In this 1995 episode of The Simpsons, Homer walks with Marge through downtown Springfield
and says
Careful now.
These are dangerous streets for us upper-lower-middle-class types
This is Homer’s first admission to being "middle-class"
For the rest of us, this always seemed obvious.
He lives in a modest home in the suburbs with his wife and three children.
He’s not a college graduate and his job appears to require a minimal amount of technical
training.
This is all confirmed when we get a tight shot of his paycheck in season 7.
Hey, how come my pay is so low?
According to this stub, Homer receives a pre-tax, weekly pay of $479.60 works out to $11.99
an hour.
So, he’s looking at an annual salary of $24,395.
Adjusted for inflation, that’s $37,416 per year.
What?
This is an outrage!
There are a lot of fans who think the show is based on the real life town of Springfield,
Oregon.
And if we look at Homer's salary there it places him pretty comfortably in the lower
middle class income bracket.
Of course, this is all based on one job as a safety inspector at the Springfield Nuclear
Power Plant.
But Homer has had over 191 jobs in 27 seasons and they’ve placed him across the entire
economic spectrum.
You know, I've had a lot of jobs.
Boxer, mascot, astronaut, imitation Krusty, baby proofer, trucker, hippie, plow driver,
food critic, conceptual artist, grease salesman, carnie, mayor, grifter, bodyguard for the
mayor, garbage commissioner, mountain climber, farmer, inventor, Smithers, Poochie, celebrity
assistant, power plant worker, fortune cookie writer, beer baron, Kwik-E Mart clerk, homophobe
and missionary.
But protecting Springfield, that gives me the best feeling of all.
Some of these jobs were literally impossible to determine salaries for — like “beer
smuggler,” or “the grim reaper.”
There were also some seasonal jobs (“mall santa”), and those had to be excluded.
In the end, I narrowed Homer’s resume down to 100 jobs, then looked up the average salary
for each one.
Here’s what we found.
Three of Homer’s 10 highest-paying jobs have been at the power plant.
In season 13, he tried his hand as the plant’s executive VP before momentarily taking over
Mr. Burns’s post as CEO the following season.
Dad please you're the head of a major corporation.
You're right.
Three years later, he served as the facility’s manager.
Dohhhhhhhhh.
Uhhhmmmm.
Uhhhh.
Duhhhhhhh.
Around half of Homer’s jobs place him in the middle class.
And his least lucrative jobs were pretty odd.
He was a mascot, a carny, moonshine taste tester, a cannonball performance artist, and
a walking billboard.
What are those doing there?!
Earning us a hundred bucks a week that's what.
I plotted out Homer’s hypothetical job salaries in a linear order, by episode number.
And over the course of 597 episodes — from 1989 to 2016 — it’s clear that he hasn’t
really ascended economically.
Estelle: Despite a few successes here and there, he has stagnated and that makes him
just like the actual American middle class.
Until the 1970s, the income of the average American family grew alongside national economic
productivity.
Since then, wages have stagnated, and have failed to keep up with inflation.
Economists refer to this as the ‘middle-class squeeze’.
Homer’s median income has never surpassed the median income in the United States.
Despite brief forays into the 1 percent, Homer remains a paradigm of middle-class America:
Three decades later, he’s right where he started.