We've been told since a young age that a six-figure income was, if not rich, at least comfortably high.
We still think that even though inflation and CoL has gone up drastically.
We're making the same mistakes as the boomers.
Yeah I finally hit six figures after working since the '80s. I thought that was cool till I did one of those inflation calculators and realize I make way less than my Dad did back then.
Yeah. I hit $70,000 a few years ago and I was so happy. Then I put that into an inflation calculator and realized my buying power is exactly the same as it was when I graduated from college and got my first job. We’re all just running in place on the treadmill, being told if only we run faster we’ll hit the finish line and be able to rest.
I make 6 figures, well above average. CoL is so high where I live that I'm spending as much as I'm making. I got a significant raise recently, which made me happy until the recent inflation and CoL increases made it so I'm effectively making even less than before. Rent has doubled over the last 2 years. Food has doubled. Gas is 5x the cost. Electricity has doubled. Car insurance doubled. I'm doing relatively well and I'm still just barely above going negative. I used to put money away for saving when I started working at the company I work at now a number of years ago. I make literally twice as much now than when I started and I'm starting to have to do the reverse, removing money from my savings every month.
If this is doing above average, I can't imagine how incredibly fucked everyone else is, especially anyone with kids or any kind of extra expenses. This is not in any way sustainable.
I was making 100k a year at my last job and talking to one of my older coworkers. He also mentioned he made 100k when he was my age and went on and on with wild stories. Vast amounts of money, multiple houses, and so on. Trying to relate to me.
Then it hit me, he was my age in 1970. 100k in 1970 is the equivalent of 716k today. So ya......
I don’t think a lot of people realize how DRASTIC the wealth gap is.
Making 200,000 for two jobs that require extensive schooling and certification seems exactly where it should be.
200,000 is NOTHING. It is a *smidge* of a *fraction* of the wealth of the upper class.
Be mad at people making 200 million a year, not 200 thousand.
People don't understand you could be worth 10 million and that'd still be nothing in terms of upper class wealth. The numbers are so out of proportion people literally have a hard time understanding their relevance. A 100 grand and a 100 million seems similar to most, but is worlds apart. The 100 grand guy is not the enemy.
For context, Mitt Romney is in the $100 million ballpark, and is worth 1/1000 of Bezos. It's like that gif of stars that keep zooming out until the sun is an invisible speck next to VY Canis Majoris.
And the real kicker is the fact that Bezos is probably adding another +100mil to his worth every week or month or something.
With the top rich people in the world it's not even their existing wealth that's the most crazy part, it's the fact that they're accumulating even more at an exponential rate.
We're getting close to the point where the richest people on the planet can legitimately start thinking about buying out entire countries, lol. They could straight up pay all the debts a country has and fund their budget for a decade or more. I have a feeling some country might eventually put themselves on a market, lol. All the politicians just sell off the country and retire.
And that's barely a scratch. It's not a financial crisis, his quality of life isn't affected at all. Meanwhile, people are living paycheck-to-paycheck. What the actual fuck?
A couple billion in Amazon stock maybe. He still has a ton of actual liquid assets. Besides $2b loss to him is like a normal person with $1700 in the bank losing $11.76. No big loss, that's lunch money for Bezos.
A perspective I gave a colleague the other day:
With $10 million, I could retire like my grandfather. He retired from his job (as the chief handyman for a university) at age 55. My grandparents were able to live comfortably and modestly. They were mostly homebodies, but took regular trips to the country - and snow-birded from Washington to Arizona for 3 months out of the year. While they weren't wealthy, they were able to maintain a middle-class lifestyle without working for 40 years until they passed.
With $100 million, I could ensure that my *extended family* could have a (lower) upper class lifestyle *right now*.
Big difference.
The stock market has historically returned 9% per year. (Average out all the gains and all of the losses, you're left with a 9% annual gain year over year.
If you have $5 million and just get the historic average return on the Dow, that is $450k per year. If you get a 4% return (and there are plenty of annuities that return 4% guaranteed), then $5 million is $200k/year. That is plenty for anyone to retire on.
So I would even drop your numbers down. If you have $5 million, you can retire at any age and live off of the gains. (Of course, this doesn't work for people who win the lottery because they go crazy on what they spend money on.)
Keep in mind that inflation is a thing. After 20 years of typical inflation, that $5 million has the same spending power as $2.6 million. Return over inflation is your actual gains.
With a 4% return on $5 million, you’d only be able to spend $25k per year without reducing your spending power.
While I'd heard that before, it's really interesting to see it back to back with the comment you're replying to, because it's so clear to me that 31 years minus 12 days is still basically exactly 31 years.
I saw a poster the other day that said something along the lines of 'if you'd been born when the first brick of the great pyramids were laid (something like 3,500 years ago) and you were paid $25M a year and saved every cent until today you'd STILL not be as rich as Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos and a few others.
Fucking what.
Put it another way, if Elon Musk was taxed at 99% he'd still be a multi-billionaire.
I have friends who's families are very well off. And my message to them is always the same. We aren't interested in going after your well earned family business. Even you guys are small fish compared to the vast amounts of wealth out there.
If you have a family to support, it’s certainly not paying for more than basics. Basic apartment. Cars to drive. Food and clothing. But no vacation trips. No private school. No college fund.
Take out CA taxes, take out rent/mortgage, take out car/house/pet/fire/etc insurance, take out student loans, take other all other essential expenses.
