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Wealth inequality will destroy America. (europe.pub)
submitted 5 days ago by to c/workreform@lemmy.world
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This cartoon from The Seattle Times illustrates how America's economic pizza is actually sliced per capita, highlighting the massive disparity between the Top 1%, the merely wealthy, the upper middle class, and the lower 50%.

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[–] 28 points 4 days ago (8 children)

Actually the top 1% in the US is ~600k per year. It's a lot of cash but not entirely outside the realm of possibility for some extremely senior software architect/manager combo at some VC startup, which is also within the lemmy target audience.

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  • [–] 26 points 4 days ago (3 children)

    ~600k per year

    Why are you using income? It's wealth that matters and that's a ~$16M cutoff.

    To reach that you'd need to be earning ~600k per year for 2-3 decades, to invest the majority of it, and to get absurd stock returns on top of that.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 days ago* (2 children)

    Which is still, just insane to think about.

    Like holy crap I can hardly imagine seeing 4 dollar-digits of liquidity in my account. In my lifetime, and I think I work hard in a role in society like anybody else.

    Something like that would require the most unlikely of windfalls. To think there's people out there, somewhat "commonly", going "Hmmm yerrs, let's put $20k into these stonks. Indeeed..."

    ...and then they reap returns, and go on and start businesses with "risk" (but not much, proportionally) and then publish books about "quitting the rat race and following your dreams."

    And they might be a few zip codes away from me. It's nuts to me. Incomprehensible, really. Just...damn.

    I don't wanna be rich, that sounds awful. I just wanna stop forever bracing against the next inevitable-but-untimeable calamity that threatens to throw us all out on the street.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    Like holy crap I can hardly imagine seeing 4 dollar-digits of liquidity in my account. In my lifetime, and I think I work hard in a role in society like anybody else.

    What do you mean by 4 dollar-digits of liquidity? Like $1000? That feels a bit low unless you're in a country where the yearly income is 1-2K.

    …and then they reap returns, and go on and start businesses with “risk” (but not much, proportionally) and then publish books about “quitting the rat race and following your dreams.”

    It's even lower than you'd think. The cutoff for basically never needing to work again in your life is around $1M so top 18% of the US. At that point as long as you're willing to live off 30-40K and invest in index funds statistically you'll only ever get wealthier. (at least historically for the last several decades)

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago

    Haha yeah sorry I was struggling to convey that properly. US American here.

    Like, after the paycheck comes in, and we pay all the bills, yeah having some 1000's just left over to decide what to do with would be quite cushy.

    We're a couple that both work decently paying part times. Living with family makes that possible, but unavoidable debts (and climbing insurance rates) the last few years balanced it out.

    So I mean, we live comfortably and we're materially content. But also times are really scary where another 2008 could hit us real bad.

    So it's still weird imagining people just having lots of padding floating around. Lol

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  • [–] 21 points 4 days ago* (1 child)

    Yeah but they would never admit to being a 1%er here if they know what's good for them.

    And besides, nowadays the real oligarchs are 0.1%ers or even 0.01%ers.

    1%ers at this point are literally just the higher end of the upper-middle class...

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  • [–] 3 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    I gather this is roughly true wrt income (other estimates place this closer to 750k per household), but not wealth (which i believe is ~14 million to be in the top 1% in the US). Note that this income estimate does not include unrealized capital gains and that a 10% return on a 14 million portfolio is 1.4 million per year in passive income.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 days ago

    Most people in the lower 50% believe that anyone that has any money, especially $1M+ is part of the 1%. The complete lack of understanding of income and wealth escalation in the last couple decades is what keeps many people voting against their own interests. Many $1M-aires believe that with the right government policy and lower taxes, always lower taxes, they would quickly become part of the 1% and be "just like Musk". They believe that the system that aides and abets billionaires would equally benefit themselves and cannot see that they are part of the riff raff, the same as a homeless person, in the eyes of the billionaire class.

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