One-Percenters Close to Surpassing Wealth of U.S. Middle Class
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
At that point the ultrawealthy will seek to form an alliance with the growing popularity of the far right and seek to annihilate the left. This is simple self preservation. The far left will, after all, seek to destroy billionaires whereas the far right will seek out easier targets who look/sound different (muslims, immigrants, jews, gays, people of color, etc.).
The point where things start to become terrifying will be the point where billionaires give up on status quo politicians and start to throw their weight behind the far right. That's when the far right switch from being a bunch of racist, loser skinhead misfits into a well funded, slick and violent ultranationalist nightmare.
As far as I can tell, the current weimaresque neoliberal age is sputtering to a close and we're seeing the beginnings of this pattern re-emerging.
We assume the 1% is white, christian and male, but is it? And insofar as it isn't, I think it's unlikely that scapegoats will be picked in the traditional (e.g. racist) way. One non-racial scapegoat category be criminals -- the right is already successful scapegoating illegal immigrants for a remarkable variety of issues.
Whichever group it is, some wealthy people will probably get caught up in it and flee the country.
Haven’t they already done through new forms of mass culture? Many of these “conservative intellectuals” are little more than bought and sold mouthpieces of the ruling class whose voices are then algorithmically targeted and boosted through platforms like YouTube and Facebook.
And in many cases, what they’re serving up is actually little more than warmed over Nazism. Few people, for example, know that hatred of trans people was something first cultivated by the Nazis, who claimed that their existence was a disease of “Talmudic abstraction” of gender from sex. [0]
How many of the “superstars” on the right have built a career on or parrot this kind of talk today?
[0] https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4188-the-eradication-of-tal...
Could you point to some reading that would help one become educated on this past history?
Because that's some regularly overlooked context to the rise of Hitler, with his brand of fascism focused on anti-Bolshevik/communist sentiments which neatly played into racial theories [1] and stereotypes [2] that were rather common back then.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bavarian_Soviet_Republic
You might want to look into the Weimar Republic (the period of the region what is approx known as Germany between WWI and WWII). I'd start with Wikipedia. Babylon Berlin is a (fiction) series about that period. I guess you meant a historic book reading though.
> At that point the ultrawealthy will seek to form an alliance with the growing popularity of the far right and seek to annihilate the left.
This is the third stage of Paxton’s five stages, the first three being:
> 1. Intellectual exploration, where disillusionment with popular democracy manifests itself in discussions of lost national vigor
> 2. Rooting, where a fascist movement, aided by political deadlock and polarization, becomes a player on the national stage
> 3. Arrival to power, where conservatives seeking to control rising leftist opposition invite fascists to share power
That said, I'd caution against putting too much emphasis on the possible parallels, even as there's a lot to learn by looking at them. That initial bargain--or rather, series of bargains--was made under very unique circumstances that aren't really present today. Industrialists saw the threat of the Great Depression (both in terms of the destruction of their wealth through purely economic means as well as the political consequences of the depression) and the possible rise of a communist German state as existential threats to themselves and their society. Richard J. Evans' The Coming of The Third Reich touches on the sheer terror over the possibility of a communist revolution a bit and how it influenced Weimar politics, given the example of the Russian Revolution of 1917: it meant not only confiscation of property, but also torture and death on a massive scale. The failed revolution in Hungary, and the White Terror that followed it, also made it explicitly clear that even failed revolutions would have immense levels of political violence. Labor unions and political parties associated with them were easy to associate with this; it helps that they weren't exactly predisposed towards them in the first place for a variety of social and financial reasons. The Nazis capitalized on (and pushed) the fear of communist revolution, both with the public and traditional conservative interests. There was also a sort of normalization of the presence of paramilitary activities and violence in Weimar and their use by political parties; if one was so inclined, it was apparently possible at the time to rationalize the Nazis as just another populist movement that wouldn't translate into lasting political power, and could even be co-opted. You also had a lot of nostalgia for the Bismarckian past and a very unhealthy democracy in the Weimar Republic; as such there wasn't much interest in defending democracy, such as it was, by the end. It seems as if everyone figured it could be replaced with something "better" in their eyes.
As for the industrialists and the rise of the Nazi Party, I'd suggest Diarmuid Jeffreys's Hell's Cartel: IG Farben and the Making of Hitler's War Machine. It's not focused solely on the role of the firm in the Nazi's rise to power, but it covers it as part of a broader look at the company's history and what it eventually led to. Adam Tooze's excellent The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy is somewhat related, with regards to the relationship between the Nazi Party and rearmament efforts and the Nazi process of Gleichschaltung, or coordination, through which the Nazis established control of "social, political, and cultural organizations...according to Nazi ideology and policy."[0] There are a few other books that might be of interest, but I can't think of them at the moment
I can't speak for its accuracy, but as a sidenote I found it fascinating and somewhat painful to read how the writer deals with homosexuality (quite negative). I suppose in its time this was a common enough sentiment, but it was still rather jarring.
That’s a weird characterization, given that the trend has been in the opposite direction: https://www.vox.com/polyarchy/2016/6/3/11843780/democrats-we...
Also, frankly, the attempt to make it seem like the “left” has a monopoly on “people of color” and “immigrants” is offensive. Trump got almost 30% of the Hispanic vote, and it’s not because of the lovely things he said about Hispanic people. Abbott got over 40% of the Hispanic vote in Texas.
The idea that billionaires are going to form a coalition with nazis to oppress “people of color” is a leftist fever dream.
For the Democrats, I am not talking about AOC and Bernie Sanders (who will always be demonized in the media) but referring to most democratic politicians (and Republicans, of course) who bend over backwards to protect corporate interests.
Currently, the billionaires in this country are split pretty much equally between the two sides, the same way the country is split pretty much equally. They are a good representation of the society we created here. While many on HN know that model is flawed, unsustainable, and that we need to try something new, we also know that dinosaurs have a hard them to let go. The movie, music, and video game industries are example of groups led by greedy dinosaurs who resisted changes brought by the internet.
