Some good input, but no closer to a tight definition.

Most retirees not completely dependent on the government are living off of capital, but I'll let that go.

But maybe one needs to be a Democrat to understand, truly know, what a "working person" is.

Now there's an interesting and somewhat odd premise, although dangerously close to ducking the subject by claiming that "I wouldn't understand."

Almost every Democratic politician in Washington is rich by any definition of the word, yet obviously they act like they have a clear idea of what a "working person" is since they use the phrase about every five minutes.

I'm sure it can't just a buzzword specifically designed to create a solid impression of class warfare in the mind of the listener while containing no real definable meaning at all. Can it?

remember, capital without labor is as worthless as labor without capital - except that one can eat the fruits of their labor, and there are very few calories in a dollar bill if you can't spend it

I'm not sure about your statement. If I was given a choice of a hundred skilled workers, or an automobile factory and a bucket of cash, I would take the factory. I can get labor almost anywhere with cash, although I would have to train them. Obviously, trained workers are much better, so I am not stipulating that the labor end is worthless.

But how do workers get themselves a factory without capital? Capital is not just money. A factory is the summation of many highly-skilled intellects doing engineering, design, math and science to create the machinery that builds cars. A Marxist sees only the guys turning the bolts on the assembly line, and thinks of the factory as a "given," like a rock or a tree.

It can get more complicated. Some very good factories have been successfully run and owned by the workers themselves, which although I oppose as a coercive government policy, I am not against such things in a voluntary and private situation. Heck, any stock option falls into this category to some extent. There are some very rich former secretaries and janitors around here. The dot.coms, while they reigned, were extremely generous with equity, spreading it to even the lowest echelons of employment. A lot of them cashed out while the getting was good (nothing illegal, just good luck), but even a crappy increase in stock value can make a secretary a lot richer than she was before.

Capital is what keeps you from having to be an ox-plowing, shit-shoveling, laboring-for-fruit subsistence farmer like almost the entire population of the planet, and allows you to live in luxury typing stuff on a computer that would have cost you four million dollars not that long ago.