We should but you know personal responsibility and all that jazz. The wealthy only care when the pitchforks come out. The biggest achievement of the wealthy has been to convince the middle class to eat itself.
I keep saying it; the amount of money in the system has increased +50% since 2008 [1], and worker compensation has gone up +25% (the BLS publishes a lot of series, I use [2]; hope it is right). So someone is getting a lot of money and it isn't obvious to what end - it isn't helping the workers or the poor, and nobody can make up that sort of difference by working harder. Workers are reaping a smaller percentage of society's bounty.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2 [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A033RC1A027NBEA
It used to be that one could somewhat easily get $1M by just selling 1 million people some $1 items, however that required making 1M items in the first place. Nowadays one can get the same $1M by making just a single unit of IP, and selling 1M copies at $1 each. Sure there is no guaranteed way of knowing whether some IP will sell 1M copies, but that only turns it into a sort of lottery which exacerbates the inequality even more.
Given that money -and particularly M2- is credit, which is kind of an "intellectual property" on itself, it isn't really surprising that a greater amount of IP in circulation would also mean a greater amount of credit/money.
Workers who exchange their effort for a fixed amount of income, are just out of all this IP lottery and its income multiplying potential.
It went from overt violence to less obvious propaganda programs tuning our feelings
I wish the “smart” crowd would look into the history of government-corporate propaganda research
I’m not talking “deep state”. It’s plainly recorded in government record how they financed propaganda research and gifted it to media for advertising and corporate use
Look at the joke history classes taught in public school
Look at the efforts to hide info about the environment by this admin
There is a concerted effort in our faces to deceive and misdirect is
Economics, jobs, and government scandals are distractions in support of these efforts
Read up on Greenspan’s comments in the 90s about growing worker insecurity being a boon to beneficiaries of supply side economics
Watch Varoufakis explain how during the Greek debt crisis German tax payers took out loans from German banks to have it to Greece who gave it right back to German banks
This is a generations long boondoggle unrelated to one policy decision 10 yrs ago
It’s a round n round we go with numbers because even the educated masses are too on the periphery to see or outright prevented from being in the room
Deep state is nonsense. It’s public record what’s going on
Lack of information or looking on the part of the rubes and proles doesn’t mean “conspiracy”
Especially when it’s a Google search away
The true Middle Class probably don't make any distinction between anyone who is in the top 20% (household income over $116,000) or especially the top 10% ($161,000).
https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentile-calculator-201...
Because middle class in a capitalist society is an economic relationship between the captialist and working class (characterized by mixed dependence on capital and labor, most archetypically the independent operator who supports themselves by applying their own labor to their own capital rather than primarily by renting labor to apply to capital or selling labor to capitalists), and its members are usually well above middle income (though, on average, far below that of the capitalist class.)
The middle income quintile is largely members of the proletariat, not the petit bourgeoisie.
Finally, a condition wether your own labour is not technically required for survival.
Most petit bourgeoisie still has to work, does not wield direct (individual) political power nor has big enough assets to survive despite major downturns.
The difference from proletariat is that they can rent and hire labour. Sometimes they get to manage it too.
haut bourgeoisie (capitalists): those who own capital and rent labor to apply to it.
petit bourgeoisie (middle class): those who live by a combination of labor and capital, particularly those who apply their own labor (perhaps alongside a small amount of rented labor) to their own capital.
proletariat (working class): those who derive income mainly by selling labor to members of either of the preceding classes.
In Marx's time, these categories perhaps mapped more consistently to the gradation of wealth and power, but there were exceptions then too.
And the degree to which an asset is "capital" that produces wealth and income without the owner's labor is relative to it's scarcity. The 30k car is a common possession, and also it has no added economic value without the driver's direct labor. A fleet of cars driven by rented labor is capital, as are factories, valuable land, or high concentrations of wealth.
Education is a kind of capital, but the surgeon's student loan is no different in than a social worker's student loan, except in the cost and income potential.
In that sense the surgeon is a worker but their work usually produces a great deal of extra income that allows them to purchase capital assets of other kinds.
In the simple, no debt financing case, that's the most obvious categorization, though much the same concerns that lead to questions about whether those drivers are rightly categorized as contractors might be raised as to whether they are genuinely self-employed independent business owners or rented labor being applied to Uber capital with a weird gatekeeping mechanism.
> and a surgeon working for a hospital who has put 400k toward education is part of the proletariat?
