What It Takes to Be Middle Class in America 

I’ve shared studies like this before. But I found this one from SmartAsset to be particularly useful.

Take a look at these facts, for example:

* It’s much harder to be middle class in the north than the south. Particularly along the coasts. You can be middle class in Florida with an income between $50,000 and $60,000. But in New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey, it will take between $80,000 and $100,000.

* New York is the worst. The middle class there don’t earn enough to keep up with the rising cost of living. While other notoriously pricey cities have a middle-class income that trends closely with the state’s general cost of living, NYC wages lag behind. Of all cities examined, the cost of living in Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan are 43%, 70%, and 138% higher than the national average, respectively.

* Incomes that put one in the middle of the middle class are highest in the West Coast tech cities. Three out of the top five cities with the highest income thresholds for the middle class are in the San Francisco Bay Area. To earn in the middle of the middle class there, you need to be making more than a hundred grand.

* The hardest place to earn more than a middle-class income? That award would go to Fremont, California, where $300,000 isn’t enough. (The middle-class income range there tops at $311,936 per year.)

Click here to read more of the study results.

$190,000 for Doing Nothing? 

When Musk fired so many twitter employees and nothing obviously bad happened to the business afterwards, I wondered, “What were all those fired people doing?”

It turns out that unproductive employees are a feature of many big tech companies. Example: Madelyn Machado, 33 years old, was hired in 2021 by Meta for $190,000 a year to work as a recruiter. But she was told not to expect to hire anyone in her first year, given that she would still be learning the recruiting ropes.

Click here.

Reporting on this in The Free Press, Nellie Bowles wrote, “I’m convinced that every big tech company is five really sweaty guys in a basement and then gleaming, open-plan offices of people like me: delightful humanities grads who have meetings about the best protein powder for our green smoothie (pea!) and the gender implications of unread messages being bold (masculine aggression). Every once in a while, one of the five tries to leave the basement and we quickly convene a series of meetings to get him fired.”

Hunter Biden for President in 2024

It’s unfair to accuse Hunter Biden of wrongdoing, my liberal friends and family members say. It’s all fake news. It doesn’t matter that there is now proof that he received tens of millions for “consulting services” from Russia, China, and Ukraine when his father was VP.

That doesn’t prove anything, they say. And his documented history as an alcoholic and drug addict? He’s bravely gotten beyond that, they say. He’s channeled the pain into his artwork, you see. And he’s a great artist. Which is demonstrated by the high prices various undisclosed patrons pay for his work.

But here are two facts that they can’t reconcile. Joe Biden has a net worth of $9 million, which makes him about the poorest president since Jimmy Carter. But Joe’s son, this kid that barely got through college, got kicked out of the Navy, and spent a large part of his life partying with hookers? He is worth $160 million!

I wonder – do the people that rationalize this, do they have any idea how much you must make to acquire a net worth of $160 million?
One guy is so impressed with what Hunter’s achieved that he is saying that Hunter, not Joe, should be the Democrat’s nominee for president in 2024. Click here.

Mexico Has a New Industry: Renting Wombs 

There is a new – well, not quite new, but an industry in Mexico that is growing really fast. It’s in the “health care” field. They call it surrogacy. It boils down to this: affluent but childless American couples paying poor Mexican women to grow babies for them from fertilized eggs.

The eggs are not the mothers’ eggs. They are from the “adoptive” mothers. Or, in the case of gay couples or adoptive mothers that can’t produce healthy eggs, from third-party donors. What it amounts to is a sort of womb rental program.

If that sounds weird, know this: According to the source below, it’s making a lot of couples happy, and conveying millions of dollars to poverty-stricken Mexican women.

Here’s how it works.