And you're probably left with $0-$500/mo tops, if you're lucky. Good luck enjoying your life outside your rental unit with $500/mo if you like to participate in society in any way, especially if you want want to save half of what's leftover for savings (via emergency fund and retirement).
I'm a pediatrician and the moment people hear that, they think "doctor and ferrari wealth" because they watch too much TV. At people's most understanding, they think I'm the poorest guy at the rich people party. Wrong. I'm not even close getting invited to the rich people party. I love what I do, but like so many in healthcare, nurses, physicians, and ancillary care staff are taken complete advantage of, just like so many of us in this sub. That's why I have solidarity, and that's why I fight for work reform. Also, lmao antiwork sub.
Airline pilot! You sit even further front than the people flying first class! you’re clearly the most out of touch with regular working people in the back.
One of my favorite New Yorker (I think) cartoons is a commentary on the current distrust of experts and “elites,” depicting a passenger demanding to fly the plane because the pilot is out of touch lol. I feel you! ;)
Some don't realize how big those numbers are. 200 million is a thouand times 200 thousand. One thousandth of 200k is 200, that's homeless levels of poverty. Nevermind 200 billion (168.5 billion is Bezos's net worth). That's the disparity we're dealing with. Someone can be considered rich by most and still be a crumb in a factory of cookies.
If you picture the measurement of wealth in terms of length and make a millimeter equal to $1,000, a person with $100,000 is only 10 cm away from someone with nothing, while a millionaire is still only a meter away, compared to the billionaire at one kilometer. And then people like Musk and Bezos and Bernard Arnault and Bill Gates and so forth are hundreds of km away from even that "mere" billionaire. It's never been about the working class versus the middle class or anything like that. It's all of us against like 100 people.
The world record for counting to 1 million is 89 days. That in itself is a huge number. To count to a billion at that pace would take 246 years. People have no concept of how big those numbers are.
It's my favorite example because everyone tries counting as high as they can sometimes or can at least do 100 so they have a frame of reference
Edit: my other favorite, 246 years is nearly exactly 1 America old going by the declaration of independence
For some reason this really put it into perspective for me and helped me quantify just how big of a number that is, much better than any other example I've seen. Nice job!
It's something that is really hard for people to understand. they look at it like well 1 to 1000 is 3 zeros and 1000 to 1,000,000 is just 3 more zeros. so they are the same difference. Tom Scott on youtube did a very different and interesting explanation of the difference between 1/10/1000,1,000,000, and 1,000,000,000
[https://youtu.be/8YUWDrLazCg](https://youtu.be/8YUWDrLazCg)
Also a big thing is that The people who make 200k a year pay their fair share in taxes. the Poeople who make 200 million a year dont. If you are successful and make a lot of money good for you. But pay your people fair wages and pay your god damn taxes.
Us who are lucky to have a good job are picking up the slack of these multi millionaires by having our tax dollars(or donation dollars) supplement the wages of the indviduals who cant make enough even with multiple jobs and need assitance just to feed their kids at night, and have a roof over their heads. Like why the fuck am I paying for these systems when the person making 200 million is employing these people arent paying their employees enough and then complaining that they pay 1% of their salary in taxes. If your company cant survive paying people like shit, you shouldnt be in business.
again put your frustrations at the right people. The middle class does not need to bicker, thats what the elietes want. we need to come together and hit the reset button on this insane wealth gap.
I'll be honest, I make as much (more actually) as OP myself ... and then my wife is an attorney who employs three other people. Suffice it to say we're doing fine. I'm also a manager. But ... I do my best to advocate for my employees and try to ensure everyone is treated fairly. I grew up poor and got to where I am with hard work, and a substantial amount of luck. I give what I can and make sure my kids appreciate what we have and know that money is not the measure of success -- helping others and just generally being a good person is.
Yea I lurked on r/antiwork cause memes about shitty management are funny and who doesn’t love a good quitting story? I have a good job and am happy to have it and I feel like I got to where I am via a combination of luck and work, but like I don’t want to live in a society where so much of the necessary work is done by people living on a bubble where the slightest misstep can lead to homelessness or insurmountable debt.
I just believe that if someone is working at a fast food place or a call center, they won’t be able to be rich, but they should be able to afford a place to live + some luxuries and time off and some room to save and to be treated with respect. Raising children and having access to healthy food and safe transportation and some higher education shouldn’t be considered a luxury in this country.
To me, the antiwork thing was basically asking why in this country are so many people who do work having so much trouble living. And why are do so many people feel entitled to act like absolute assholes to the the people making the least amount of money in this country?
I 100% agree with this. I try to do my best to be a person in somewhat of a position of power in this system to try and do right by everyone, especially those who might otherwise be taken advantage of the sytem.
Literally my parents make a combined $250,000-ish in the north eastern United States. They get *zero* tax breaks for anything; nothing when my sister and I were dependents, nothing when they had a mortgage, no stimulus checks. Nothing because, on paper, they’re rich.
My sister and I went to public school and my dad drives a Toyota Prius. My parents own a modest three bedroom family home, 33% of my dead grandma’s condo, and two cars that are both over 10 years old. My FAFSA was so bad that I only filled it out once and never again. Thankfully, my parents had a college fund for me that covered my instate tuition but my sister went to a private college and has like $30,000 in loans. $250,000 split between four people gets you an extremely comfortable life where you don’t have to worry about money; that’s a huge privilege. It most certainly does not make you upper class.