With AOC, we should be promoting and rewarding community success, as opposed to that of an individual like we do with the current pseudo-merit travesty system that we have. I do not see how this conflict with being highly profitable. I actually think that more people would be more motivated and more profitable with a more inclusive system.
>The British Labor Party, whose leaders compete with their Con-servative counterparts in advancing national interests, is hard put to save even a modest program of partial nationalization. In West Germany, which has outlawed the Communist Party, the Social Democratic Party, having officially rejected its Marxist programs, is convincingly proving its respectability. This is the situation in the leading industrial countries of the West. In the East, the gradual reduction of direct political controls testifies to increas-ing reliance on the effectiveness of technological controls as instruments of domination. As for the strong Communist parties in France and Italy, they bear witness to the general trend of circumstances by adhering to a minimum program which shelves the revolutionary seizure of power and complies with the rules of the parliamentary game.
The UK Labour Party didn't really cease being of the left and away from nationalisation until 1983, which started the march to being "Tory Lite" of Blair's New Labour. [1]
Around 1980 the centrist people split away from the party to form the SDP (they would much later merge with the liberals to become the LibDems).
What killed the left was "the longest suicide note in history" - Michael Foot's 1983 Election Manifesto. 1983 was the early election that Thatcher used to cash in the Falklands dividend. The Tories were on course for a major loss, or at best scrape a hung parliament prior to the Falklands, after they got a doubled majority and the pattern of the rest of the decade was set. No Labour manifesto policies could have answered that. Yet between that and the SDP it started the journey to Blairism, and almost destruction of the party.
Brexit may end up doing similar to the Tory party - they've kicked many of their moderates. Depending what the December election brings, it could get ugly... Bring popcorn.
[1] OK, if you want to be pedantic, the IMF loan Healey got in 1974, and subsequent IMF supervision kicked them toward the centre -- temporarily. Everyone remembers it was Healey -- no one remembers the negotiations started the moment they got elected because the Tories left no public finances, and of course there was that minor oil crisis. :)
I don't think you've adequately supported that criticism.
The article you're citing discusses the "top 4%" of income earners. That's a very different thing to "billionaires" of which there are 607 [Edit: in the USA].
Since the US has a FPTP system, the first layer of fighting is for both party nominations and is poor majority against (centrist) rich minority, which would have a clearer outcome if money in politics had clearer rules.
Edit- clarity
That’s not what the parent said, they said that the right scapegoats various minority groups as a way of dividing the lower classes and bringing segments of them into alliance with itself. It’s true that fascistic scapegoating doesn’t operate along standard US racial frames, but not that the right won’t resort to them.
The other thing you’re eliding is the incoherent tribalism inherent to fascist ideologies. Since they have no real commitment to meaning or truth, all it takes is identification with their precepts and a particular authoritarian manifestation to adhere to them.
For example, the Republican Party used to enjoy the majority of the black vote, but this shifted towards the Democrats during the latter half of the 20th century. Likewise, prior to 9/11, the Republican Party enjoyed the majority of Muslim voters, who shifted their support leftward in the following decade.
As for the Democrats, they used to have much stronger support from the white working class, but this once reliable voting bloc started eroding away from them since the 1970s.
The sustained economic prosperity of the post war years in the US mainstreamed market liberalism for Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers, giving birth to “neoliberalism”, rejecting their parent’s depression-era “new deal Democrats” skepticism of unfettered market capitalism.
Political demographics aren’t set in stone. They will change with events of the nation.
I'm particularly interested in watching African-American voting sentiments in the age of Trump. He seems to be bringing change.
If AOC, Sanders and Warren took the reins of the party, they'd not only lose all support from billionaires, they'd go into vicious attack mode, funding whomever they thought could defeat them - both inside and outside the party.
I also wouldn't want to presuppose who the "other" might end up being. The far right might very well embrace Jews, Hispanics and Blacks while they turn on immigrants and muslims. But, there will be an "other" and their "otherness" will become a bigger and bigger deal over time.
I can’t find the article, but there was a story during the run-up to the 2012 election covering wealthy donors who switched to Romney in 2012. They interviewed one guy and his entire motivation for dropping support for Obama was, I kid you not, Obama telling him at a White House party in 2010 that he hadn’t gotten around to reading his self-published book yet. The donor thought it was really insulting that after all the money he gave Obama he hadn’t read his crappy book. This is especially absurd when you consider Obama was in the midst of battling the massive financial collapse and two foreign wars.
This is why I think bargaining with billionaires is dangerous. You’re never going to be good enough for them.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/10/08/super-rich-iro...
> Last July, before he had written the [harshly critical] letter [about Obama], Cooperman was invited to the White House for a reception to honor wealthy philanthropists who had signed Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge, promising to donate at least fifty per cent of their net worth to charity. At the event, Cooperman handed the President two copies of “Inspired: My Life (So Far) in Poems,” a self-published book written by Courtney Cooperman, his fourteen-year-old granddaughter. Cooperman was surprised that the President didn’t send him a thank-you note or that Malia and Sasha Obama, for whom the books were intended as a gift and to whom Courtney wrote a separate letter, didn’t write to Courtney. (After Cooperman grumbled to a few friends, including Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, Michelle Obama did write. Booker, who was also a recipient of Courtney’s book, promptly wrote her “a very nice note,” Cooperman said.)
Here's a more recent retelling:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/10/leon-cooperman-eliza...
> For those unfamiliar with Cooperman’s history of bitching and moaning, this isn’t the first time he’s complained about being treated just sooo unfairly by a politician. During the Obama years, he claimed that the president’s description of Wall Street leaders as “fat cat bankers”—made in the immediate wake of the financial crisis before he would go on to be extremely business friendly—was encouraging “class warfare,” and that Obama’s “polarizing tone” was “cleaving a widening gulf…between the downtrodden and those best positioned to help them,” i.e. the rich. Speaking of tones, Cooperman, like many of his brethren, chose to liken Obama to Adolf Hitler, and also got his knickers in a major twist over the fact that the president had the audacity not to write a thank-you note to Cooperman’s 14-year-old granddaughter for her unsolicited book of poems. So Liz Warren better shape up, and fast.
