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er, small business owners making $800,000+ a year? I don't think that's very easy to relate to. Who is waging this campaign? I don't think is a campaign to vi

er, small business owners making $800,000+ a year? I don't think that's very easy to relate to. Who is waging this campaign? I don't think is a campaign to vilify the 1% as much as it's an increased awareness by the 99% that no one needs to be making $800,000 a year. As people see home ownership being increasingly implausible, healthcare difficult to afford, fulfilling work unable to be found and less than $1000 in savings, is it any wonder people are upset, bothered and judgemental of people who make an impossibly larger amount of money than 99% of people?

hueving 9y ago
The number you're looking for is $465k. https://www.investopedia.com/news/how-much-income-puts-you-top-1-5-10/ https://www.investopedia.com/news/how-much-income-puts-you-t... >that no one needs to be making $800,000 a year. And that's where the mistake is. A significant number of people (including me) are fine with someone creating a company, selling it for a few million, or just having 10 good years of operation and retiring. The rewards for creating something new need to be worth the risk of complete failure and loss of income for those years. This is the problem with using 1%. The bottom of the 1% is filled with normal professionals that took huge risks (starting businesses) or spent a significant amount of time in training (brain surgeon). >As people see home ownership being increasingly implausible Not if you give up on living in the most expensive parts of the US. Even then, a housing shortage is hardly attributable to income inequality. Just look at the bay area where there are people making good money. The housing shortage has caused prices to sky rocket to absorb up all of that difference. If you have 1000 people fighting for 100 houses, 900 people are going to get screwed regardless of income inequality. > healthcare difficult to afford, A broken healthcare system can't be fixed by fewer rich people. >fulfilling work unable to be found and less than $1000 in savings Capping incomes of successful professions will not add more fulfilling professions nor will it increase their savings. >Who is waging this campaign? Well people like you who claim nobody needs to make a lot of money and then blame a bunch of unrelated issues on income inequality. I can't tell if it was just the mathematical ignorance of who started the movement or if it was partially orchestrated by the super-rich. But by making it include skilled professionals that had to put in huge risks to get where they are, they lost significant support of the population within 50% of that income. >is it any wonder people are upset, bothered and judgemental of people who make an impossibly larger amount of money than 99% of people? I don't know what "impossibly larger" is supposed to mean in this context. Someone who makes $250k will not see someone who makes $500k as making an "impossibly larger" amount of money than them. If this whole movement had been more carefully crafted to exclude people that had to go to medical school and go $350k into debt, I don't think there would have been very much disagreement from a significant chunk of the US. As it stands, it just looks like an arbitrary cut-off screwing the people who managed to secure a good life rather than being focused on people with enough money to hire full-time Washington lobbyists.
- evanlivingston 9y ago
  > The number you're looking for is $465k. The link references data from 2014. > The rewards for creating something new need to be worth the risk of complete failure and loss of income for those years. New things are not inherently valuable by virtue of being new. I don't feel that we ought to reward people who for merely creating things that are new. And why should anyone be rewarded beyond having a comfortable, easy life? $465,000 is an insane salary, magnitudes larger than is required for a comfortable life. > Not if you give up on living in the most expensive parts of the US. You're thinking in a narrow context. For someone like me who moved from the midwest to the west coast, yah, I could just go back "home". The larger issue however is that, to borrow a tired phrase, it takes a village to raise a child. The jobs that make a city work are largely not high-income earning jobs. That is: paramedics, firefighters, teachers, bus drivers, road repairmen, linemen, auto mechanics, delivery drivers, locksmiths, and on and on. Much fewer of these people are transplants than the high-earners and don't have support networks in those cheaper parts of the country. Creating cities where only the wealthy can afford to live necessarily, forcefully pushes other people out. > Even then, a housing shortage is hardly attributable to income inequality. While I agree that it's vital to build enough housing for the demand, there is one reason alone that a house can cost $600,000. That is because someone has ~$120,000 in liquid, spendable cash. If everyone had only $1000 of cash, how much could a house possibly cost. > A broken healthcare system can't be fixed by fewer rich people. I agree, the healthcare system is broken and the problem isn't for lack of money. But when you see politicians attempting to gut medicare for tax breaks for the rich it doesn't little to instill confidence that that money could be better spent. > Capping incomes of successful professions will not add more fulfilling professions nor will it increase their savings. I agree. > But by making it include skilled professionals that had to put in huge risks to get where they are "Huge Risks"? If you have stories about skilled professionals who risked their security and failed I'd love to hear them. > I don't know what "impossibly larger" is supposed to mean in this context. Someone who makes $250k will not see someone who makes $500k as making an "impossibly larger" amount of money than them. Sure, but someone who makes $45,000 is likely to see $100,000 as impossibly larger. Referencing the professions I listed above, can those skilled professional expect to make $250,000 a year in their profession? > If this whole movement had been more carefully crafted to exclude people that had to go to medical school and go $350k into debt While I only know a handful of people who have gone to medical school or law school, the path to repaying those loans seems to be pretty straightforward and perhaps a little nerve-racking at times, but I don't know anyone who's gone destitute as a result of those loans. Also, I'm critical of a system that puts the burden of risk on the individual for training individuals to do those important, necessary jobs. Their risk-taking isn't what we ought to be rewarding, it's the value that those professions bring to the general population. These problems are all intersectional. Is it the fault of rich people that there are poor people? Often not, in some cases yes. There have long been abuses of the lower economic classes by the higher economic classes. I think one the largest problems is how quickly wealthy people lose solidarity with lower earners and believe that it's their "hard work" that got them their wealth. People stuck in lower incomes know how ignorant that belief is. It's also exceedingly difficult for a person living paycheck to paycheck, raising a family or caring for dependent parent or whatever, to solidarity with someone who was in a position to go to med school or study law. Anger is often misplaced and I agree that the delineation between the %1 and the %99 percent is often fuzzed, but that doesn't make the anger an less real, any less meaningful.
edanm 9y ago
People being upset is a poor sign that things are actually wrong, or that they could change. I'm upset when natural disasters occur, but I don't blame anyone for them. I'm upset when it's too cold outside, but I don't blame anyone for that. The problem is that, when it comes to the economy, people for some reason think that it's nothing like a force of nature - they (sometimes subconsciously) assume that if one person is rich, that means another person is poor. Or even, that if someone is rich, than that has something to do with whether she "deserves" it. That's close[1] to being as nonsensical as asking if someone "deserved" to die in a hurricane. [1] I write "close", because this only applies in a good capitalist economy. There are of course ways to cheat, whether by directly stealing money from other people (in which case you'd go to jail in a well functioning society), or by changing the laws to benefit yourself (which is a subversion of the capitalist system, but it can happen. It's not what people are usually complaining about though).