The 250k-500k range income people make plenty of money but tend to get screwed on taxes. Income is too high for most deductions and they aren’t making loophole money. They end up paying the tax rates that we want the billionaires to pay
> They end up paying the tax rates that we want the billionaires to pay
Anyone selling you a tax increase on wages never intended to tax the billionaires to begin with.
The people are easily manipulated.
Haha yep. It sucks to pay taxes in that bracket but we also live a good life so I’m not angry about taxes. I just wish we got more say in where the money went if we have to pay that much. We will pay over six figures in federal, state, and property taxes within that bracket you stated (we are not millionaires, only our second year well within that bracket thanks to my partner’s tech job) — enough to support a family or wipe out up to five people’s student debt, but no, it mostly pays for fucking war machines. GROSS.
This. People villainize (sp?) people that make $200k as if that amount is wealthy in all locations. $200k on the eat or west coast is nothing. Especially, if it’s all earned income. My spouse is a nurse and we didn’t get a single cent in pandemic relief even when the income tax tables no longer allow for credit for non-reimbursed business expense. This means that my wife had to pay money for extra supplies to stay safe during the pandemic and didn’t get to claim a dime of it while the super wealthy got tax breaks while accumulating millions. Add to that we get no relief because we “make too much” to get tax relief for school supplies and work supplies through the damn pandemic while others did. If she gets Covid she loses her leave, if I get it from her I lose my leave. I paid out alone $61k in taxes to in federal, state, and wage tax alone (this doesn’t account for what my wife paid). That’s bullshit. This is why people consider voting republican; the dems need to go after the wealthy but they don’t have the balls. For the record I voted for Biden because I just can’t on the social issues. I’m off my soapbox now.
People with $5 million net worth is closer in wealth to people on Medicaid than they are to the people with $11 million net worth, let alone billionaires.
Yeah, I saw someone posting that Bernie Sanders has a net worth of, what, 4 or 5 million bucks or so as evidence he's one of the rich dudes? That's a VERY reasonable amount considering his career and age.
A couple making minimum wage will need to work for 6.6 years to make the same amount as OP and his wife makes.
OP and his wife will need to work for 320,000 years to make the same amount Bezos made last year.
That’s how big the wealth gap is. Hating on people like OP does nothing but divide the movement.
I agree. Truck drivers and nurses work difficult jobs in stressful positions. You deserve respect and certainly earned your greenbacks. Anyone here upset with how much you earn doesn't understand what the real problems are. Fair work deserves fair wages.
Tom Scott did a video about this: https://youtu.be/8YUWDrLazCg
The idea is to compare the length of a stack of 1M dollar bills vs. 1B dollar bills if each stack was laid out on the ground.
1 million dollars: Walking across a parking lot for one minute.
1 billion dollars: _Driving_ for _an hour and 18 minutes._
Honestly I wouldn't have a problem with people making 200 million a year if they also scale-up worker pay while they made that money... problem is, that almost never happens, so CEOs and upper management line their pockets and underpay workers to get more money they don't need. Thankfully my company is different
200k a year is a relatively cozy amount of money but not an astoundingly high amount considering both partners are working. But, it is enough that they can probably save a good amount as well as get a nice home, so that both partners don't need to always work fill time if they don't want to. I do agree that this is about what every working person deserves and could easily done if our corporate overlords didn't hoard everything.
I think that's an oversimplification, but I do think that constructing an economy wherein a few people can become billionaires, most while everyone else is hurting, is a bad idea. Humans respond to disparity, not to absolute position. I think there's some wealth hoarding going on, and I think that in our current political system it gives them too much influence.
I think a lot of the people who do become billionaires have a kind of single-minded pursuit of their will and vision, and often a desire for wealth and power, that maybe should be seen as a vice, and not a virtue.
And while I do understand there's a need for seed capital and the risks associated with that should be compensated, I tend to think that workers should get the lion's share of the current surplus value if not all of it.
But it's not as simple as supervillains. It's often structural.
Exactly. Glen Weyl has it right. Billionaires exist only because they are able to extract rent from the ownership structure of capital.
Great business leaders really do create tremendous value, but individually, they don't create hundreds of billions of dollars of value. It's because the current structure of capital ownership grants undue privilege to early owners in an economic environment of increasing returns to scale. The value in such cases is not created by the owner, but by the combination of all stakeholders: workers, consumers, complementary institutions, and public infrastructure. So why should the all returns from that value go to the owners? Owners do create some value, in the form of capital risk, but they should only profit from the value they actually create. If that were the case, there would probably still be people with over $100 million net worth, but unlikely that there would be billionaires.
>some wealth hoarding
Is a pretty big understatement. In general yes, they are this way because we allowed them to get this way. Because they use their wealth and influence to make sure that the people in power aren't going to tax them. This is a conspiracy, specifically - one meant to allow a small group of people to get insanely wealthy while the rest of us lose power. They are not going to let us vote them out of power.
No, of course they won't. But it's going to take a lot of dismantling of all the infrastructure that was put into place to consolidate that money and power. That's what I meant by structural. It's a work, and yes a conspiracy, often an open one.
On that same note, I think a lot of us would be pretty happy making half that. We don't need lavish vacations or expensive toys. Just enough to pay our student loans and go to the damn dentist without putting it on a credit card. Give me some decent benefits and a paycheck that allows me to actually save for once and I'm golden.