Pytester: If you're in the Bay Area, please get lunch with me. You are insanely bigoted and hateful against conservatives. Have you talked to a real conservative in the last five years? I have never seen such hate-filled tripe on HN.
Then
You are insanely bigoted and hateful against conservatives. Have you talked to a real conservative in the last five years?
You do see the irony here, yes?
It’s a way for Cruz to signal membership as part of the large minority of Hispanic Americans who are religious, anti-socialist, and have conservative views on abortion, crime, drugs, etc.
It’s a shrewd way to stake out and define a distinct identity for minorities who lean conservative. Look at Sajid Javid in the U.K. (where the Tories are in the verge of pulling in the majority of the Indian vote): https://www.politico.eu/article/conservatives-lure-south-asi...
> “Most ethnic minorities believe in the Conservative values of family, self-reliance and aspiration.”
Despite US culture’s obsession with slotting people into racial categories like “Hispanic”, Cubans in Florida actually have very little in common with Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in California, Texas and the Southwest.
Whether that’s the case or not, I’m not sure how it’s relevant to the discussion of who Florida Cubans align with politically, since it hasn’t been proposed or discussed by Trump or anyone else.
Is there any particular reason to conceive of these people as belonging to the same interest group(s)? No. Do they even like each other? No.
This is a fairly apt description of the Southern Strategy that Nixon rode to power.
Doesn't make you racist or a bad person to concede, in a debate, that which really is just millennia on millennia of human evolutionary biology at work. Does it make politicians irresponsible when they employ tribalism? Absolutely. No question. But it's abundantly clear the left and the right employ that strategy all the time.
Many commenters here appear to be testing the extents of mental flexibility in order to render their side of the political divide innocent of tribalism. I assume they are doing so because they believe conceding that fact is tantamount to being a racist. My assertion is that conceding this fact is not racist, it's just laying out contemporary political realities. It's just laying out behavioral evolution. We, as in "our society", put the screws to certain groups, because in our society doing so delivers votes. When it no longer delivers votes, maybe we won't do it? But for now, it's just how the game is played.
And all political sides play this game. It's just that different political sides put the screws to different "tribal" groups. And some tribes have the rare misfortune of coming under pressure by all political sides.
Nixon is obviously a good example of a politician who used tribalism to his benefit. I don't argue that at all. Because, again, conceding that doesn't make me a bad person or a racist. Just makes me a guy stating a fact.
Conceding the fact and still voting for them is. Yes, this is rampant on "both sides." It is still morally repugnant, and it continues because it doesn't cost them enough votes.
Political realities exist because people accept them.
> It’s an easy story to believe, but this year two political scientists called it into question. In their book “The End of Southern Exceptionalism,” Richard Johnston of the University of Pennsylvania and Byron Shafer of the University of Wisconsin argue that the shift in the South from Democratic to Republican was overwhelmingly a question not of race but of economic growth.
More important, that alliance is already mathematically impossible. Trump only won by courting blue collar whites and a critical mass of conservative people of color. By 2050, Hispanic people will comprise 30% of the population. To ratchet up the racism while still managing to win elections (you can’t “annihilate” anyone without having political power), the right would have to pull in almost all white Democrats. But those are the most liberal group in the entire electorate, and a big chunk of the electorate’s socialists.
The mathematics of the situation is that there are billionaires, and 10-20% of the population that are riding the wave behind them. (These folks are disproportionately urban and suburban white people, and also disproportionately liberal.) There is no way to build a coalition with those people that involves scapegoating fully half the population that comprises people of color and immigrants.
You can limit people of color's access to the ballot box and turn away immigrants. Like rich people have regularly done for most of this countries existence.
While there is absolutely no denying that the PRC and DPRK are totalitarian regimes, many scholars of political economy and sociology would argue that they are simply totalitarian in a different way; for instance, one common theme is that the notion of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia has conditioned us to think of totalitarianism in a very specific way with specific consequences. The issue is that totalitarianism can acutally be conceived of in terms of totality, a concept critics of neoliberalism use a lot.
See the work of Herbert Marcuse, who, while before the time of neoliberalism, argued the notion of totality in the West, while quantitatively not as bad as the regimes you name, was still more pernicious in the fact that we don't consider them totalitarian. Orwell was somewhat of a break in this style of thinking, but now we conceive of totalitarianism as Orwellian rather than otherwise.
I have a comment here[0] with more about this. In short, we tend to start from the assumption that are own societies are not totalitarian because the totalitarianism is natural to us. But it's also a mistake to assume that there is a "view from nowhere" which can tell us which societies are tolatitarian and which are not.
Someone please convince me otherwise?
But I think the US has a few more steps before reaching that stage. Making sure people are obedient is a process that started long ago, by denying them healthcare, housing or education, unless they are disciplined enough to work and not to question the system; while regulating in favor of well entrenched oligarchy.
I think the best way to coordinate is by starting cultural trends. Sudden change and revolution almost never lead to anything, and if we look at the history of the US, it's "power" is exactly that: cultural change. The tech "class" is already attempting this, but I think the approach and message are wrong and don't resonate with enough people, to create something at the scale of the hippie era.
So the US really needs the US to save itself, but by developing an ever stronger middle class, and mechanisms to protect each other's health, while allowing for money to move around freely. And I think tech can be a part of that solution (no, I am not thinking encrypted chat, AI to hack the gov, or other non american kinds of weapons, but rather genuine solutions). The more power they have, the more they can keep the government in check.
The far right's concern is those who seem different, but there is also an intersection between billionaires and those who seem different. >30% of the people on Forbes 400 are of Jewish ethnicity and the far-right loves to harp on about it.
You don't have to form any alliances if you control both sides and you have the media and the lumpenproletariat to your disposal. In the worst case scenario, the working class will engage in an ethnic guerrilla warfare (thus making the state even weaker and easier to corrupt) rather that a revolution against the elites.
Abe Lincoln and the Union were "right" (republican),many of the modern GOPs initial members were free black people. Of course by 2019 standards everyone of that era is far right in the US.
You have to also consider that even now left/right can mean different things in different societies.
