OK, every time I see a comment about income on the internet, I have to assume that the person commenting has zero IQ if they mention nothing about COL.

The same happens when someone mentions something about the Average income as opposed to the median income. The average income is meaningless if the top 1% keep going up while the rest of the system stays the same. The average would look like people are earning more money when they're not.

Same thing with Market economics and the price of items. If I got a choice to sell a boner pill for $1 to a million people and $1 million to one person, those are equal value propositions. So whenever a corporation raises prices, they don't care how many customers they cut off as long as the remaining ones are whales. That's particularly sharp with all the AI costs being shoved into the pipe.

So, that is to say, you really shouldn't just produce a single number about anything and treat it as some benchmark across the world.

Technically even an income of 50k is really high for a person that just needs to pay property taxes and food (house is paid off for example). And if they live in Missouri, they are probably reaching "upper middle" especially if they already have savings.