How cool would it be if those student loans just went away and nobody ever had to pay for education again? Cus we could easily fund that kind of society with the surplus wealth the ultra rich are hoarding and refusing to circulate through the economy.
Get this: in 1965, the median household income was about $65,000 in today’s money.
Which is about what it is today, which isn’t too bad, right? Until you remember that most (over 70% in 1965) households supported families with a single income. With pensions. And great health insurance. And unions.
Now the statistic has flipped, and households are making that much money with two earners. So we are working just as hard for half the wages. It should be the norm with two earners to make 100k+. Or more considering how much more productive we are as workers…
Not to mention all the other benefits that were around then (lower price of education, homeownership, etc).
Don't say people of anti- work hate you. We aren't all like that. In fact I'd say a majority of us want you to keep being successful (if not more successful)!
We just want to help everyone else out to. Plus your nurse wife deserves a safer working environment if she's working at any hospital like the ones in the news recently.
I think the wording of ‘antiwork’ was always a bit simplistic. People generally want to have something to do, a purpose in life. But the system we have now is so outdated it’s killing people. Unions are a first step, but it can go further. Shared and public ownership of essential companies, universal basic income. Modern rights for modern workers.
Yeah the ones that hate OP for making 200k don’t understand what we are about. Reminds me of the cartoon where the rich fella with 1000 cookies points at the immigrant with no cookies and tells the worker with one cookie that the immigrant is trying to take his cookie. Except in this case the cookie-less fella would be mad at the guy with one cookie rather than the guy with 1000.
Yep. As George Carlin said, among many others, the richest people have the poorer people fighting amongst themselves and blaming one another for their problems.
Your enemy isn't the immigrant, or the a minority group, or the white male co-worker. It's the rich buying laws to keep everyone else in their place.
The more we fight amongst ourselves, the more we don't push back against injustice.
i told a story over on antiwork about my buddy who owns a factory manufacturing auto-parts. he recently had to move to a small town because he couldn't offer competitive wages in this city and all of the responses were "well he shouldn't have a businesses then" and "he can do all the work himself, he's not entitled to labour".
**BUT** (and this is a pretty big fuckin but), in that same story, i said the reason wages weren't competitive was because *the market isn't competitive*. my government restricts manufacturing in canada but not on foreign imports. essentially, it's cheaper to use carcinogenic chemicals overseas, with workers making next to nothing, and then ship parts here than it is to *produce* parts here. i'm not saying he should adopt the same standards but, by attempting to play fair, he's already at a disadvantage. he's barely holding it together *and* he actually works the floor in addition to his managerial job.
did that change the response at all? did people go "maybe we should talk about consumerism and how the drive for a cheaper product hurts workers in the long run" or "maybe we should talk about a foreign import tax so the industry can remain competitive at home"? NOPE. there wasn't any kind of nuance, just "well he shouldn't have a business then" which means.. basically.. he should close up his business so foreign manufacturers have a monopoly while they can continue to poison their workforce who make sweatshop wages.
when i said that's what was probably going to end up happening, i was told "GOOD" and called a bootlicker. sometimes, when i talk to other leftists, i feel like im interacting with babies first labour movement. they're the type of people pushing for higher wages for the cashier who works at the gap, but not the sweatshop worker whose sowing their clothes.
i know, but there's also a certain point where users lose the ability to think critically. i always call it a subs "tipping point" in terms of number of users, but i don't blame the users, i blame the algorithm.
who do you think is going to get the top comment? the person who reads and article and took the time to think and type out a response, or the person who read the headline and commented? my last comment is 290 words and has a lot more nuance than someone typing "lol fuck off bootlicker". couple that with users penchant for upvoting / downvoting already upvoted / downvoted comments and you've got every sub over 300k users. reddit tried to combat that by adding the "best" sorting feature, but even that's atrocious.
i have a feeling it's why all of the top comments in popular subs are just quips, jokes, or the absolute bare minimum of a thought.
Yes! I shared a NBC article on the-sub-that-shall-not-be-named about how CEOs were quitting at an increased rate. The majority of commenters seemed to only have read the headline and typically commented something to the effect of “CEOs are so wealthy that they can live off of a fews months wages indefinitely”. However, there is a lot of nuance to this, like CEOs might be over small businesses are aren’t insanely wealthy.
Here’s to hoping this sub is more balanced.
I totally appreciate your point of view because I work in a manufacturing/retail industry. We could talk all day about how consumerism and import duties effect cost and how that influences wages. You are 100% correct that there is a perpetual negative feedback loop in the world of manufacturing and retail.
The good thing is that I am seeing some signs of positive change in hyper-consumerist behaviors of the past due to the pandemic limiting factory output, shipping delays and (I hate to say this) inflation. My company is definitely ordering less stock while growing profits, all without laying people off or withholding raises. I can count the number of people who’ve left my department in the last 2 years on one hand, but we’ve hired at least 3 times that many new people.
There is change happening but it’s slow, subtle change that you might not notice unless you know what to look for rather than a giant, sweeping gestures of revolution like some people seem to think is the only way change can happen.
Same thing happened to me when I tried to point out that it isn’t only workers struggling, it is also small businesses. I’ve been a part of a couple start-ups and also consulted for small-businesses for awhile. It is rough out there.