Here is one way to put it: billionaires will lie in bed with whoever has their best interest. The group that has their best interest is usually the group that can't acheive it's goals through democratic or other preestablished process. The popular side does not need them, and being popular means doing the bidding of the majority non-rich. If republicans are very popular,democrats will be in bed with billionaires to advance their agenda.
It is a simple economics of supply and demand. IMO, history actually shows how ideology means little compared to ability to weild power.
You like many have this Us vs Them attitude where you've been sociologically engineered to group yourself with certain groups,the same is happening to others. This makes divide and conquer very easy to all available hostile parties.
I think there are plenty of forces at work that desire the fall of the west and America's global dominance. Everyone knows that even if major nuclear powers unite,defeating america in nuclear or conventional war is very very hard and expensive. The best way to dismantle such a large and powerful enemy is from the inside out -- similar to what the wesr did to the USSR. The billionaires have money but money means nothing if you can't spend it and keep it. Nation states control billionaires and billionaires exert a lot of influence on nation states. The American lead liberal world order is not beneficial to nation states all over the world and it keeps getting worse from their perspective. Billionaires are good at moving their money elsewhere,the problem is America's reach is far. You can see how so many parties have to gain from the great american division. I think billionaires backed or encouraged by hostile nation states desire to instill division that can be used to control america and if it comes to it,destroy the west. Bear in mind this is just my opinionated analysis.
I am of the opinion that if we everyday feel resentment towards those who have more, that we are in itself creating a lesser condition for ourself. Whether that be mental illness, hate, or worse.
Your thoughts?
We read that the wealthy are taxed at a lower tax bracket because most of their income doesn't come from a paycheck, but from investments which are taxed at a lower rate. I can never compete, because I do not have investments that would generate a return similar to my current salary. Unfair rules in my opinion.
>The top 1 percent paid a greater share of individual income taxes (37.3 percent) than the bottom 90 percent combined (30.5 percent).
https://taxfoundation.org/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-...
1: https://inequality.org/facts/income-inequality/
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...
The reality is (as of 2016) the top 1% pay 37% of the total income tax bill. The top 5% (income>198K) pay 58%. The top 10% 69.5%.
On the other hand, the bottom 90% pay 30% of the tax bill, the bottom 50% only 3%.
What I meant was: One way for rich people to get more at other peoples expense, that does not require what would legally considered stealing from you, is to have to pay less taxes than they previously had (by using legal ways to do it, or by being the beneficiary of changing laws).
The point is, there is a lot of way's for the rich to benefit at your expense, and hacking your bank account might just be the least practical.
They are not so much stealing money from your account, but the amount they put in looks like it could be a lot bigger?
I don’t know, but something is off, the way I see it.
Many companies make huge profits because the enviromental impact of their work is an externiality, and they do not carry that cost.
Probably the biggest part, as we will come to see.
Not necessarily. There are plenty of people who think that the growth of Microsoft and Amazon came from doing sketchy things that should not be repeated.
Because those are very different situations.
Also, I'm not sure that there was a meaningful equivalent to venture capitalists in that era, but I'm not at all confident enough in my history to state that with any weight.
The automobile used to be a toy for millionaires, now even (American) minimum-wage workers can travel daily in comfortable, individual, climate-controlled vehicles capable of incredible speeds.
I would pay $100k for a ten-year-old Civic but I don't have to because the car companies work hard and compete with each other and have driven down costs and prices to the bare minimum.
Same for many of todays billionaires / huge corporations. They're generally not stealing from us, but creating enormous wealth for all of us in the form of consumer surplus with their desirable goods and services.
I definitely don’t agree that either of these companies predatory tactics, and especially Amazon’s treatment of workers, is something that should be lauded or encouraged.
Absolutely not.
It’s a completely reasonably argument to assert that both men made the bulk of their outsized wealth via anti-competitive monopolistic behavior that was harmful to the markets they operated in.
Gates was in fact accused of this by the US Justice Department so it’s not exactly a fringe theory.
You seem pretty clearly to be speaking of his networth which rises and falls with the price of AMZN shares. When friends/relatives ask 'how much do you make?' do you include unrealized gains on any investments you own?
try this thought experiment:
your neighbor has $10 and you have $1. the cost to keep a person sheltered, fed, and clothed is $3. your neighbor pays you $1 to do some task each month while making $10 from your labor. you can't afford the basics with the salary being offered. your neighbor, on the other hand, can afford the basics for themselves and also for you using the revenues generated from your labor -- and more! yet, they still only pay you $1, because if they paid you $3, they'd only be able to pay for their own consumption two times instead of three times. is this situation acceptable on the basis of the factors outlined in the experiment alone?
because that level of exploitation is a mere shadow of the scale of exploitation that the current crop of billionaires perform. and we haven't even started to talk abou tax dodging yet.
However, when you want something done, when you believe in a cause, you're going to have a harder time than previous generations to exert pressure on the powers that be to make that happen. They will care less about your purchasing power or your vote than was the case for your parents or grandparents. Depending on what injustices you see in the world, you will probably have a harder time finding an organization with any real influence that you can join to make a difference.
This is the biggest problem with inequality; people are fixated on what they have, not on what's possible. The world will change, and everyone has a stake in what it changes into. It's a problem when it changes on the terms of just one group, a problem that of course will always be the case, but can be bigger or smaller. Right not, it's getting bigger.
Later addition because most answers say that this is normal for politics:
Usually on HN for other topics such a primitive black and white thinking is in the minority and will be laughed about or just ignored. Why not if it comes to politics?
But usually on HN with other topics such a primitive black and white thinking is in the minority and will be laughed about or just ignored. Why not if it comes to politics?
which translates to this kind of black and white rhetoric.
it also doesn't help that since the 2016 elections, everything became even more polarized. nowadays, if you vote D and say you like some R policy, people will churn you (and this is valid the other way around too).
but i do think that politics in general turn HN into something that it's usually the opposite (i.e. a lot of generalizations and name-calling).
The engineering approach would try and decompose the problem without judgement. Then explore the tree of possibilities, apply weights on all the possible outcomes and then take the best possible route, knowing full well that an ideal doesn't exist.
