McCain: $4.9 million a year isn't 'rich'

Ezra Klein discusses McCain's answer to the "What's rich?" question at Saturday's Saddleback Church forum:

On Saturday night, at Saddleback Church, Barack Obama and John McCain were asked what income level made someone rich (give Rick Warren his due: This was one of the campaign's more useful forum queries). Obama said $150,000, which is somewhere around the 94th percentile. John McCain said $5 million, which is about $3.4 million more per year than you need to qualify for the top 0.1 percentile.

[...] If your wife has hundreds of millions of dollars and you spend your days in the United States Senate, your bar for riches changes a bit. Nothing he said, incidentally, is wrong. $5 million is indeed rich. It's just $4,800,000 more than you'd need to be making for most Americans to see you as rich. McCain's answer is just profoundly out-of-touch. But that has consequences. Asking the world's tallest man to set cabinet heights, or the world's strongest man to decide the tension of jar lids, is going to leave you with some pretty tall cabinets and some pretty tightly closed jars. Similarly, asking one of the world's richest men to set your tax policy will end up with a pretty skewed set of policies: Say, a tax plan that gives his wife $370,000 in breaks. Again, nothing weird or malign: Just the naturally skewed perspective of someone who lives on a particular extreme, in this case, the extreme edge of the wealth distribution.