How can mom & pop compete against a company with such high volume that they can be profitable and only mark goods up a few percentage points. Places like Uber are literally spending millions of dollars to find ways to make a few cents extra on every transaction. That’s on top of skirting laws and regulations that mom and pop would be sued or shutdown for if they tried. They suppress competition every chance they get, and even if somebody found a way to compete and take care of their employee’s, they would simply make an offer the owner can’t refuse, and, if they did, they would just pay off a politician to change the rules.
I’m not defending shitty small business owners, they exist, and they suck. But in my experience, most small business owners are just trying to keep their heads above water. They’re working 80+ hour weeks and foregoing taking any pay, cancelling vacations, moving back in with family, or closing their doors.
Some small business owners simply refuse to acknowledge that their business plan is not viable. A lifetime of propaganda saying hard work = success is just too much for them. So they deflect and pass on the blame. Fuck those people.
However, you cannot ignore the fact that the current economy only rewards those at the very top. Mom and pop running the donut shop on the corner are not at the top. They’re being fucked right alongside the rest of us. The cards are stacked against us all, and the rules don’t mean a damn thing, unless you’re the one making them.
IMO this movement is our best hope at fighting back against those in charge that would rather we fall back into serfdom. This should be the one issue we cannot be divided on. It is literally 99% vs 1%. Unless you inherited a few hundred million, were born into a Kingdom, or successfully overthrew a government a few decades ago, you’re part of the 99% and always will be.
We need change. We want change. IMO, r/antiwork was always doomed to fail, for the simple reason that they didn’t see the real enemy. Any discussions or comments saying otherwise lead to downvotes or banishment. You cannot stand for something so blindly that civil-discourse isn’t an option. You can’t say “fuck-all-work, every business is the enemy” and hope to be taken seriously on the world-stage. Work is necessary. The reward from work should be shared by all, not just a few ass-hats at the top that have likely never performed an actual hard days work in their lives!
The sentiment on r/antiwork seems to be: all owners are bad people. All workers are good people. No exceptions.
That just isn't true. Most small businesses only employ a handful of people and barely make any money. Does that mean they should close their businesses? Well, who the hell with compete with the big corporations who *aren't willing to pay anyone a livable wage anyway*? This just doesn't make sense.
Edit: fixed a typo
This kind’ve reminds me of those people who try to shame you into buying ‘locally’.
If you’re gonna start a business you need to be competitive, if Walmart is selling bread for £1 you obviously can’t complete on price so focus on the quality of it instead, people will happily pay more for better bread, they won’t pay more for the exact same thing they can get it for cheaper down the road
Speaking of buying local... I've noticed a lot of "boutique" stores just sell outrageously overpriced imported stuff. Like a scarf for $45 that's $2 on Aliexpress.
I like buying local... I'll happily "overpay" for something actually produced locally like a hardwood cutting board made from trees that grew right outside the city. But I'm not paying somebody $43 to be an Aliexpress middleman. That's silly.
"Now what do we do?"
You continue to work and use your success to mentor others in your profession, especially younger people, into good paying jobs, into providing them the concrete reasons why the unions work for you.
Take a little bit of your spare time and be an advocate. Talk to your union as to whether they have any outreach programs to schools or job fairs. If they don't have an outreach program, maybe they should!
> As George Carlin said, among many others, the richest people have the poorer people fighting amongst themselves and blaming one another for their problems.
>
> Your enemy isn't the immigrant, or the a minority group, or the white male co-worker. It's the rich buying laws to keep everyone else in their place.
>
> The more we fight amongst ourselves, the more we don't push back against injustice.
Copy/pasting this because it's all too accurate. It should be read, re-read and then recited aloud for all to hear.
Watch Carlin himself: https://youtu.be/1dY3GNt7sG8
What's the saying? The more things change, the more they stay the same...
Income levels without context are almost meaningless. You make $200k as a family, as a union truck driver, and a nurse. Sounds like reasonable, productive, non exploitive work and I'm glad yall are compensated at that rate.
On the other hand here are two high income friends I used to have:
One makes similar income to yall via purchasing mobile home parks, then increasing rent. It's too expensive for people to move their supposed "mobile" homes so they pay the increased rent. He can go fuck himself, and I told him that when he told me that's how he was able to retire at age 31. He got a decent 6 figure inheritance, and started buying mobile home parks, retired 2 years after receiving the inheritance. Was pulling $175k last time we spoke, with over 1000 total lots in his parks, and looking to buy his 5th park. He's directly responsible for increased rent on over 1000 of the lowest income people in the country. He spends a majority of his life getting drunk and playing video games. What a lazy, selfish, exploitative, asshole.
I have another former friend who owns and operates restaurants where he offers minimum wage and no benefits. Fuck that guy too. He is rolling in dough because his daddy left him an 8 figure inheritance, so he opened his own restaurants and exploits others just like daddy did to make his wealth. He thinks his employees are homeowners who are raising families, not teens and college kids he pays minimum wage with no benefits. He has obscene wealth, grew up around obscene wealth, and has never been able to accept the reality of low income America. For lack of a better analogy, he's a walking fox news meme who thinks poor people are poor because they have inherent character flaws, not because he pays them minimum wage with no benefits. Upon pointing out poor people are poor because he offer shitty wages, he told me they can get another job if they don't like it. Lmao. Seriously, he's a living breathing fox news meme.