I am sure it's possible to apply many more lenses to a problem, each of then bringing more richness and understanding to the world.
The whole point of the existence of poilitical economy and sociology is th at this kind of decomposition is very hard, if not impossible - without judgement implies that those who practice this kind of thinking, or engineering, are able to adopt a view from nowhere, but the fact is that these people belong to groups in society, they are personally affected by the outcome, and absolutely already have pre-existing interests. Furthermore, you automatically figure this as a kind of balancing game with weights, but this implies that the weighting can be done (how do you weigh two qualitative choices?) and further the utilitarian view that all that matters is the maximum weight. Both of these problems are why there is intense debate in moral theory regarding instrumental reason and consequentialism.
Anyways, my point was that by looking at every argument by first placing it on a left vs right scale removes the interesting nuances that could be discussed. I don't know that the engineering approach is necessarily the best tool to solve social inequalities as this is not my topic at all.
There are many possible outlooks on income inequality and wealth distribution. They don't fit in a line.
It's deception
Really this is such an unsubstantiated comment. No one carries a card for being a member of the “ruling class”. Instead people making this argument simply cherry-pick from diverse groups for their purposes and claim they all work/live/think the same: politicians, the rich, foreign interests, lobbyists, youth activists, corporations, media, far right fringe, etc.
I'm not saying that both sides are the same here. I'm saying that what Chuck Schumer wants for his class and what Mitch McConnell does are broadly the same. Chuck might pay lip service to his constituents by opposing tax increases, but at the end of the day both would still vote to increase the defense budget, vote against Medicare-for-All, vote against expansion of welfare and entitlements, vote against most things that would make life easier for the struggling majority in this country.
The exceptions, like Sanders, Warren, Ocasio-Cortez, etc., are just that, exceptions. We often forget just how ridiculous and absurd both Sanders and his positions were viewed in 2015 when he first entered the race.
But they can, and it's the best way to gain wealth. You can use paper wealth as collateral, allowing you to borrow much more.
Is wealth in a mortgage-free triplex appraised at $1MM today inequal to equities in $MSFT that is worth $1MM today? If so, in what way is the wealth of the stockholder less important or less valuable? I don't think we can be sure that the real estate is going to provide more growth over time. I'm not sure by what other means the real estate could be considered more important.
Note that a pretax income of ~$500,000 puts you in the 1 percenters league. So the type of investment value in my example is probably fairly realistic.
"One-percenter" isn't a real thing. It's just math. There is absolutely nothing tying the 'one-percenter' class together. They're not banding together to make it so their kids have a straight run into the Ivy League. They're not trying to stay politically dominant by passing poll taxes.
One-percenters aren't doing that. The upper class is. And there's plenty of "one-percenters" that aren't part of the upper class, most notably tech workers.
Social classes each have their own institutions of which they dominate. They have industry segments in which they maintain presence. But apparently we can't talk about that anymore. Sadly it's probably less to do with anything more nefarious than the gutting of funding for journalism, so all the stories are getting lazier and lazier.
You’re going to have to back that assertion up.
that was a bit snarky so I'll expand a little. I think people typically use "upper class" to signify the highest echelon in the power structure of society. but there are a lot of ways to have power over others, and it doesn't map perfectly onto money. an influential media personality may have more influence than someone far richer but unknown to the public. someone with a high worth on paper might have liquidity issues that force them to be careful with their spending. you might be wealthy and politically connected, but excluded from certain social circles anyway.
I think a more reliable distinction would be whether a person's income predominantly comes from their labour, or whether it proedominantly comes from what they own.
The threshhold for being in the top 1% of income is that 99% or more of people make less than you.
Clearly I mean the threshold for being upper class a term mentioned in your actual comment... unlike "top 1%" which was not.
But all members of the top 1% are in the upper class.
There are only a few hundred billionaires in this country, and they didn't get that money by being paid a salary.
So all the retired people living off their 401k are now part of the upper class?
Of course there is a class difference between people at retirement age:
- Has enough wealth to pay for daily life with interest/dividends. Nearly all wealth sill be left to family+friends upon death. (Upper class)
- Has enough wealth to retire, drawing upon this wealth to survive. Must work late into life in order to leave a significant inheritance. (Middle class)
- Not enough wealth to survive without working or leave significant inheritance. Must rely on friends, family, or the state when unable to work in old age. (Lower class)
Are they in their 30s with inherited wealth that allows them to spend like someone with a top 1% incone?
> Ballmer was offered a salary of $50,000 as well as 5-10% of the company.[17] When Microsoft was incorporated in 1981, Ballmer owned 8% of the company.
> While CEO of Microsoft in 2009, Ballmer earned a total compensation of $1,276,627, which included a base salary of $665,833, a cash bonus of $600,000, no stock or options, and other compensation of $10,794.
His billions came from the ~10% of the company he got when he started, not from his wages. This is closer to a co-founder than a typical employee.
If the top 1% is an household income of $475,116, and you have 2 working people, they each need to make $237,558
That's certainly a lot, but on the coasts, a college grad can get a $120k or more offer straight out of school. I've heard of much higher ones, but lets use this number.
So to be a 1%, you could simply have a couple where both techies that make twice as much as a new grad. That's not exactly far fetched, when you include equity at a public company.
Of course, these people likely spend 3-5k/month on housing, are paying 6 figure in student debt each, might be sending their toddlers to a day care or a private school and saving for said toddlers' college, and putting a bunch in equity to supplement their 401k and emergencies. Clearly way better off than most, but also probably having discussions as if they should eat out less often to save some money and if they really need 2 cars or not, because gas and maintenance is starting to add up.
So in a good (great even) place, but certainly not the same world as what comes to mind when people say "1 percenter". High income doesn't really mean upper class.
Yes, it is.
> High income doesn't really mean upper class.
Yes it does. Making 10x the annual average family income makes you upper class. That’s what the words mean.
The cognitive dissonance you’re experiencing here is not that the rest of the world is confused about the obvious fact that the top 1% is way above average, it’s that you’re confused about where the average is.
NFL players get paid very high salaries, but the average career is only three years. many of them blow through it and have only meager pensions and the aftermath of injuries to look forward to in their old age. are they "upper class" for the brief part of their life when they have the cash flow or just an edge case of the exploited worker?
