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Did you have a way of seeing this as a good thing?
by windowshopping 3y ago
Did you have a way of seeing this as a good thing?
- somedude895 3y agoThere's also a way of seeing it as just a thing.
- breadbreadbread 3y agoonly if you are content with the way the US economy works, which requires wearing some pretty large blinders
- breadbreadbread 3y agoactually no, I don't think anyone should look at the wealth spread in the US and think that it's normal or good. It's objectively dangerous and undemocratic. If someone can earn millions a day from passive investment but someone who actually provides meaningful goods and services day-to-day barely makes 50k a year, I think we have totally misunderstood as a society what to value and how to distribute resources
- exabrial 3y agoThere are plenty of people on earth living less than $1usd a day and would trade their situation gladly for a very comfortable $50kusd/year.
- breadbreadbread 3y agoimagine if i told you that i think everyone deserves to make a wage that allows them to thrive and have stability. Also consider that A) things are more expensive here and B) our economy is debt based and many people with homes and cars in the US have negative income after expenses, just because aesthetically our poverty looks different, it doesn't mean that it's good. It's not comparable.
- al_borland 3y agoDebt is heavily marketed, but ultimately a personal choice. For those who choose to live within their means and not take on debt, they don’t have most of their paycheck going out the door to pay for last month, or have negative income. I’ve had people who make less than me tell me I live like a poor person. That’s ok. I know I’m doing fine and they have since told me about some of their money struggles, and have a lot of debt to deal with each month. Maybe if people stopped using debt to pretend they had more than they do, we’d see more reasonable housing and car prices, as well as goods that are made with some quality and repairablity instead of things like fast fashion that simplely gets thrown away. Companies doing business in the US go to where the demand is. People need to stop using debt to demand junk that makes things worse. Step one could be ratching down the average home size. It has more than doubled since the 1950s, while the number of people in the house has gone down. A bigger home is naturally going to be more expensive to buy/build, but then it also takes more land, has higher property taxes, costs more to heat/cool, costs more to repair and maintain, has more rooms to furnish, and has more place to put stuff before a person needs to stop and question if this need all of it. Simply living in a more modest home or apartment can have a massive effect on a person’s finances.
- breadbreadbread 3y agoif your opinion is that some people make millions a day and some people make $1 a day and thats just life and we shouldnt try to change that, I think you are fundamentally lost. Also consider: where do the billionaires in the US get the resources to fuel their empires? Do they get their cobalt from slave labor mines in the Congo? Do you think maybe there is some kind of connection between corporate greed in America and people on the other side of the world making $1/day or less?
- sapphicsnail 3y agoSo as long as there is someone more miserable than me, I can't want something better?
- MerManMaid 3y ago>There are plenty of people on earth living less than $1usd a day and would trade their situation gladly for a very comfortable $50kusd/year. This is absolutely besides the point. I also wish as many people as possible could make enough money to live comfortable lives but it has nothing to do with the problem of people passively earning millions of dollars without contributing anything positive to society.
- bwanab 3y agoOnly if you forget to notice that the bottom 20% in the US lives better than the majority of the rest of the world.
- bcrosby95 3y agoSo what you're saying is the lifestyle of the bottom 20% should be good enough for the rich in the US too.
- bmitc 3y agoThat is not necessarily true nor does it negate the point.
- exabrial 3y agoWhat he said is _most definitely true_: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2prHCbrVUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2prHCbrVUw
- breadbreadbread 3y ago"a bad thing happens somewhere in the world therefore you shouldn't complain"
- exabrial 3y agoPrecisely. It's called being an entitled brat.
- bmitc 3y agoIt's insane to consider people suffering from malnutrition, lack of education, food scarcity, lack of access to healthcare as "entitled brats". I just don't even understand how one comes to that conclusion.
- breadbreadbread 3y agoyou know all this shit is connected right? the rich in America exploit labor to accumulate profit -> funnel that shit into investments to passively increase their income -> investment firms squeeze their controlled companies to generate more profit to increase shareholder value -> companies outsource labor to the 3rd world to reduce costs and give savings to shareholders -> those foreign businesses exploit their workers to a greater degree because there is less/none regulation -> people in other countries get paid $1 a day Fighting corporate greed in the US is in effect fighting for the rights of laborers internationally that are negatively affected by American business interests. No one who fights for this kind of change does so for selfish reasons, it's for all of us.