hueving 9y ago

The number you're looking for is $465k. https://www.investopedia.com/news/how-much-income-puts-you-top-1-5-10/ https://www.investopedia.com/news/how-much-income-puts-you-t... >that no one needs to be making $800,000 a year. And that's where the mistake is. A significant number of people (including me) are fine with someone creating a company, selling it for a few million, or just having 10 good years of operation and retiring. The rewards for creating something new need to be worth the risk of complete failure and loss of income for those years. This is the problem with using 1%. The bottom of the 1% is filled with normal professionals that took huge risks (starting businesses) or spent a significant amount of time in training (brain surgeon). >As people see home ownership being increasingly implausible Not if you give up on living in the most expensive parts of the US. Even then, a housing shortage is hardly attributable to income inequality. Just look at the bay area where there are people making good money. The housing shortage has caused prices to sky rocket to absorb up all of that difference. If you have 1000 people fighting for 100 houses, 900 people are going to get screwed regardless of income inequality. > healthcare difficult to afford, A broken healthcare system can't be fixed by fewer rich people. >fulfilling work unable to be found and less than $1000 in savings Capping incomes of successful professions will not add more fulfilling professions nor will it increase their savings. >Who is waging this campaign? Well people like you who claim nobody needs to make a lot of money and then blame a bunch of unrelated issues on income inequality. I can't tell if it was just the mathematical ignorance of who started the movement or if it was partially orchestrated by the super-rich. But by making it include skilled professionals that had to put in huge risks to get where they are, they lost significant support of the population within 50% of that income. >is it any wonder people are upset, bothered and judgemental of people who make an impossibly larger amount of money than 99% of people? I don't know what "impossibly larger" is supposed to mean in this context. Someone who makes $250k will not see someone who makes $500k as making an "impossibly larger" amount of money than them. If this whole movement had been more carefully crafted to exclude people that had to go to medical school and go $350k into debt, I don't think there would have been very much disagreement from a significant chunk of the US. As it stands, it just looks like an arbitrary cut-off screwing the people who managed to secure a good life rather than being focused on people with enough money to hire full-time Washington lobbyists.

