Why some rich families in US feel so middle class?

Back in 1972, New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael was incorrectly quoted as saying she couldn’t understand how Richard Nixon had won a 49-state landslide since she didn’t know anyone who’d voted for him. The anecdote is often trotted out as an example of liberal snobbery and indifference to “ordinary” Americans. Kael’s actual quote was more self-aware: “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”
Nevertheless, the debate over President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan certainly appears to have exposed a pronounced cluelessness among some urban elites. As Congress haggled for weeks over who exactly should be eligible for assistance, some high-earning households argued that they, too, should qualify as “middle class” and receive full stimulus checks.
In its initial version of the bill, the House of Representatives proposed to send $1,400 stimulus checks to individuals earning up to $100,000 annually and households making up to $200,000. The Senate lowered those thresholds to around $80,000 and $160,000, respectively. That led to pushback: On social media many people, presumably living in households cut off by the lower limits, were aghast that they might not be as firmly entrenched in the middle class as they believed.
Such confusion is understandable. According to the US Census Bureau’s 2019 American Community Survey, more than two-thirds of all US households (68.6%) earn less than $100,000 a year. Those who make between $100,000-$149,999 annually account for another 15.7%, while those earning $150,000-$199,999 comprise 7.2% of households. Only 8.5% bring home more than $200,000 annually.
In other words, fewer than 16% of US households earn more than $150,000 per year. That would certainly seem to put those families in the country’s elite.
Still, it’s easy to see why some of them might not feel terribly rich. Given widely varying costs of living, one city’s middle class is another’s affluent class. In the New York metro area, 42.9% of all households earn more than $100,000 a year, with nearly one in six (16.1%) earning more than $200,000 a year. In the Washington, DC metro area, more than half (53%) of all households earn more than $100,000 a year, while 20.3% earn at least $200,000 annually.
Contrast those figures with, say, Indianapolis. There, less than 30% of households make more than $100,000 a year and only 7.2% make more than $200,000 a year, putting the city slightly behind the national average. The same goes for St Louis, which comes in at 31.1% and 7.5%, respectively. If Indianapolis and St Louis are “middle-class” metros, then New York and Washington, DC would be “upper-middle class” metros.
—Bloomberg