America Is the Place To Be, Part 2

Earlier today I posted a chart showing average household income in the US vs. other developed countries. Several people understandably wanted to see this chart with median incomes instead of means, since high income inequality can artificially increase means even if middle-class families are struggling.

Unfortunately, a reliable measure of median incomes that’s consistent between countries is hard to come by. Here are a couple that I could find. The first one is from Pew Research:

According to Pew, median household income in America is 34 percent higher than the Netherlands; 36 percent higher than Germany; 38 percent higher than France; 49 percent higher than the UK; and 71 percent higher than Italy.

However, this is disposable income, which means income after taxes. This makes other countries look poorer since they have higher tax rates, but the flip side—that households get plenty of services in return for all those taxes—doesn’t get counted. This makes it a difficult metric to use. Here’s another one, based on survey data from Gallup:

According to Gallup, median household income in America is 13 percent higher than the Netherlands; 31 percent higher than Germany; 38 percent higher than the UK; and 40 percent higher than France.

However, this survey pegs the median household income in the US at $43,000 in 2010, which is far lower than Census Bureau figure (about $50,000). So how accurate is it? It’s hard to say.

So it’s tricky. At the same time, even if the absolute numbers vary quite a bit, there’s fairly broad agreement about how countries compare to each other. If you average the three different measures (OECD, Gallup, and Pew), middle-class household income in the US is higher than every other comparable country:

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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