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| "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." |
The relevant passage is here:
Poverty is expressed as an income level. Most economists break down income in America to five brackets, called quintiles, and people move in and out of these. The top quintile, I think, is like a million plus, and that'd be the top 1% of 1%. I forgot what the breakdown is, but the poverty level, it's roughly, what, $14,000 for a family of four? It's around there. People move in and out of these all the time.
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This is rich.
A quintile in this instance is one of any of the five groups of American households divided into those five groups based on how much money they make.
By definition, then, the top quintile is the richest 20% of households in America. So it's impossible for the top quintile to be "the top 1%", let alone "the top 1% of 1%".
As embarrassing as that is, Rush has absolutely no concept what it means to reach the top 20% of household income in this country.
The fact is it doesn't take all that much, and certainly nothing close to $1 million, hard as it may be to get there.
Currently the point in the middle of the top 20% of households by income is only about $181,905 per annum. That means about half the people in the top quintile make more than that, and about half make less. And interestingly enough, the middle of the richest 5% of households in this country isn't anywhere close to $1 million, either. The average household income of the top 5% is just $318,052. (For a good presentation of the data, see here.)
And Rush is equally out of touch about what it means to be poor. The federal definition for a family of four is about $23,500, not $14,000. The latter is about what it means for just one person to be poor, not four (see here).
Rush Limbaugh complains constantly about the sorry state of public education in this country. He even did so today in the same segment:
[L]ook at [President] Johnson's solutions. Education, job training, medical care, housing. That hasn't changed. The same weapons, the same language, the same way they tug at heartstrings. It's 1964, and they keep using the same lingo, obviously because it works. But look at how our education system's been since 1964 with them in charge.
Yep. Look at how it's been.
Rush is Exhibit A . . . the most popular radio host ever for a reason.