Yes. Highly paid professional athletes are upper class.
There are many people who have modest incomes, but high wealth. Those people are upper class.
On the other hand, there are a small number of people with high income, but who have a lot of drains on their money (support a large family, donate a lot), and who I would not consider upper class because they do not have a large amount of wealth
No it doesn’t! You can be a millionaire but still be from the working class.
I said being in the 1% doesn’t make you upper class.
No that's not what the words mean.
Social class is what circle you run in. It's what kind of car you can see yourself driving. It's how you think about financial security. It's what rec activities you think about doing. It's how you get involved politically.
Income is only a tiny part of that equation. You can be upper class and dirt poor. And you can be lower class and have millions in the bank.
Don't use class to refer to wealth or income. These three concepts are totally different and can exist independently of each other.
It's not your fault you don't understand this. America failed you.
I recommend reading this article https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/wealth.html
The top 1% does not make such a small amount. The top 1% has a net worth of $18 million after accounting for loans and other debts, and an income north of 1.7million... And that's in 2013. It's even worse now.
We should be talking about net worth, not about income, or else people who pay themselves a salary of $1 but are billionaires are classed as "lower class", which is obviously nonsense.
That was the point I was making. 1% is not the same as upper class.
If you have to work for a living you are not upper class, period.
My wife and I are income 1%ers, but we're also first-generation college graduates. We live in a city with a tremendously high cost-of-living, because it's where our jobs are. If we are lucky, we will inherit some small amount of equity in our parents homes. We have no political connections or clout. Our income is virtually 100% in the form of pay from our employers.
From your point of view, we're better candidates to be "upper class" than say, Andrew Cuomo, the Governor of New York (salary: ~$180K) despite the fact that Cuomo's father was also Governor of New York, he was married to a Kennedy, and he presided at Billy Joel's wedding to his fourth wife?
Im most certainly not upper class, as I can't even afford to buy department store clothes or go out to eat more than once a week.
My expenses, due to my location, education, medical status and job, eat up a lot of my income. I'm VERY thrifty and am about 75% over the poverty line after job/education expenses. Throw in medical, transportation and the ridiculous housing costs and I can't even afford mcdonalds for breakfast.
If that's true and you're making over $400k per year, you're doing something wrong.
As I said in my comment, non-negotiable expenses are high.
You're going to have to go into a lot more detail if you want anybody to believe expenses that high are possible.
I dont want to discuss my medical costs directly, but the uninsured cash cost for my monthly medications is about 5.5k month. Insurance does help significantly, but the final cost is still greater than 10% of cash price.
I'm currently an educator in a high income area, teaching students of significant wealth. I make about 450k a year.
We are required to live within a specific radius of the campus, which significantly limits my housing choices to high income, low space options. I'm around the middle of housing costs among my peers, and I'm paying 5k a month for 600 sq/ft.
We are expected to provide all resources for our courses, as is fairly normal in the primary/secondary teaching profession. Resource costs are around 200k a year, and this is fairly common among the staff. We are expected to bear it based on the idea that we're "over compensated" for our position, and that this "gives us flexibility to provide tailored education experiences". Nonsense, but I do love the job.
Taxes and health insurance take a bit over 100k a year.
That puts me around 90k gross for a family of 4 (which I have). "Very low income" level for a family of for in my area us 58k. That puts me at 55% above the VLI line. My original estimate was 75%.
I have a significant medical issue that puts a financial burden on us in monthly prescription copays, plus 4 three month specialist checkups, plus the cost of 2 children.
I am NOT saying this is normal by any means. My single healthy peers live fairly well.
I also expect most people to think, "Just get a new job!", which is understandable. However if I were to move back to my previous southern US appointment, doing the exact same job, Id have less net income and not be working in such a cool place.
> Resource costs are around 200k a year, and this is fairly common among the staff.
That certainly explains everything. I'm curious where that money goes? If you're teaching a class of 30 students, you could buy each one a laptop and go on a two-week field trip with individual hotel rooms and still have 100k left from that budget.
We pay for trips, electronics, "lab kits", license fees, PPE, raw materials, rental fees for heavy equipment and due to the nature of the content we pay probably more than we should due to inflated costs related to the specialized nature of the topic and school contracts.
AND we pay sales tax on all of it, which isnt insignificant on already ridiculous costs.
I don't believe that is an ethical choice, even if the students are already extremely privileged.
I do struggle with this every few months though, it is a difficult concept to grapple with, but I always side with trying to provide the best educational experience that I can.
And FWIW, among the other instructors, my costs aren't even particularly high.
If you're unable to manage your money it's your fault, but you're not working class
Here's the difference between rich and wealthy. Shaq, is rich, the white guy that signs his check is wealthy.
Rich is something you can lose over the summer in Vegas with a drug habit.
Im not sure why it's difficult to grasp that the difference between gross and net income can be large for some job in some areas, but that is the case for a small number of individuals.
If your after-tax income is $250k and you're spending $130k on loans and medical expenses, it would be foolish to sign up for a mortgage that costs $120k per year.
No they aren't! You can be working class but a millionaire, and you can be upper class but destitute.
That can easily be true, but it’s so ludicrously far from what normal people mean when they say that they “can’t afford McDonald’s for breakfast” that I think it drives the point home pretty well.
You aren’t poor because you already spent your allowance.
The fact that people in the upper echelons of the global upper echelons of financial resources don’t “feel rich” because we have to make “financial decisions” only when we’ve already spent all of the rest of our money is exactly the problem.
This isn’t, like, an upper-class character flaw. There’s some kind of normal human scale insensitivity that makes it really hard to understand how much a dollar is worth to someone else.
But it seems like if you do the math, you should acknowledge that you genuinely are one of the people getting paid off by the pyramid scheme. If you still feel constrained in your options, it’s because everyone at every level feels that way, because the whole system is lubricated from top to bottom by a pervasive sense of personal insufficiency. And actual poverty is still a lot worse.
What should be the focus is on the total wealth. Who controls the resources eating up all that income? And how much of that controls is concentrated into a few individuals?