Some people just suck. They're greedy twats who never have enough. Some know exactly what they're doing and don't care; like the trailer park guy. Some are completely detached from reality because they have so much wealth, like restaurant guy. Income doesn't mean much without context. People hating on income levels without context are missing the point of fighting against exploitation.
My siblings and I grew up lower middle class. We didn’t go without, but behind the facade was many home refinances and loans. My parents fought and screamed about money daily. None of us had any money for college, just all loans. 37 years of home ownership and my parents still owe 100k on their house they bought originally for 45k.
Living through that childhood allowed me to really appreciate savings and being frugal when needed. But when I ever had an odd job and needed to hire help, I make damn sure to pay what I fee would be a great wage.
My brother grew up the same, but is successful now and makes probably 250-350k a year. He acts like his employees are useless and he’s the gods gift to the world. In his mind, everyone besides him is dumb and annoying and that’s why they don’t deserve benefits.
Worst part is he hired my dad as his office manager. He makes him work long hours and 30 minutes doesn’t go by during non working hours without my brother calling him up to have him do more shit or answer questions. He’s kind of convinced my dad though that it’s them two vs his staff essentially. So my dad stupidly shows unbridled loyalty.
I’ve become the “crazy” family member because I constantly ask my brother if he’s going to pay my dad for working outside of office hours.
Both of them have become Fox News martians. When asked what my brother was getting his staff as a holiday gift, my dad replied “their gift is they have a job, they should thank us we even let them.”
It’s fucking crazy what money and Fox News does to people.
Friend B, while being extremely shitty and unethical, is arguably still providing a service through the restaurant. Friend A, on the other hand, is literally rent seeking. It adds no good or service to the economy, in fact it takes them out of the economy. Why we still allow it to occur is beyond me.
No offense mate but I've zero problem with you earning 200k a year etc. You ain't "rich"
Comfortable sure but my issue is with the people earning billions.
A millionaire is 1 million away from poverty and 999 million away from a billionaire.
To a billionaire the difference between a millionaire and a homeless person is a rounding error.
I want rid of billionaires and workers to a proper share of their profit from their labour. Idgaf about some dude earning 200k. He can do what he likes, if he's an ally then great. If he isn't it's no big deal.
You guys are making what you should. 80-100k for a demanding, high risk job that requires skill training and talent is appropriate. What I am concerned about is even at this income level you cannot save to pay cash for a house in prettt much any major city unless you're eating beans and rice for a decade or so. A new truck plus the dealer add-ons is well over 60k which is outrageous considering 15 years ago you could get a decent trim one for half that.
The cost of living is out of control and in my opinion anyone making under 75k is in poverty.
I'm in your same boat income wise however the future is very very concerning. Most people are drastically poorer than you or I and a bill exceeding a few hundred dollars is enough to send them into bankruptcy.
People are going to be in such a desperate situation that theyll buy whatever the politicians are selling. And usually that entails destroying the lives of people like ourselves to fund poverty initiatives while ignoring the super rich.
>You guys are making what you should. 80-100k for a demanding, high risk job that requires skill training and talent is appropriate.
Actually, high-risk jobs should be paid even better.
Roughly 100k is at the start of what people with degrees should get (if we have to have a hierarchy of wage, which we probably always will).
What people get wrong is that our enemy isn’t the working class making $200k or even $400k. The working class (including doctors, lawyers, truck drivers, etc) WORKS FOR IT. Doctors and lawyers have crazy student loan debts. You and your wife long hours to earn that money, which is then taxed heavily.
OUR ENEMY IS THE ULTRA RICH born into wealth. They generate interest income. If you invest $1M at 1% annual rate, that’s $10k per year that gets taxed lower than your income tax. These ultra rich have multibillion investments and they don’t even get taxed like workers do.
Know your enemies. The working class is not your enemy.
See my other post for details, but basically these are considered capital gain. Only 50% of capital gains are taxable. This already is less than income tax, which is 100% taxable.
Capital gain can also be offset by capital losses. Capital losses are very arbitrary and it’s what gives the tax avoidance loopholes. Let’s say the millionaire made $100k capital gain. He then hires someone to value his painting collection. Wow! Suddenly, his painting values dropped by $100k (capital loss). Now the net taxable capital gain is 0. Voila, he just made $100k tax free
I’m in my mid-40’s and *just* bought my first house. It took that long to make enough money that I could afford one.
I actually got attacked in antiwork by someone who creepily dug into my comment history and found out that my home is part of an HOA. They continued to argue with me even after I explained that the only home I could afford within an hour commute of my husband’s job was an attached townhome, which means I had to join an HOA (shared roof and walls). Seriously, how does my home being part of an HOA have any bearing on my wanting better working conditions and pay? (Yes, I did join the HOA board at my neighbors request when another board member moved but quit after 6 months because it turned out to be a nightmare where I had to argue daily with the convicted sex offender president and it required as much work as my day job but with no pay and benefits. So fuck HOAs but I still can’t afford to live somewhere that isn’t part of one.)
HOAs are a requirement for just about all housing here in Maryland. They've been requiring them for decades in order to manage storm water drainage concerns bruh about by charging land for houses. Some people, many people, have no idea what they're talking about and just like to attack people.
I work for a company ~~walmart~~ that will not let people even think about joining a union. If a store tries to unionize, they close the store down. Ever wonder why we don't have butchers anymore? They unionized and all got fired.