A lot to high income workers (surgeons often very much among them) are joint capital/labor earners of a kind that diverges from the independent small business owner model, because they gain substantial income, often deferred through reinvestment and often mainly in what are held largely as retirement funds, on capital to which their own labor is not applied, as well as selling labor to capital; for that reason they’d generally be seen as petit bourgeoisie, thought somewhat different from the main textbook example.
> Or do you count education as capital?
Traditionally, if it's not been made property that can be itself sold freely in capitalist economy, it's not capital in the analysis of economic class in a capitalist economy. (Looked at from within the system rather than from critics of capitalism, ask yourself: are the returns of education taxed like labor or like capital—that tells you how the capitalist system itself sees them.)
The main difference is in influence wielded...
The social Dynamics of the modern anerican situation have changed so much from when Marx was alive his labels no longer accurately apply.
Generally by that time the wealthy are long out of the country. In fact in most revolutions where people imagine they will take from the rich, people are generally in for a shock when they realize the rich are long gone. And now the door for a peaceful taxation is also gone.
>>The biggest achievement of the wealthy has been to convince the middle class to eat itself.
The wealthy have to convince nothing. Middle class is full of people who want instant gratification, and are bad at savings and investments.
I can't find the link right now, but there was a TedX talk by a multi-millionaire arguing that he wants to be taxed more. And it's a growing trend, a lot of very wealthy people are starting to plead for higher taxes. The reasoning being if wealth inequality continues to widen, eventually it won't be a case of shaking the rich to empty their pockets a bit, it will be a case of hanging the rich from lampposts.
I've met a lot of anti-capitalists who are mildly Posadist/accelerationist for this reason. For all of the ideas in this thread regarding increasing taxes on the rich and social welfare problems, I cannot help but believe that ultimately, we are overdue large scale social unrest in 1st world countries. Placating the proletariat with incentives like tax breaks and welfare programs is great in the short term, but in the end it might just be delaying the inevitable, and making it far worse. I'm firmly of the belief that a new economic system needs to be part of mainstream discussion as soon as possible, because otherwise we will eventually have riots which cause a power vacuum, and history has shown nothing good comes from that.
This? https://www.ted.com/talks/nick_hanauer_beware_fellow_plutocr...
Technically government is already equipped to do everything a charity can and more eith superior information so should be more efficient at it. Although it depends on the country/state in question.
I will say this again. As a mobile adult, in the United States, to not have $400 on reserve for an emergency is simply not possible with proper decision-making. Individuals at that level of poverty have national and state level food stamps, welfare, disability, affordable housing, rent control, minimum-wage laws, child-support, often social security, medicare/medicaid. It's not as though the country has a non-existent social safety net. You simply can't propose that the solution can exist independently of the personal decisions made by the individuals in this position.
The reason for some people not having the money around is undoubtedly poor decision making, but for a great many others they simply have no gainful employment, no prospects of obtaining gainful employment and are often trapped in debt spirals due to past financial desperation.
I'm real happy for you that you're so far removed from their situation that none of this occured to you.
The whole individual agency and moral superiority complex of American culture is more and more sickening to me as I grow older and see how most people simply with a rational set of actions and existing opportunities better off not pursuing what used to be the better options due to structural problems. Endless optimism only works so far for attitudes that help with success until you’re truly at a rock bottom point and nobody wants to be near someone that’s failed so much out of social niceties alone.
There are obvious exceptions for individuals suffering from unavoidable medical circumstances and the like, and I am fully willing to criticize our existing healthcare system's failings in providing suitable mitigation against such circumstances. But we're talking about 40% of the country.
I think we are mostly products of our surroundings so, yes, good decisions can help a lot. It just seems placing that level of "blame" is counter-productive and just does not represent reality on the ground. Trapped is trapped, you used the word yourself. I'd wager you have little idea the sorts of life traps that are laid out there. Having debt is pretty easy even with a better than average stability matrix. A single hit with bad luck is simply made worse as the "socially permitted" trolls eat their prey where no "socially permitted" social safety net exists that could possibly save them.
What is that? Trickle-down blame? You got yours? I simply don't understand the economics of "it's your own damn fault" with the force of a gavel.
The vast US homeless population suggests we don't really have a safety net, so much as a safety rope you need to hold on tight and pray. Consider, if all the homeless people showed up in the same place that would instantly be in the top 10 US cities.
Yes, I've lost jobs before because of corporate restructuring.
