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By his own definition, Graham Platner is not working class. Although the Democratic candidate for US Senate from Maine is almost universally identified in news stories as an oyster farmer, he recently told an interviewer: “My definition of working class these days is essentially anybody who makes money from wages. If you work for a living and you go out and put in hours and you pay taxes just like everyone else, I think that’s quite fair.”
Most of his income comes from a veterans disability benefit, not earned income. So as Platner defines it, a first-year analyst at Goldman Sachs is working class, but he is not.
Platner can be forgiven for his confusion, because what America means by “working class” is constantly changing. Now its meaning is being scrambled by an economy that is upending both work itself and how we are paid for it.
Continue reading the entire piece here at Bloomberg Opinion (paywall)
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Allison Schrager is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.