[andyt]

You said 50% of people earn less than 29,700. Ie 50% earn more. That is exactly the definition of median, the amount where 50% earn less, 50% more.

You're haven't given a fig for low income cutoff - surely not 29700, ie 50% Seems to me if you use the term middle, low and high, you'd assign 1/3 of the earners to each category.

[OnTheIce]

bootlegga bootlegga:

You sure about those numbers? That's $36 billion and IIRC, they only ran surpluses of 5 or 6 billion per year after they cut the GST. But if they actually did cut it by that much, how much have they racked up since then?

Very sure.

2009 Recession. Stimulus. Not a result of poor planning and such, we had to take those measures. Supported by all parties. In fact, your Liberals wants to push us further into debt as we weren't doing enough.

bootlegga bootlegga:

I thought the federal debt is now about $600 billion, which is far worse than the Liberals adding $22 billion after 13 years in government.

Ignoring, of course, that the Chretien Liberals didn't face a Global recession. In fact, they enjoyed some of the best economic times this country has ever seen.

[Winnipegger]

andyt andyt:

You said 50% of people earn less than 29,700. Ie 50% earn more. That is exactly the definition of median, the amount where 50% earn less, 50% more.

I didn't say anything about 50%. You did.

andyt andyt:

You're haven't given a fig for low income cutoff - surely not 29700, ie 50% Seems to me if you use the term middle, low and high, you'd assign 1/3 of the earners to each category.

I did give a figure for low income cut-off:

Winnipegger Winnipegger:

Statistics Canada: Low income cut-offs before and after tax by community and family size, 2011 constant dollars

$1:

Community size: Population 500,000 and over - Low income cut-offs before tax: $23,298

That last quote is pulled from a table.

This makes middle class, for cities with population over half a million, to be: $23,298 to $80,400. That is total family income, so for married couples that's the total of both incomes.

Of course the $80,400 figure comes from the CBC table. That story was published in September. The Statistics Canada web page from December said $84,100. Again, I'm using the low income cut-off as the lower bound for "middle class", and the cut-off for the upper 10% as the upper bound. "Median" is just half way between whatever bounds you choose. Considering the top 0.01% of income earners have such ridiculously high income, any calculation of "median" would be badly skewed. "Mean" means average; that would be calculated by adding up declared income for everyone who submitted an income tax return, and dividing the sum by the number of returns. Any plot of income will be a bell curve. The vast majority will be in the middle. I think using the low income cut-off as the lower bound is reasonable. What would you use as the upper bound? Top 10%, 5%, 1%?

[andyt]

median is not halfway between whatever bounds you choose. That would be average ((minimum + maximum)/2) Median is where 50% of people make more, 50% make less. Your quote referred to 50% of people making less than 29700 - that figure is the median and doesn't jibe with where they say its 30,... for the same year.

Lico depends on family size. For a large city with 4 family members the Lico is more around 30K

My contention is that saying below 10% of top income earners is middle class is to broad a category. As I say, really it should be 1/3 of people in each category, but ZI could see using quintiles (20%) and assigning the middle 3 to middle class.