Actually the giveaway is making over $35,000 a month.
(Wikipedia, naturally)
If you just mean high income when you write upper-class, you’re not communicating clearly.
> You’re going to have to back that assertion up.
I always thought about it by the distinction between can pay others or not.
Yes, it does.
Being in the top 1% is extraordinary. It’s a tautology, it’s not really arguable.
Ok I'll add that to my priorities list somewhere below figuring out how to pay for healthcare.
In option 1, the pie is growing for all, but for the rich faster than for the rest. In option 2, all of us are poorer, but we are more equal.
I would prefer option 1, while I believe many on the left would prefer option 2 given the proposals to enact socialism and seize property from those who have it.
If the choice were between no growth + equality and growth + no equality I too would choose growth. However, the period of the fastest economic growth in the US (1940-1950s) featured much higher taxes, much lower ratios between the highest and lowest paid, and much more economic equality. The idea that equality and growth are incompatible is unsupported dogma.
This is a much parroted line, but it needs to be pointed out just how exceptional of a time period the 1940s-1950s were in the history of the world. The US at this time was literally the only functioning industrialized economy left on earth. All of Europe, Russia, and Japan were left in ruins. China hadn't even remotely begun to industrialize. Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America's GDPs were totally negligible. If you wanted to buy anything beyond raw materials, it came from the US.
We live in a fundamentally different world now, where we must compete in a fully globalized economy. The US has succeeded at competing in high paid, high technology sectors, which by their nature have contributed to the inequality of incomes we now see.
Except for Australia, as manufacturing in Australia was still a thing then. And there were a few other developed nations that survived the war with their economies reasonably intact.
The USA wasn't a total global monopoly. Nor was international trade as common as it is now .
Is there a viable and realistic non-socialist strategy being proposed for helping in those sorts of situations?
No. The capitalist solution is to become rich enough to participate in the market, or else be denied that opportunity.
Equality of opportunity and access to resources beyond what the control of capital can provide is an inherently socialist concept.
I figure if we’re just going to make up random scenarios out of thin air to support our arguments we should definitely include one with ponies.
Growth comes from economic freedom, and economic freedom rewards people who create value. The only way to have the 1% not change and everyone else go up 5% would be crushing controls and oppression of the top 1%, but that lack of economic freedom would make the more general growth impossible. You would just get flight of capital and brain drain to a more economically free country.
People are inherently unequal in drive, intelligence, patience, work ethic, everything. The more economic freedom there is, the more unequal outcomes will be. The less economic freedom there is, the less unequal outcomes could potentially be, but there will be no growth or prosperity. So it seems the two choices are that we can have growth, but some people will gain more than others, or we can stagnate or shrink. I think it's magical thinking that we can just tax the successful into Oblivion and they will just keep working hard and nothing will go wrong.
So far as I can tell, the overwhelming drive from most people who hold a view on this, is that they want to be better off personally, they want those they care about to be better off, and ideally they'd like just about everyone to be better off who isn't already living a luxurious life, as long as that doesn't come at the cost of harming those they care about.
Option 1 is not happening - the pie isn't growing for all.
Not just economically. Civil rights taken away, freedom of movement taken away, xenophobic/racist commentary on the rise for now (not just online), children can't afford housing like their parents, work is less reliable, the hours when having to work multiple "gig" jobs are long, more people have to live in crappy shared housing, higher education is getting less affordable, you can't go anywhere without a feeling that both the state and economically powerful entities like your bank, politicians and health insurance are assessing your every action to decide how much to individually reward or punish you in the long run; that sort of thing is a shrinking of the pie as well. Even if you have lots of mobile phones and great internet, that doesn't mean life is unequivocally wealthier.
So, according to my theory, people see that whatever the "rich" are getting, it is coming at the cost of harming those they care about at the moment, so it's unacceptable. But they don't want anyone to be poorer, so they don't want option 2.
Another thing that has decimated the middle class is the general collapse of family. Divorce is the greatest family wealth destroyer in America.
People who care especially about jobs for the lower and middle classes support trade and immigration restriction politics. This is exactly why certain midwest states handed Trump the election in 2016, whatever imperfect good they got from that. I've been to these places. People in rust belt towns with closed factories did not think that the Democrats were going to bring the jobs back.
If free trade improves the overall economy by making the very rich slightly wealthier, and destroying the jobs of everyone else, it is obviously not an unalloyed good, and perhaps not in the interests of most people. Similarly with mass immigration.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/195955/divorce-rate-in-t...
part of that is due to marriage rates being down, but divorces as a percentage of marriages are also at the lowest point they've been since 1975:
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/03/divorce-rates...
The middle class in China and India (which barely existed a few decades ago) has profited tremendously from this. It's a natural equalisation: why does a worker in America deserve a better standard of living than a worker in Indian or China when the latter is willing to work so much harder to pull his family out of abject, mud-hut poverty?
This idea that Chinese and Indians would be living in mud hut level poverty without blessing from the American capitalist class is an feel good manufactured narrative.
India has very little integration to global supply chains, they famously followed a consumption lead growth model - "We feed our people before others".
China duped the American capitalist class using the carrot of profits.
They could have easily bought the technology and know how from Europeans, but couldn't believe their luck when they found out how easy it was to make Washington sell it's industrial base.
You are free to reindustrialize at paying 45 dollars / hour to assembly line workers.
This sounds right but is not very true. Look at the quality of living of lower income people, things like refrigerators, TVs, air conditioning, heaters, smartphones, cars, computers etc, and pretty much everything you can buy at walmart have dropped in price precisely because of the ability to cheaply import goods and services.
Things which cannot be or are not outsourced like college, doctors and hospitals are super expensive and unaffordable, and results not only in things like a saline bag costing hundreds of dollars instead of a couple. And this funnels money to the upper class e.g. doctors and college administrators from the lower classes, and results in inequality. Not to mention raising the income levels of other countries allows a lot of people in the US working for companies with a large overseas revenue component.
For wealth, the average of the one percent in the US is about $1.3 million. For the world, it depends on where you look, but it’s anywhere from $10 to 50k.
