Kevin Drum suggests we add up the total taxable income of all households above $200,000 and make a chart of it. One can also aggregate the taxable income of households below $200,000 to get a bar even higher than the over-$200,000 bar.

Here is what I wrote in my last post on this subject:

To illustrate why the upper-middle-class matters in the tax debate, I recommend taking a look atthis chart, which I found via the Hoosier Pundit. It measures the amount of total taxable income for all filers by adjusted gross income level for 2008, and it shows that the total taxable income for households earning $100,000 to $250,000 — comfortably beneath the upper bound of the “middle-class” — approached $1.4 trillion.

I actually did make a mistake here — the bar I pointed to was for $100K-$200K households, not $100K-$250K. It actually should be a number higher, perhaps considerably higher, than $1.4 trillion, and I should have been more careful about that.

A number of commenters wrote in to suggest that this clause was nuts:

comfortably beneath the upper bound of the “middle-class”

Rather, they argue that this is far above a reasonable threshold for “middle-class” status. A few thoughts:

(a) I put the term middle-class in quotation marks, a strategy some writers use to suggest skepticism;

(b) the post referenced my article on the upper-middle-class, in which I wrote the following:

It is widely understood that the American middle class has fuzzy boundaries. Many relatively poor and relatively rich people identify as middle-class. In an ambitious 2008 survey, the Pew Research Center found that an extraordinary 53 percent of Americans described themselves as middle class. Yet it’s also clear that within this diverse, sprawling middle class, there are some households that are better off than others. College-educated households, for example, have largely been spared the scarring effects of unemployment and underwater mortgages. And upper-middle-income households, a group that overlaps fairly closely with the college-educated middle class, have seen fairly healthy improvements in their standard of living in recent years. …
One of the most fascinating aspects of the Obama era has been the elevation of a $250,000 annual household income to an almost mythical status. The magic number was first introduced by Hillary Clinton in 2008, when she defined $250,000 as the upper bound of the middle class. That same year, Barack Obama pledged to cut taxes on all households earning less and to raise them, ever so slightly, on those earning more. Given that 49 out of 50 households earned less than $250,000 that year, there is no question that the cutoff number chosen was politically shrewd. [Emphasis added]

I suspect that the commenters in question didn’t read the article.

(c) Why did I single out the $100K to $250K households if I think that a revised chart displaying under-$250s and over-$250s would be a reasonable choice? I address that point in the article:

One could argue that the failure of Democratic voters to accept the need for higher taxes reflects pervasive political immaturity. But that’s not quite fair. In 2008, the median household income was $52,029. This number masks the fact that there is a rising number of single-person households, but it does give a crude indication of how a large number of American households are faring. During the 2008 election, 37 percent of voters lived in households earning less than the median. An additional 36 percent lived in households earning between $50,000 and $100,000. It is easy to accept the argument that these voters, many of them young and upwardly mobile but buffeted by rapid economic change, should be insulated from tax increases. These voters aren’t the problem. But if one believes, as the president emphatically believes, that we need to dramatically expand the scope of government, it makes far less sense to argue that households earning between $100,000 and $250,000 should be completely exempt from tax increases. [Emphasis added]

That is, I think the case for insulating under-$100,000s is rock-solid while the case for exempting $100L-$250K is much weaker.

I’m grateful to Kevin Drum for his redrawn chart. He is what I call a value-added blogger.