Beauty, as the saying goes, is in the eye of the beholder.

So is wealth.

Gov. Paul LePage set Maine’s social media networks ablaze when he uttered the “r” word – as in “rich” – during Monday’s gubernatorial debate with Democrat Mike Michaud and independent Eliot Cutler.

Responding to Michaud’s comment that “the governor made a priority to do huge tax cuts for the wealthiest 1 percent of Mainers,” LePage first giggled. Then, citing a report by USA Today, he said Mainers making less than $25,000 a year have fallen to 38th nationally when it comes to their tax burden, while those making more than $100,000 now have the fifth highest tax burden in the country.

“A hundred-thousand or greater. Those are the richest people in Maine, folks,” said LePage. “And I don’t know how many of you are making $100,000, but it’s not that rich.”

Tweeted Michaud’s campaign Tuesday morning, linking to the above quote, “RT (retweet) if you think Governor LePage is completely out of touch with working Mainers.”

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Across the political divide, Matt Gagnon, CEO of the pro-LePage Maine Heritage Policy Center, took to his Facebook page to lay out a family of four’s monthly budget on a $100,000 annual income. Posited Gagnon: After the two car payments and the $100 to feed and groom the dog, among other expenses, the family had a mere $1,488 left over at the end of the month.

“I’m not asking anyone to shed a tear for people who make that amount of money,” wrote Gagnon. “But we could stop demonizing them, and pretending that they are rolling in a money bin full of cash, when very frequently they have just as much trouble putting away savings as a single guy making $30k a year.”

Let’s discuss.

Two years ago, the Pew Research Center surveyed 2,500 Americans to measure, among other things, how people define being rich. About seven out of 10 responded that in order to be considered wealthy, a family of four would need an annual household income of at least $100,000.

Contrast that with a 2012 survey by the investment firm UBS. Asked if they considered themselves “wealthy,” a full 72 percent of those with investable assets between $1 million and $5 million answered no. And among those who had more than $5 million to invest, a full 40 percent said no, they would not view themselves as wealthy.

(Asked to define “wealthy,” 50 percent of the UBS respondents chose “no financial constraints on activities,” 16 percent said “surpassing a certain asset threshold” and 10 percent each replied “not having to work again” or “ensuring a comfortable lifestyle for next family generations.”)

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So, as the income gap between the haves and have-nots irrefutably widens in these post-recession United States, how do the rest of us define wealth?

“There’s an absolute analysis you can do, which is a data-driven version,” said Garrett Martin, executive director of the Maine Center for Economic Policy, in an interview on Tuesday. “And then there’s a psychological analysis.”

Let’s start with the data.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, 16.4 percent of Maine’s nearly 550,000 households had an income of $100,000 or more in 2013. Move up higher on the income scale and that number drops off sharply – only 6.3 percent of Maine households pulled down more than $150,000 and just 3 percent cleared $200,000.

Now let’s descend the income spectrum. Last year, the Census Bureau found, 52.7 percent of Maine households had incomes under $50,000. And of those, fully half earned less than $25,000.

Crunch all of the above and you get a Maine median household income of $46,974 in 2013 – the lowest in the 11-state Northeast region and the 17th lowest in the nation.

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Which brings us to what Martin of the Maine Center for Economic Policy calls the “psychological analysis.”

LePage’s claim that households in the state earning more than $100,000 – one out of every six – “are the richest people in Maine” is true. But his insistence that $100,000 a year is “not that rich” depends very much on whom you ask.

To be sure, many Mainers now in the $100,000-to-$150,000 range probably don’t consider themselves all that wealthy (assuming their real estate, stock holdings or other assets don’t dwarf their annual income). From where they sit, you have to be among those 3 percent who make more than $200,000 a year to truly live on Easy Street.

But drop down to that median-household income crowd, who get by on less than half of that $100,000 a year, and “rich” takes on a whole new meaning.

Back to the Pew survey, which included a section titled “Upper Class Largely Immune from Day-to-Day Economic Hardships.”

Asked if they had trouble paying their rent or mortgage in the past year, only 7 percent of those self-identifying as upper class answered yes. That response jumped to 16 percent for those in the middle class and a whopping 45 percent among the lower class.

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A similar pattern emerged when it came to paying the bills in general: It was a struggle for 13 percent in the upper class, 29 percent in the middle class and 64 percent in the lower class.

Now I’m no social scientist, but I’ll bet you a car payment that if you were to tell someone in that last category that his or her annual household income from this day forward will be $100,000, the likely response would be “I’m rich!”

Just as the response in many a Maine living room to LePage’s “not that rich” comment was something akin to, “Not rich? $100,000 a year? Come look at my pay stub, Big Guy. I’ll show you ‘not rich’!'”

Only LePage knows for sure whether he touched the income-gap – or, as his fellow Republicans like to say, the class-warfare – nerve intentionally or, like so many other things that have come out of his mouth these last four years, his brain was stuck in neutral while his tongue shifted into overdrive.

But by drawing his six-figure line in the sand on Monday, just two weeks before Mainers go to the polls to decide on whether he deserves a second term, LePage gave more than half of Maine yet another political sour ball to suck on:

If $100,000 or more a year “isn’t that rich,” then what is $46,974?


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