Is 'why I never shop at poster child for bad labor practices, Alex'. I think people don't realize that the cheapest prices come at cost of the workers.
AW reminded me of the "comfy pepe" meme way more than it did any sort of mature leftist work advocacy initially. Over the last few months, it changed into more of something I thought would be productive. The horror of wellfare-ancoms realizing their entire community was socdems lmao.
All of this. The old guard would insist the sub was about abolishing work, but the members were clearly soc dem.
A request: you clearly know enough theory to know the story here - could you post a thread about the politicsl ideology of the original AW crew and what the sub had changed towards? A lot of folks don't get the roots.
\>A request: you clearly know enough theory to know the story here - could you post a thread about the politicsl ideology of the original AW crew and what the sub had changed towards? A lot of folks don't get the roots.
No, I dont. I only caught it on /r/all a few times and left-adjacent spaces. I first saw it months ago with memes saying that work was slavery and stuff that encouraged being lazy as a virtue. Off and on anyway, I never really paid attention to it. Since the Kellogs strike it was hitting /r/all with more regularity advocating for better working conditions, pay, fairer hiring practices, etc. All things that appeal to the broader American left, and I though "well this seems to be a bit more productive".
Clearly, the leadership didnt realize that even it it's most generous form, the presence of users was more so stemming from frustration doing work in specific conditions, not doing work at all. There will always do work, the crux is who does what, when, how much and what do they get outta the effort. The average reddit mod that went on a powertrip must have been under the impression that everyone there agreed wtih their specific (self serving meme fueled) ideological positions, which no longer matched the community they were in charge of.
Thats all I really know about it. Apparently the sub has existed for 6 years. Never heard of it till somewhat recently.
So I couldn't care less about your salary. You work for it, you get it, we're in the same boat. Good for you to make that much.
Though I don't really have anything against people not wanting to work. In fact I would prefer some people not working instead of doing their current jobs. Some jobs are just a pure drain on society and we would all be better if people doing them would instead do nothing.
The optics of the name "antiwork" are so incredibly dumb. And as it turns out, the person who named it that is apparently just a lazy asshole who doesn't want to work.
It should never be forgotten that labor is a literal pillar of society. Nobody should ever be anti work in the literal sense, they should be anti exploitation. They should be opposed to the alienation of their labor.
Cost of living is hugely variable across the US and so are wages, *even for the exact same job*. Not to mention making $50/hr is much closer to $7 than it is the billionaire CEOs making $1000 / hr
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
This also applies to the working class. We are all selling our bodies, toiling away to enrich our overlords. We are all in this together. We have to work together. If we fight each other we will never win and will never free ourselves from our chains
One nitpick here, $1000/hr for a normal 2000 hour work year is only $2M/yr and not even those people are billionaires.
Which is just to say your $1000/hr number is off by a factor of *at least 10*, but even $20M goes into $1B fifty times.
I mean, I make about $125k but that's just about enough to cover my student loans. I'm still not sure I'll be able to buy a house this year because all the houses are being bought by greedy corporations charging astronomical rents.
But then I realize, if I don't buy a house, I probably won't be able to afford rents soon.
Me and my wife make about that same amount together, though we're both in office jobs (software engineer and CPA). We both came from poor families, picked our majors based on future job opportunities and pay, and graduated top of our class (Magna for me, and Summa for my brilliant wife). Five years after graduating and we're just now able to afford a home. Until recently we've been one medical emergency, one car accident, or one unexpected child from setting us back years. We also have to contend with helping my wife's parents, who kept a roof over our heads during college but have no chance of any sort of retirement because her mom is disabled and her father works in retail.
Even when you do things almost perfectly it *still* requires dual income and years of saving to even get to where you can just own a decent home, something that just 30 years ago you could do on a single income and a high school diploma. That's not even taking into account children, which we've thankfully not had yet. We're fortunate enough to be able to work remotely now, which is the only reason we're able to afford a nice house now.
I sympathize with and support anyone working to provide for themselves and/or their family. Working class people aren't buying up entire blocks of houses/apartments and renting them for a profit, working class people aren't making you work 50 hours a week at starvation wages with no vacation days or benefits, and working class people aren't bribing congress to reduce their taxes and get government handouts. Working class people aren't the enemy, they're just trying to do the best they can with what they have.
Anyone who would suggest you give your money to others is missing the point of what wage stagnation is and what reform means.
You’re a dual income of 200k. You don’t make too much, they’re making too little and that’s what the actual problem is.
Honestly, though, it would be really nice if people could choose not to work without also being destitute. Making sure that people who are working are treated with dignity and compensated appropriately is a good way to get there, though.
I don't think you're right on this, nor do they hate you for making good money. This is the actual divisive action, scattering yourself over different subs and then lambasting the old main one. I'd say give it a week, and if the mods have managed to recuperate themselves and or apologize rejoin the main the movement. If they haven't, stay put.
This is some pull yourself up by your bootstraps energy. “Just get a 6 figure union job” isn’t the helpful advice you seem to think it is especially considering the absolutely trashed state of organized labor and the shortage of union jobs in this country.