Imagine you went to a crappy school where you spent most of your days trying to avoid gangs rather than learning anything. You did everything people told you to do and you applied to some for-profit bullshit college that accepted you. You signed some paperwork that you literally didn't understand the details of (because of said shitty school and parents who have never dealt with this situation before and for-profit colleges that explicitly set out to target people exactly like you). Now you have $50,000 in debt that you literally can't even declare bankruptcy on and no marketable skills. What do you now do?
To blame it all on personal responsibility degenerates into a No True Scotsman argument very quickly. It's the kind of overly simplistic thinking that makes thirteen year old kids think Ayn Rand had it all figured out and never think further than than her heroic fantasy novels.
(I admit, I actually really like Ayn Rand's philosophy if it's seen as an ideal, rather than something that is practically p[possible. Marx and Engels were also idealists and in their perfect world everyone would be happy too.)
Humans are not born with an innate understanding of optimal decision making and the power of compound interest. Our environment shapes us to a massive degree and you're discounting this.
The problem occurs when there are MANY emergencies. You're about to get evicted, your car is broken down (so you're about to lose your job) and your kid is sick and you need a doctor but can't take the time off to get one.
>I will say this again. As a mobile adult, in the United States, to not have $400 on reserve for an emergency is simply not possible with proper decision-making.
Okay. The day your turn eighteen, your parents (who taught you very little and gave you nothing) kick you out on the street. You have no money (because they flat out stole it the day before you became an adult). Where does this magic $400 come from?
$400 is a LOT of money. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 before taxes. That's a week and a half of work without accounting for gas money to get you to the job or food to eat when you get there. After the basics (taxes, cheapest-possible rent, basic food, some kind of heating and lighting and a few other things) you're probably at the point where you have $10 or $20 left over.
Let's say you get sick, or disabled, or laid off. You are so fucked.
> Individuals at that level of poverty have national and state level food stamps, welfare, disability, affordable housing, rent control, minimum-wage laws, child-support, often social security, medicare/medicaid.
Have you any idea how long it takes to get disability? Years. And years. And it's not certain at all. What do you do in the meantime?
Even the other programs - they often fail the very people they are designed to help the most.
Child support? Again, have you any idea how many years it takes to get child support from someone who bails from their job every time the paperwork makes its way into the syste, and who never files a tax return?
Poor decision making or lack of personal responsibility are certainly sufficient to achieve such a situation... but they're not necessary. Unless you play with the definition of "poor decision making" to include things like "capable of making mistakes."
This could be a good time for everyone to review the concept of the Fundamental Attribution Error: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
I’m making well into six figures now, but in my early 20s, I was living pay check to pay check and barely had enough to eat some weeks. If I managed to scrape up an extra $400, I had a hundred things to spend it on that weren’t a rainy day fund.
This alone is sufficient motivation to drive policies which ensure not just inequality, but humiliation of the losers.
Honestly, though, you're just stating the obvious: people screw up and behave irrationally. That's common knowledge.
The goal is to minimize the impact of poor decisions and give people a way to get back on track. "F* 'em, I've got mine" doesn't help anybody.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-r...
Repetition doesn't actually make your claim any better supported, so maybe instead of repeating it, provide better support or, failing that, just stop instead of reiterating.
I wonder if you suddenly incurred uninsured medical expenses of oh, let's say, 20X your net worth or annual income, whether you might see things differently.
A family of four on a $50K annual income would find a sudden $1000K obligation utterly devastating.
That's life for (IMHO) too many of us. On average, it has far more to do with luck than your proffered causal moral failure. I think we can do better.
There's a lot of "let them eat cake instead" mentality in that statement.
What makes $400 the ideal number? Probably nothing, except the fact that it makes for the best headline, since "2 out of 5" is a quotable statistic.
Formulating advice should follow a different pattern. The ideal number for emergencies is probably closer to $5,000 since it covers more realistic emergency scenarios.
$500 might cover food, gas, a few taxi rides or train tickets and basic OTC medication like asprin for possibly a week.
$5,000 might cover a lost or stolen laptop, plane tickets, hotel stays, car repairs, emergency rooms and ambulances and out-of-pocket prescriptions, funerals, rent or convert to a month's worth of basic needs (food, gas, short-haul travel).
More is obviously always better, but emergency response is about covering the cost of capacity to react, plus supplies needed to take action, plus duration of endurance. $500 wouldn't keep you off the street for more than a weekend, but $5,000 could last a month or more.