- swells34 3y agoWell, it's a bad thing for 90% of American households no matter how you look at it. Additionally, based on the comment from dwallin, it's likely a bad thing for 99.9% of American households. This is an odd state of being for a democracy, you'd think that we'd support laws that benefit the majority, since the idea of democracy is that the majority sets policy.
- BeetleB 3y ago> Well, it's a bad thing for 90% of American households no matter how you look at it. It sounds like you believe that if the ownership share of the top 10% went up, then the average wealth of the bottom 90% went down. The latter does not follow from the former. Both can have seen increases in wealth.
- bmitc 3y agoNearly every measure you can think of for standards of living, health, education, etc. is negatively affected by the increase of wealth inequality.
- BeetleB 3y agoThis is a generalism in response to a precise statement. It's a simple question: Has the wealth of the lowest 90% gone up or down? (And 90% is too coarse. Would be good to see it for every decile.)
- wyre 3y agoWealth for the lower 90% has gone up but that is nearly meaningless when the cost of living has increased much greater than any of those wealth increases.
- BeetleB 3y agoOK - new claim: > but that is nearly meaningless when the cost of living has increased much greater than any of those wealth increases. Can we show that for each decile?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- agent327 3y agoIt implies you are not living in a communist society, and therefore allowed a measure of control over your own life. It means you have the right to own property, while making it less likely that you'll be sent to a reeducation camp, or die of starvation. Meanwhile, if you want the Bezoses, Zuckerbergs, and Musks of this world to stop being so rich, there is actually a simple, straightforward way to achieve this: STOP GIVING THEM MONEY. Don't order crap of Amazon. Don't look at ads on social media. Don't buy that luxury electric car. It's not them taking all the money, it's us giving it to them.
- beezlewax 3y agoLol
- twojacobtwo 3y agoI think your comment goes against the site's guidelines, but damned if it isn't exactly the response that the parent post deserves.
- beezlewax 3y agoYes it was an extremely lazy post so apologies on my part, but I'm a little lost for words when I see comments like the parent one.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kiba 3y agoSure, but not everybody's going to do that. It's a very small lever to affect causality.
- micromacrofoot 3y agoI don't use Amazon, Tesla, or Facebook and it's not working.
- 3y ago
- Vaslo 3y agoThere is a another way to look at it, though maybe not very positive. It tells me that though they probably have preferred stock and other types of investments I don't have access to, I should invest in whatever they invest in. People with that much wealth and power are going to fight to the end to keep it, I might as well ride along.
- bmitc 3y agoThis is naive. They will never let that happen. Those at the top regularly insider trade, manipulate the market, and perform all sorts of lobbying to make sure the game is in their favor. You are not playing with the same rules as they are. For example, just look at the contribution limits for IRAs and Roth IRAs. They are disgustingly low, limiting people with salaries just barely big enough to afford a mortgage with an hour commute. Now, why is that? It's because it keeps the middle class in place while the upper class has several loopholes they exploit to put generational levels of money into these accounts. The story goes on and on.
- Spivak 3y agoThis is a weird take, even if the game is rigged no amount of market manipulation can defeat just buying and holding. Those are limits on tax advantaged accounts. You can put any amount of money you want into whatever market and have the growth taxed at capital gains rates. If you're talking about backdoor Roths you can (and should) take advantage of it, it's not a rich-person only thing.
- bmitc 3y agoIf it isn't only a rich people thing, then how do people amass hundreds of millions and even billions in Roth IRA accounts? Those numbers far exceed, by many orders of magnitude, the contribution limits and assumptions of 10% growth over decades.
- Spivak 3y agoBecause Roth accounts aren't taxed on the growth, and the growth is unbounded. 1. Put in $6000/yr into your Roth. 2. Invest in low-cost, high-risk high-reward stocks. 3. Get lucky. 4. Boom your Roth is worth millions. For more seed money look at the list of the accounts you're still allowed to roll-over into Roth IRAs, pump money into there, and roll them over. The only "rich person" thing is some people have access to non-publicly traded stocks but I have those and I'm certainly not rich.
- onion2k 3y agoIt makes the logistics easier if there's a revolution.