Peasant

Yes you. Everyone that has a job or thinks they deserve one also thinks they are in the middle class. Balderdash says Ming. You are wallowing in wishful thinking. In reality you are the working poor and getting poorer by the day.

Inflation over the last generation makes your inflated salary worth no more than your grandfather's wage from wielding a pick and shovel when he washed ashore after fleeing some foreign sink hole. The tax brackets that now apply were meant for the rich in the preinflation era. Now they ensnare you, making the widow's mite that is laughably called your compensation "package" worth even less, net of taxes, than you thought.

Education is the answer say all the pundits. Horse pucky says Ming. College will saddle you(or your parents) with debt. Then the position for which your training qualifies you will be exported to wherever people work for less. Besides, B students work for C students and A students, lacking people skills are forced to teach at the institutions from which they graduate.

What to do? Ming, as always, has the answer. Pretend you are an unwashed immigrant. Having no credentials they are forced to do something useful and are usually paid in cash. Barbers, taxi drivers, restaurateurs etc. They then fiddle their taxes, keeping all their hard earned money and in ten years own mansions, late model cars and have no debt while you are forced to buy suits so you can sit under the fluorescents shuffling someone else's paper all day.

Maybe Ming should just blame the above peroration on that bad burrito now wending it's way through his system that peristalsis seems unwilling to push along, or maybe not.