Pour One Out For The Middle Class Millionaires

Comic Dave Smith’s newest knee-slapping bit is the middle class millionaire.

Smith, who is unintentionally hilarious despite never seeming to actually perform comedy, told someone called Jack Neel that young men just can’t get by in the economy these days, and that leads to political extremism. He was making some decent points, until he got to this one:

“You do have this kind of stratification between the rich and the poor, with the middle class evaporating more and more,” Smith pontificated. “When it becomes a thing where like, you gotta kinda make a million dollars a year to live kind of a middle class lifestyle, what does that mean? It just means the middle class is just shrinking more and more and more, and all these people who used to be middle class are now something below that.”

Let’s eat this elephant one bite at a time, starting with the most absurd. There is nowhere in America where someone needs to make $1,000,000 a year to live a middle class lifestyle. Even in the most expensive places to live in the country, Manhattan and San Francisco, one is surely quite alright on that level of salary. To use the most commonly cited issue (and one Dave mentioned), housing, the average ratio of new home prices to median income in America right now is around 5x. Even in New York or the Bay Area, that means a million-dollar income will get you more than enough house if you aren’t stupid with your money.

Now for the broader claim being made here about America’s middle class. It is simply factually untrue that Americans are falling out of the middle class. In fact, the opposite is the case. Using 2025 inflation-adjusted dollars, the percentage of American families who make less than $75,000 per year has cratered from nearly two-thirds in 1967 to just one-third in 2025. About the same number of families make between $75,000 and $150,000, and the share making more than that has skyrocketed from 5% to 35%. For reference, the median household income is around $87,000.

To put it in more blunt terms, when it comes to income, more Americans have moved above the middle of the pack than fallen behind it in recent decades, by any available data.

It’s true that in many ways, a dollar doesn’t go nearly as far as it used to. While Americans are earning more than ever before, and the upper middle class is growing, there are certain staples of middle class life that have become unattainable on a median income: housing prices have skyrocketed due to restrained supply, college degrees now cost an arm and a kidney even if you stay in state or have some financial aid, and healthcare costs are literally bankrupting Americans. We also get nickel-and-dimed in tons of new ways, from streaming subscriptions to ticket fees.

But Americans have access to bigger and better homes, more advanced technology, better medical care, and more knowledge than any people in history, so the trade-off hasn’t been all bad.

That takes us to the real conclusion to be drawn from Dave’s ramblings. Perhaps he’s woefully out of touch given that he podcasts for a living and is certainly well-compensated for it. But he’s ultimately engaged in a demoralization op.

There is an entire cadre of talking heads and bloviators who want you to believe everything has gone to sh*t. Everything sucks now, America is over, there’s no way out. You should hate the opposite sex, you’ll be poor forever, you’re going to die for Israel in a stupid war, etc.

Outlandish claims about needing a million-dollar salary just to get by are a textbook piece of that op. They are designed to make success feel so far away that one might as well give up. The goal is to get people to not even try, because the system is rigged and there’s no hope to do anything about it. Smith’s claims are not only stupid, but insidious too.

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