches of the income scale. In a series of recent revealing remarks, McCain said he thought an income of $5 million made you rich. There's no doubt that's true, but if that's your income cutoff, almost nobody's rich.

The often-cited work of income analysts Piketty and Saez (see Table 0) reveals that admission to the top 1% of the income scale will run you a cool $375,000. Too many common folk there for your taste? Then you'll need about $600K to move up to the top half of the top 1% (i.e., the top 0.5%).

What's that? You want to roll with some serious money? It'll cost you $2 million to break into the top 0.1% (the top tenth of the top percent), and $10.5 million for the top 0.01% -- the top one-hundredth of the top one percent, average income: $30 million.

So yes, Cindy's $100 million in wealth, inherited from her family business, puts the McCain family solidly up there in the narrowest sliver of the richest of the rich. But numbers like these only give you an upper bound. Certainly, there are more rich people in America than those who reside in the 15,000 households of the top 0.01%.

My research on income class has led me to take a less quantitative approach to the question of who's middle class, rich, poor, etc. I think it has much to do with your choices and your access to opportunities.

Rich people's choices are generally not constrained by lack of income (boy, that sounds really obvious, but read on). Years ago when I worked with poor clients in New York City, I remember someone telling me they thought about cost before making a long-distance phone call.

Move up the "choices chain" and you get the picture. Middle class people tend not to think twice about a phone call, but a baby sitter, dinner, and a movie, is not a slam dunk right now, what with prices up and incomes down. And speaking of the price of transportation, vacations don't become "stay-cations" for rich people. Their choice set isn't constrained that way.

These choices may sound kind of trivial, but of course, there are real life-changing opportunities at stake here. One of my favorite -- well, least favorite, really -- factoids to make this point has to do with access to higher education. Once you control for cognitive ability, high-testing, low-income kids have the same (low) college completion rates as low-testing high-income kids. We do not, my fellow HuffPosters, reside in a meritocracy.

(If I may shamelessly tout my own work with colleagues at EPI, please read our forthcoming chapter on income mobility from the new State of Working America, out Labor Day -- though I'll see if I can get the mobility chapter posted here ASAP. It's a tour through this critical question of how challenging it is for people to get ahead given the mobility barriers they face these days. To us, this strikes at the heart of a basic American economic value. We may not believe in equal outcomes in this country, but we sure believe in equal opportunities. And the data on inequality and mobility suggest this basic value is under siege.)

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Jared Bernstein is a senior economist and director of the Living Standards Program at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington D.C.