Published on Wednesday, August 3, 2005 by the Providence Journal (Rhode Island)
The Comfortable Life
by Paul Campos
The good people at Forbes.com have just produced an estimate of how much money an American family of four needs to live a "comfortably affluent" lifestyle.
The authors of this story emphasize they're not addressing the needs of the truly rich, who can't get through life without necessities such as hundred-acre manors, private jets, exclusive vacation retreats scattered around the world and so forth.
Forbes says it is merely trying to determine what's required these days for what it characterizes as a comfortable "upper-middle-class" lifestyle.
This lifestyle is assumed to include, among other things, a spacious home, a vacation residence, two late-model luxury cars, private schools for both children and eating out at a fancy restaurant once a week.Naturally, the price of comfort was found to vary a great deal depending on where our model upper-middle-class family lived. Furthermore, Forbes omitted all federal taxes from its calculations, perhaps because it wanted to tantalize readers with glimpses of the great wealth the magazine's supply-side gurus assure us would be generated if tax rates were cut to zero
Damn, who makes this kind of money? http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0803-20.htm
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