evanlivingston 9y ago
> The number you're looking for is $465k. The link references data from 2014. > The rewards for creating something new need to be worth the risk of complete failure and loss of income for those years. New things are not inherently valuable by virtue of being new. I don't feel that we ought to reward people who for merely creating things that are new. And why should anyone be rewarded beyond having a comfortable, easy life? $465,000 is an insane salary, magnitudes larger than is required for a comfortable life. > Not if you give up on living in the most expensive parts of the US. You're thinking in a narrow context. For someone like me who moved from the midwest to the west coast, yah, I could just go back "home". The larger issue however is that, to borrow a tired phrase, it takes a village to raise a child. The jobs that make a city work are largely not high-income earning jobs. That is: paramedics, firefighters, teachers, bus drivers, road repairmen, linemen, auto mechanics, delivery drivers, locksmiths, and on and on. Much fewer of these people are transplants than the high-earners and don't have support networks in those cheaper parts of the country. Creating cities where only the wealthy can afford to live necessarily, forcefully pushes other people out. > Even then, a housing shortage is hardly attributable to income inequality. While I agree that it's vital to build enough housing for the demand, there is one reason alone that a house can cost $600,000. That is because someone has ~$120,000 in liquid, spendable cash. If everyone had only $1000 of cash, how much could a house possibly cost. > A broken healthcare system can't be fixed by fewer rich people. I agree, the healthcare system is broken and the problem isn't for lack of money. But when you see politicians attempting to gut medicare for tax breaks for the rich it doesn't little to instill confidence that that money could be better spent. > Capping incomes of successful professions will not add more fulfilling professions nor will it increase their savings. I agree. > But by making it include skilled professionals that had to put in huge risks to get where they are "Huge Risks"? If you have stories about skilled professionals who risked their security and failed I'd love to hear them. > I don't know what "impossibly larger" is supposed to mean in this context. Someone who makes $250k will not see someone who makes $500k as making an "impossibly larger" amount of money than them. Sure, but someone who makes $45,000 is likely to see $100,000 as impossibly larger. Referencing the professions I listed above, can those skilled professional expect to make $250,000 a year in their profession? > If this whole movement had been more carefully crafted to exclude people that had to go to medical school and go $350k into debt While I only know a handful of people who have gone to medical school or law school, the path to repaying those loans seems to be pretty straightforward and perhaps a little nerve-racking at times, but I don't know anyone who's gone destitute as a result of those loans. Also, I'm critical of a system that puts the burden of risk on the individual for training individuals to do those important, necessary jobs. Their risk-taking isn't what we ought to be rewarding, it's the value that those professions bring to the general population. These problems are all intersectional. Is it the fault of rich people that there are poor people? Often not, in some cases yes. There have long been abuses of the lower economic classes by the higher economic classes. I think one the largest problems is how quickly wealthy people lose solidarity with lower earners and believe that it's their "hard work" that got them their wealth. People stuck in lower incomes know how ignorant that belief is. It's also exceedingly difficult for a person living paycheck to paycheck, raising a family or caring for dependent parent or whatever, to solidarity with someone who was in a position to go to med school or study law. Anger is often misplaced and I agree that the delineation between the %1 and the %99 percent is often fuzzed, but that doesn't make the anger an less real, any less meaningful.

edanm 9y ago

People being upset is a poor sign that things are actually wrong, or that they could change. I'm upset when natural disasters occur, but I don't blame anyone for them. I'm upset when it's too cold outside, but I don't blame anyone for that. The problem is that, when it comes to the economy, people for some reason think that it's nothing like a force of nature - they (sometimes subconsciously) assume that if one person is rich, that means another person is poor. Or even, that if someone is rich, than that has something to do with whether she "deserves" it. That's close[1] to being as nonsensical as asking if someone "deserved" to die in a hurricane. [1] I write "close", because this only applies in a good capitalist economy. There are of course ways to cheat, whether by directly stealing money from other people (in which case you'd go to jail in a well functioning society), or by changing the laws to benefit yourself (which is a subversion of the capitalist system, but it can happen. It's not what people are usually complaining about though).