Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

I'm tired of hearing the term "the 1%" used for stuff like this. The 1% is 3,000,000 Americans. I've seen income figures for that demographic ranging between $160,000 and $500,000 a year. The lower end is pretty much in reach of any professional working in New York or San Francisco with more than a few years of experience. (This is total compensation, 401k matching, stock, etc.) All this tells you is that the population mostly lives in expensive areas; rent in New York City can be 10x higher than elsewhere in the US.

I'll tell you as someone around that income range in New York... I don't get invited to parties where we discuss how to screw over the working man. I ride my bike to work, spend half the day there, ride my bike around Brooklyn, watch some TV on a 720p LCD that I bought 6 or 7 years ago, and then go to bed in my bedroom that's too small to actually contain a bed. (The mattress fits.)

Admittedly, I've accumulated some savings this way, but still, New York is really fucking expensive, and it's not hard to spend make what sounds like a lot of money on ordinary things like food and shelter in non-premium neighborhoods.

According to this, they also have 10 million in wealth, not only the 160.000 a year. You're probably not in the 1%:

"The 1 percent threshold for net worth in the Fed data was nearly $8.4 million"

Source: economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/measuring-the-top-1-by-wealth-not-income/

www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/business/the-1-percent-paint-a-more-nuanced-portrait-of-the-rich.html

That's a convenient (at least for the young, upper-income HN demographic) but ahistorical definition. The use of "top 1%" in political rhetoric goes back at least to Al Gore's 2000 campaign for president, as a cudgel against George W. Bush's proposed tax cuts. Gore is quite clear in his October 17 debate that he's talking about income when he speaks of the $330,000 (household) earnings cutoff to be in the 1%[1].

It continued to be a common refrain against upper bracket tax reductions for a decade, and it was still being used in that sense by politicians and activists at the time it graduated into the slogans of Occupy Wall Street.

[1] http://www.debates.org/?page=october-17-2000-debate-transcri...

>The lower end is pretty much in reach of any professional working in New York or San Francisco with more than a few years of experience

Only if you define "any professional" as less than 1% of the population. Accept the fact that you are a high income person, and react according to what your morality dictates for high income people.

In a room with 100 random Americans, you are as likely as not to have the highest income in the room.

Everyone who uses that realizes that the term is a mental shortcut. "One percent" rolls easier of the tongue than "one pertrille". Please don't take it personal, nobody's talking about you. :)

Essentially, you don't like the phrase "the 1%" because you're in it?

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