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Comment by charliebossy | Hacker News Reader

what an absurd thing to say

Why? I've heard this sociological theory plenty of times. I don't know that there's any data for it, but on the other hand, it seems far from the category of garbage one might reasonably dismiss out of hand as "absurd".

Its classist and completely dismissive of the wide variety of opinions people have over how and to what extent government should be funded.

I think there's also a wide division as to what people think their government is for.

e.g. "Should I pay to arrest/convict/incarcerate the person who stole my phone" vs. "Should my cancer be cured without bankrupting me"

#1 seems to get universal traction, as does #2 in pretty much every country who could fund it, apart from the US.

It is extremely classist. My wife is from rural Iowa. Folks around where she grew up aren't thinking "one day I'll be rich like Donald Trump so I'm going to vote for low taxes."

What an absurd response! The chance that a random person on the street in America is a billionaire is currently 0.00000212036%. It is absurd for anyone to think they'll win that lottery chance (especially since the acquisition of wealth is correlated highly with... already having wealth)

It's absurd. But it's what a lot of people believe. Why else would anyone play the lottery?

A common misconception is "somebody has to win, why not me?"

The article is about millionaires not billionaires, in which case the odds are actually around 3.5% (12m out of 327m pop) of US population.

I mean, it's purely rationale to think you'll accumulate a million dollars of assets at some point in your lifetime, but that isn't rich - a large portion of your wealth will be locked into sustaining your living situation. Up here in Vancouver almost everyone (including blue collar peeps) who purchased a home in the 60s or 70s is a multimillionaire, but if they want to continue residing in Vancouver that money is essentially unavailable to them.

I'll clarify a bit, being a millionaire in no way implies that you're rich, inflation is a thing and the vast majority of millennials will be poor.

Maybe so, but when commenting here, please try to include information that readers can learn from. Even when the comment you're replying to wasn't substantive.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Steinbeck believed as much:

"I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist."

often misquoted as "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

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