5 ms·

> I, the middle class engineer get fucked by the taxes Fwiw we feel like middle class but we’re really in the top 5% or higher. We’re the rich people these tax

• mrkurt 6y ago
  Middle class engineers make 7 figure salaries?
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • Swizec 6y ago
    No, that’s the top 0.35% Where does the middle class top off? $125,000/year individual income puts you in top 10%. Pretty normal for a software engineer. Is that middle class?
    • dataflow 6y ago
      > Where does the middle class top off? $125,000/year individual income puts you in top 10%. Is that middle class? Depends on the location and cost of living? And no I'm not saying you should just offset income by exactly the CoL. Obviously being in a prime location has its own benefits too. But you can't just assume the benefits cancel the extra cost of living either; they certainly don't cancel for everybody. The balance is somewhere in between. (I don't have a formula.)
• tfehring 6y ago
  More than 1% of US households (something like 1.5M households with a total of ~3M people) have >$10M in household net worth. The primary target is that class, irrespective of its members’ earned income, in part because they can reliably earn mid-six-figures per year in returns to capital alone. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2019/10/22/the-number-of-millionaires-has-boomedheres-where-your-net-worth-ranks-compared-to-others/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2019/10/22/the-number...
  • AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    Great, but there are many more mid-six-figure earners who don't have >$10M in household net worth. And if you tax mid-six-figure earners, you get them, too. If you want to target wealth over $10M, tax wealth over $10M.
    • brianwawok 6y ago
      Are you excluding primary residence? A lot of paper millionaires due to lucky real estate
      • CPLX 6y ago
        > paper millionaires Is there some other kind of millionaire?
        • seangrogg 6y ago
          I'd imagine in this case it's more a matter of liquidity. It's one thing to say you have a million dollars to your name. The difference is that one person has to sell everything they own to command that value while someone else just calls their broker to have it liquidated from their rainy day fund.
          • CPLX 6y ago
            Indeed, and in 2021 I think it’s pretty clear that owning a residence means you have a reasonably liquid asset. But more to the actual point. To the extent a concept of “paper wealth” exists it should be confined to things that are genuinely unable to be converted into real money at all. For example stock options in a seed stage company are genuinely illiquid and may never be worth anything ever to anyone. People living in a million dollar house and saying it’s not really wealth and shouldn’t count sound pretty out of touch to the rest of the world that doesn’t get to live in a million dollar house.
            • 6y ago
• SvenMarquardt 6y ago
  You need to reframe it. How many $ do the top 0.35% own vs the next 5%.
• tarsinge 6y ago
  > The ultra rich/wealthy are a red herring, there’s only a few 10k of them of them. Only 614 people are billionaires. Have a look at what inconveniencing just 400 of them would do (they would still be billionaire after) https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/ https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
  • bpodgursky 6y ago
    To save other people time, this is nothing but a gimmicky html box showing what a stack of money looks like compared to other stacks of money.
    • SantalBlush 6y ago
      Do you mean data visualization?
• ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  "there’s only a few 10k of them of them." And they own half the country.
• odiroot 6y ago
  Being a software engineer in a EU country, you're definitely not a classically rich person. In USA, maybe? In EU not so much. There's so many professions (quite common at that) that earn more, or even much more than us.
  • aantix 6y ago
    Why aren’t software engineers valued more in EU?
    • tiborsaas 6y ago
      Most people accept it's just another job which pays a bit (somewhere a lot more) better compared to alternatives. Also the companies who employ these engineers aren't making that much money to burn. That's just my hunch, I haven't done a thorough research.
    • brianwawok 6y ago
      I have asked this several times. I think the answer is because they can. If you want to make more money you become a manager. Developers are just like electricians or brick layers. They also don’t have the FAANG to create tons of value from software.
    • adflux 6y ago
      Matter of scale. A team of engineers working on building a Dutch marketplace has a potential customer base of 18 million. An American company doing the same can reach 300 million. Assuming equal complexity, the American engineer can deliver far more value because his target audience is much larger. Scale can be like a force multiplier for engineers. Makes them deliver more value and employers are able to pay them more.
      • bosie 6y ago
        What is value in this context though? Seems for Google the value is actual money and for a startup it is a potential future earning? Yet the startup developer in San Francisco is still (presumably) paid 200k or more? If that startup fails, was the developer overvalued?
• jahewson 6y ago
  No, no, earning a salary is for poor people. Real rich people own things. They also happen to own most of the things.
  • brianwawok 6y ago
    * own things that make money
• RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
  > Fwiw we feel like middle class but we’re really in the top 5% or higher. I think middle class is about where your money comes from than the amount of your money. If you are primarily deriving your income from from working for a company you don’t control, then I think you are middle class.
  • Swizec 6y ago
    What if you're one of those AI research folks making, say, $500,000/year in salary. Are you middle class? What if you invest 70% of those 500,000 because your CoL is only 150,000. Still middle class? Cold hard cash is an asset if you use it like an asset. Well okay, your cold hard lucrative skills are the asset in this case.
    • dragonwriter 6y ago
      > What if you're one of those AI research folks making, say, $500,000/year in salary. Are you middle class? Assuming you are completely dependent on the salary for support, you are high income working-class intelligentsia. > What if you invest 70% of those 500,000 because your CoL is only 150,000. Still middle class? Assuming the returns from those investments are as important to your ability to get by (even if you aren’t touching them currently, but they ade backstopping your labor income), then you’ve achieved middle-class (petit bourgeios) status, instead of merely working class. > Cold hard cash is an asset if you use it like an asset. Well okay, your cold hard lucrative skills are the asset in this case. “Skills to do labor that is valued by capitalists” are assets, sure, but they are the assets determining success within (and perhaps at the extremes the potential to move out of) the working class. Ownership of transferrable capital assets defines the difference between the working class and the higher classes in a capitalist economy.
  • dragonwriter 6y ago
    > If you are primarily deriving your income from from working for a company you don’t control, then I think you are middle class. That’s the classic definition of working class. Having a roughly equal (in terms of importance) split between capital and labor dependence for income (such as by applying your labor to your own capital as an independent small-business owner or yeoman farmer) is the traditional middle class.