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No, the upper middle class is the one screwing everything up. Not the billionaires. Want to have cheap healthcare? You can't have that with doctors earning 400
by rsj_hn 5y ago
No, the upper middle class is the one screwing everything up. Not the billionaires.
Want to have cheap healthcare? You can't have that with doctors earning 400K and nurses earning 120K. It's impossible. But you can have that with a few billionaires.
Want affordable university education? You can't have that with universities that have 3 non-academic full time staff for every full time professor. It's impossible. But you can have that with a few billionaires.
Want a genuine left party in the US? The professional classes are what co-opted the progressive movement, not billionaires.
Who does outsourcing benefit? Primarily managers and business process outsourcers. They are the ones driving outsourcing, as it creates a swollen professional class and the blue collar workers they manage are viewed as cogs. This is also why there is the rise of culture wars as the professionals need a justification to let them sleep at night as they screw the domestic working class, and that justification is that the working class people deserve to be screwed because they don't support trans rights or some other niche cause that serves as a moral differentiator between the urban professional classes and the working class.
Tired of the Administrative state? That's not happening because of billionaires, it's happening because the professional classes have extracted all that the market will allow, and now need to extract even more, using the power of the state to increase their control over society and extract more resources from it.
I recommend reading Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank. He has some choice words for the professional class, and a good history of their ascendancy.
- nobodyandproud 5y agoYou’ve inhaled the kool-aid.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- seattle_spring 5y agoIt kind of sounds like you believe that we should prevent everyone from become successful (upper-middle class), rather than implementing policies that try and enable upward mobility for everyone.
- rsj_hn 5y agoIt kinda sounds like you haven't really read my post if you conflate the existence of an upper middle class with the political power such a class holds in shaping how society is organized. The story of the post-war era is not the disproportionate power of billionaires, but the disproportionate power of the professional and managerial class. It's not billionaires that make healthcare expensive, but overpaid doctors, nurses, and hospital bureaucrats.
- rz2k 5y agoIt sounds reasonable to anyone who doesn't work with macro data to say that "a few billionaires" cannot have a measurable effect. There are approximately one million physicians earning an average income of about $300k. That accounts for approximately 7% of $3.8 trillion spent on healthcare. Another way to look at it. The total assets of individuals earning over $540k increased by over 30% from $27.58T to $36.23T from 2020q2 to 2021q2. That is, the net worth of just the 1% of highest earners in the country increased by an amount equivalent to 28 years of physicians' salaries in a single year. Political discourse on the distribution of wealth in the US does seem intent on convincing people who make a few hundred thousand dollars that they feel economic stress because they are propping up the truly destitute, and convincing the destitute that they feel economic stress because professionals are making $300k or $400k. Actual data relating to the percentage share of wealth in the United States[1] spanning 1989q3 to 2021q2 by income percentiles show that people in the 60th up to the 99th percentiles have hardly changed their percentage ownership of assets in the country, but everyone below the 60th percentile in income has lost ground, and that wealth ownership has been almost exclusively been acquired by those in the top percentile. 80-99th: 43.6 -> 43.6 60-80th: 16.7 -> 15.4 40-60th: 12.3 -> 7.2 20-40th: 7.4 -> 4.0 0-20th: 2.9 -> 2.7 99-100 : 17.2 -> 27.0 Note that these data begin in 1989, which was already the first year in the post-WWII period that the gini ratio exceeded 0.4 following economic policies intended to shift wealth away from lower earners (it is 0.458 in 2020, and was most equitable in 1968 at 0.348). (Table F-4 [2]) [1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/table/#quarter:127;series:Net%20worth;demographic:income;population:all;units:shares https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr... [2] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/historical-income-inequality.html https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-p...
- naveen99 5y agoGood luck running society without professionals. how do you propose to distinguish the best from the not so best of the labor class, if to just call them to do overtime because the others didn’t show up for work. And who will call them to show up to work ? Or who will decide where to work and what to do ? Oh , why does anyone have to work. Good point. Never mind.