Can we just admit that we all know what the term 1% is intended to mean in context and not have this silly semantic argument again? There are real, important issues here and being pedantic distracts from the discussion.
In my city's case, there are extreme amounts of outside capital flowing into Austin to try to take advantage of the hype pumped out by all the various vacuous media channels in this country.
All that wealth sitting out there, being used to drive up property prices so that average working folks can't afford to live in the city they supposedly live in.
This is historically inaccurate, at least for American politics. There, the use of the phrase "top 1%" goes back at least as far as debates over then-Governor George W. Bush's income tax plan in the 2000 election[1]. Gore frequently used it as 'wealthiest 1%', but he was clearly citing studies based on the income breakdown[2].
If you want somebody who will fight for you and who will fight to have middle-class tax cuts, then I am your man. I want to be. Now, I doubt anybody here makes more than $330,000 a year. I won't ask you, but if you do, you're in the top 1%.
[1] http://debates.org/index.php?page=october-17-2000-debate-tra...
> Houses are going up 24% year over year
That's called a bubble, such a rise is not sustainable.
Look, you're living in a place full of rich people, so you feel poor by comparison, that's expected, so deal with it or move.
For someone making $45k in the Midwest, a 3-bedroom house with a 2-car garage in an excellent school district is expected.
If the 1%er moves to a lower cost of living area, he will not be a 1%er anymore.
I pay a far higher percentage of my income as tax to the society I live in than the people in the panama papers.
Well you absolutely don't know that. And whilst no doubt some people _are_ avoiding tax, many are not. And btw overall the rich pay a far higher portion of their income in tax than the poor. In the UK for example the top 1% of earners account for 30% of the total tax take (up from 20% 10 years ago). The top 3,000 pay more than the 9m bottom.
If you earn a salary that puts you in the literal 1%, you probably pay an effective tax rate of 30-50%. I don't know how low your income needs to get to reach a 15% tax rate on income, but it's really low.
1. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/opinion/stop-coddling-the-...
2. http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Elections/President/2012/0119/U...
> I don't know how low your income needs to get to reach a 15% tax rate on income, but it's really low.
I was below 15% in the low $70k range for sure. We'll see what it is this year.
Some people are so rich they don't even appear on the rich lists. I don't know how much tax they pay, but I suspect it isn't much.
Generally, if you can literally fit the people who own most of the economic assets of a country into a small hall, you have a serious democratic deficit.
If you're in the top 3000 people by income in the UK, you get to ride the same crappy trains as everyone else, drive the same crappy roads (unless you try go everywhere by helicopter - hardly practical), get the same government services, have access to the same markets and the same products in those markets; how many companies produce luxury goods these days? Unless you're an idiot and buy diamond encrusted iPhones, the stuff in your house is going to be similar to other people's. You'll be eating similar meat, drinking the same water. You could collect rare art or something, but that's hardly a meaningful part of the national economy.
The top 3000 get pretty similar benefits from the economy as everyone else, they just pay a lot more in absolute terms for the privilege.
Um you're confusing equal access with equal benefit...
> you get to ride the same crappy trains as everyone else, drive the same crappy roads (unless you try go everywhere by helicopter - hardly practical), get the same government services, have access to the same markets and the same products in those markets
Yea, except by being the super rich, you're benefiting far more from all those same crappy assets. Think about a rich person in retail.... their millions/billions depend on the existence of all those crappy roads to bring them customers and products to sell them. When said roads disappear, you both lose access to them, but the rich person loses far more as his access to customers also depends on those roads.
Equal access and equal benefit are vastly different things. The rich benefit more from infrastructure than the poor because their businesses are built upon and depend upon them.
The poorly paid actually spend a much higher % of there income in tax than the top 1%. And their contribution has been rising as the income and wealth based taxes are cut and the consumption based taxes have risen.
I don't blame you for thinking that is the case though as this canard has been pushed heavily by the UK press.
You know when your grown up when you have a discussion with your parents about their wills and inheritance tax.
But that's a meaningless metric. How is it comforting to know that 99% of people in India or Ethiopia have no voice in US (or UK, in this case) politics either?
What distracts from the discussion is using a term which lumps mid-career doctors in with billionaires while only talking about the billionaires.
Confusion might not be the best word, but we should avoid perpetuating the notion that the entire 1% is to blame for average people not getting ahead.
Because it's a simple number to write.
Lay-people using this term have no idea that the 1% includes doctors and lawyers, they just assume it's ultra-rich bankers, executives, and hedge fund managers. Yes, that means that if you're incapable of understanding context it might sound like they're talking down on doctors and lawyers. But I assure you they're not.
> And "railing against" != confusion. If enough people believe something, certain people in that group can do some pretty messed up shit without exactly "railing" first.
What are you even saying?
That summary jumps seamlessly from a literal use of "the richest 1%" to "A global network of tax havens" without any indication that they've suddenly begun talking about a much smaller set of people.
Or browse articles about the 1% on occupy.com or Huffington Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/top-1-percent/
Both sometimes use "1%" to refer to literally the top 1% wealthiest people, and sometimes to refer to the ultra rich. You can jump from a numbers-based article about where the 1% earn their money to a screed about how "the one percent" are putting out expensive videos downplaying the plight of minimum-wage workers.
It's a rare political term that actually has a pretty clear meaning. It's a bit vague in that it could refer to income or net worth, and nationally or worldwide, but it's way better than stuff like "liberal" or "conservative" or "terrorist." Using such a precise term as a lazy synonym for "the ultra rich" is ridiculous.
Hint: It's because they haven't suddenly begun talking about a much smaller set of people.
None of the links you posted are talking about the literal 1% as the problem. They'll reference statistics about the literal 1%, but only because the literal 1% includes the figurative 1%.
> It's a rare political term that actually has a pretty clear meaning. It's a bit vague in that it could refer to income or net worth, and nationally or worldwide, but it's way better than stuff like "liberal" or "conservative" or "terrorist." Using such a precise term as a lazy synonym for "the ultra rich" is ridiculous.
I totally agree with you, and personally I try not to use the term because I think using it shows poor communication skills: I think it's exemplary of everything that made the occupy movement largely unsuccessful. But it also shows poor communication skills to derail a discussion just to enforce the usage of your terminology, even if your terminology is more accurate.
There is no movement to overthrow doctors. Stop defending people who aren't under attack.
It seems they want their taxes increased and that money sent to Bangladesh to make for less income inequality.
Despite their college degrees I suspect they are innumerate and have a difficult time understanding meanings of words that don't favor their privileged position in the world.
Yes, the middle class in America is losing people to the upper class at a 2:1 ratio to the lower class, if this continues 66% of people will be in the upper classes in the next few generations.
That's odd. I mostly see employed people at malls and in parks. How do you tell them apart? Or do you just assume that they're unemployed, because they're in a park, doing nothing?
Social assistance programs are so meager and inexpensive compared to the cut we give to the finance industry. It's ridiculous to begrudge social assistance to people who need it just because some people who receive it don't.
Frankly, I'm just not offended that some people don't work. There aren't useful things for a lot of people to do. I'm much more offended that some people are rewarded incomprehensible amounts of money which no human can possibly be worth, often for activities that are actively harmful.
This completely ignores that you can be better off than someone else and still live in a shitty situation, but it sounds so nice ..
That's why many philosophies boil down to: you're going to be dead soon, you might as well start enjoying it, and if you're not... well... you know what to do.
Only in America would people who borrowed money to take a 4 year sabbatical be complaining about being poor.