IMO, the problem is not their income; It’s that some billionaires literally hold more wealth than entire nations.
For wealth it is $10,000,000[2]
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/personal-finance/how-much-incom...
[2] https://dqydj.com/net-worth-brackets-wealth-brackets-one-per...
EDIT: correct headline
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-01-24/oxfam-...
2) You have taken the bad analysis and made it even worse. The headline says 8 men own as much as half the world (as much as the bottom 50%). That does NOT mean they own half the world. Far far far from it. (EDIT: you fixed this part with your edit)
So top 26 instead of top 8.
Anyway my point is that all these news article lump the top 1% together even though you can make similar headlines about just the top 0.1%, 0.01%, 0.001%, 0.0001%, 0.00001%, 0.000001%.
Whatever your point is, it's not very meaningful if it's supported by faulty evidence or reasoning.
I am saying the top 1% is 77 million people and you can narrow that group down by a lot and still make the same headline of top X surpasses wealth of bottom Y.
Keep in mind that the top 1% have a combined wealth of about 35 trillion. The combined wealth of all US billionaires is only 10% or so of that.
So the core idea that you seem to be trying to express, that the billionaires have it all, is just not accurate.
Personally I think the focus on the 1% is a bad tactic since it targets people who are everywhere all around us, whom their friends know to be talented or hard working or to have undertaken the stress of operating a small business or whatever. For that reason it does and will continue to come off as inappropriate/unfair/immature to demonize the 1%, and hell probably even the 0.1%. This is why Occupy Wall Street was so easily dismissed.
In the US, when we focus the discussion on the ultra rich and move it away from the merely well to do, we take the discussion away from what has to happen if we want things like single payer health care or vastly cheaper college education.
2) Also, for the record this is a little questionable:
compared to the 1%, most of whom still have to actively plan for retirement and worry about financial security
To be in the 1% of wealth you've got to have over 10 million dollars. If you've got that much on hand and you're all that worried about retirement you either can't do math or your idea of a comfortable retirement is quite lavish.
(a) implicitly constrain our notion of what is possible ("what is possible is what we can offset with a redistributive pay-for"), or
(b) in reckoning with the fact that billionaires can't (for instance) pay for single-payer health care, force ourselves to reject entirely the notion of accounting and economics (see MMT, which is a serious idea in academia but finds an entirely unserious expression in public policy).
Europe doesn't seem to have this problem; they seem simply to decide that everyone needs guaranteed-issue, subsidized, affordable health insurance (or a single payer), and then tax the middle class to pay for it.
Looking at this now though I think, okay, there's more of us than them. Let's just take it and figure out how to redistribute it. But I know most of them are probably innocent and goood people. I suspect the real problem is our failed government. Does anyone have any idea how we can solve wealth inequality? Will it happen or will we keep slipping?
Rich people always say they are smarter and deserve the money. Well that's fine. They'll continue being smarter and continue being rich but it'll just be a bit harder for them. Seems fair to me.
P.S. Yes I think a small wealth tax is a good start. Little tweaks
What they do have is more luck, either by their location of birth or parentage, being in the right place at the right time, and so on. There's no outsized intrinsic merit to the wealthy, as much as members of that class would prefer to believe.
Taxing the lucky to spread the luck around seems like a reasonable and commendable approach.
Most wealthy people I’ve met may have had occasional luck but they’ve also had bad luck. But they are smarter, work harder (more intensely and longer hours), and put themselves in positions to encounter luck/opportunity with high frequency. By and large I’ve observed it to be a result of their innate traits and active decision making.
This recent cultural obsession with claiming that merit isn’t real and that meritocracies are a myth is itself a feel-good myth with little basis in reality. Every piece I’ve read with such claims either rests on dubious statistics or pontificates endlessly to ultimately state personal opinion.
They always start out small, and targeted only to the top x%. Then politicians realize it's easier to tweak the rules and make it apply to just a few more people than it would be to create a whole new tax. Introducing a small wealth tax is the start of a whole new class of taxes. See the history of income tax from a limited wartime thing to a huge a percentage of government revenue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_State...
I would argue that instead of a wealth tax, a more sensible option would be to look at all the sources of income for very wealthy people that are treated differently than earned income. For example, capital gains tax rates, tax shelters in real estate, and other ways to get around normal tax rates.
The fact is that a good chunk of the population is terrible at impulse control and will just spend however much they have, regardless of what they earn. If you take money from investors and give it to these people, they'll just consume it all. Like how the majority of lottery winners end up blowing through all their money.
How many times is society going to "tax" the same money? The wages and compenstation have been taxed. The income from investments have been taxed. The realized gains on any investment have been taxed.
Their solution to this is 1) divide and conquer and 2) scapegoating.
Which is why a racist boomer robot took your job and gave it to a Chinese millenial mexican illegal immigrant on drugs.
I'm not totally sure whether it amplified the differences or took the lid off some rather nasty but hidden opinions. Either way the result hasn't been positive.
That's really only true of those whose wealth is entirely inherited.
Anyone who made it to the economic top by owning a company in this day and age is statistically nearly certain to have done so by shamelessly exploiting the labor of his workers, for instance.
- Income Inequality and the Taste for Revolution
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/426881
(Study based on global survey data and GINI coefficients.)
- Robert Reich: Everything You Need to Know About the New Economy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMmH_2EYohQ
- The dirty secret of capitalism -- and a new way forward | Nick Hanauer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th3KE_H27bs
- Why Free College Could Increase Inequality
https://www.thirdway.org/memo/why-free-college-could-increas...
Obama, who during his first term could have chosen fiscal policy and tax policy, instead decided to take on health care. Obamacare also weakened the middle class.
Care to elaborate?
More people are getting healthcare, hence more money is needed, and instead of raising taxes to pay for taxpayer funded healthcare, the US government decided to force health insurances to cover people who had to raise health "insurance" premiums.
More people were never going to get healthcare without an increase in either taxes or insurance premiums. Complaining about higher premiums is therefore complaining about more people getting healthcare, unless you would have rather higher taxes on the wealthy to pay for taxpayer funded healthcare for everyone.