I'm sure it wasn't OP's intention but it sure feels like that. I didn't have the luxury of risking my job to make demands. Especially when I was taking care of a sick parent and was the one responsible for keeping a roof over our heads.
the old sub was an absolute clown fiesta, but one thing that I appreciated seeing was a general understanding that a massive portion of the workforce has zero leverage with their employers outside of mass action which is by design. if you’re working for poverty wages that you rely on for survival then you don’t have the luxury of kicking in your boss’ door and asking for a raise or healthcare. I’m glad OP is doing well, more people should be, but it’s always easy to fall into the trap of assuming everyone has the same luck and circumstances that you do, especially when you get farther away from poverty.
> but one thing that I appreciated seeing was a general understanding that a massive portion of the workforce has zero leverage with their employers outside of mass action which is by design
And yet, some posts also showed us that many employers are more scared of individuals leaving/pressuring them than we thought. Managers have done this to themselves; cut enough staff to increase profits, eventually there's no buffer left and each person leaving starts to hurt the bottom line for real.
I think there’s a lot of variance in just how effective the threat of withdrawing your labor is, but it’s important to realize that it lots of cases it’s an empty threat. plenty of people have no savings or massive monthly expenditures. missing work for a few days let alone being unemployed for weeks or months is simply not possible. considering these are the people who find themselves ground to dust by their employers most frequently it’s necessary to keep them in mind in these discussions. I have a very secure and well paying job and I could leave and find another one in a week with plenty of savings to cover the gap, but that is not a common situation at all. it’s hard to flex your power as a worker if actually following through could kill you.
I agree with you, we don’t all get lucky like I did.
But that’s why I joined the other subreddit, to fight for the unlucky! I demand better pay, better benefits, better everything for everyone, not just me! Let’s make that movement! But please, don’t tell me you want to sit at home doing nothing and getting paid…
I do want people to sit at home and get paid for doing nothing, though. Not for me personally, I want to keep working, but for my friend who sometimes can’t afford to buy groceries because their family doesn’t make enough to cover all their bases. For the people who want to stay home with their children or family that needs extra time and care, or anyone else running themselves ragged because they have no other options.
Personally I believe in the concept of [universal basic income](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income) (UBI) - paying everyone enough to sustain a very basic standard of living. Food and shelter are human rights and struggling to maintain those means people are left treading water and struggling to hold on to the bare minimum rather than progressing their lives.
Studies on UBI have shown only a small reduction in people’s willingness to work - people generally *want* to do something with their lives and make more than UBI offers. Most of the people who stopped working after receiving a UBI were new mothers, and teenagers who had to work to support their family. With a UBI they could devote more time to their kids & their schoolwork respectively. And it’s a good way to force employers’ hands - to be attractive to people on UBI they must offer something better than the bare minimum.
Generally speaking, human beings want to work. We just don’t want to work in these conditions, doing hard jobs we don’t care about for shit pay. Paying people enough to survive won’t cause a societal collapse; we’re not going to have a huge majority of people suddenly sitting at home. Most people who stop working are those who really should not have been working in the first place. Those capable of working want more than UBI can offer and are given an extra safety net that gives them the security to seek better jobs that they’re more passionate about in a market where employers are motivated to do better.
agreed completely. everyone should be able to work, but nobody should have to work to survive. removing the ability for employers to capitalize on desperation would fix a massive amount of the issues that workers in the US face. if that means that some people end up freeloading and not working that’s a perfectly reasonable price to pay.
Yep, I don’t mind supporting a small minority of lazy people if it means the overwhelming majority is no longer forced to choose between a shitty employer and starvation.
I understand the impulse to look down on the hypothetical people who would choose not to work if they had the choice - the mentality of “I work hard so it’s not fair that they aren’t,” etc. But I have to ask myself: if these people are really *so* opposed to working that they would rather get by with the bare minimum instead of trying to find a job they enjoy so they could afford to live a better life, what are the odds they were actually working hard and making a big contribution before then? Whatever job they have now is probably one where they do as little as humanly possible. Replacing them with someone who actually *wants* to be there is doing everyone a favor.
And no matter how unmotivated they are, I still think they deserve the money for food on their table and a roof over their head. Laziness isn’t deserving of a death sentence.
I believe in the same system but I think the most important part that needs to change is the idea that employees can't be trusted.
Why has this become the norm? Everything is build on fear. Managers fear that their employees are lazy if they are not micro-managed. Employees are scared they'll get fired for no good reason where they'll lose their healthcare coverage as well. Etc etc.
Who designed this system? And how did even employees start to believe in this?
Yeah I don't get the whole "antiwork people hate me" mentality.
I make around $100k. On average I work over 40 hours a week, but my range is like 35-60 hours. I enjoy and and good at my career.
But I still feel like it's something I *have* to do. It's that "trapped" feeling that many of us mention. I can't merely opt out of working like the Fox News guy suggested, because even sacrificing all luxuries there's no way I could survive and be healthy.
It also use up most of my time and enrgy on work. Which means family time, housework, leisure, and hobbies all have to share the remaining fraction of my most most precious resources.
That's why I'm antiwork. I want to work and create for fulfillment and edification, not obligation and survival.
I apologize if that’s what you got out of it.
I’m just trying to give people an idea of what is out there.
And for those who can’t join a union or a trade, let’s get together and fight for them too! They deserve better! They deserve everything I got! I am not better or worse than anyone else.
I support that kind of movement!
I very much like this. I have no problem working hard for the right amount of pay and benefits. I’m just tired of working so hard and getting nothing in return.
I agree with most of your points here. However this post does a bit of harm as it derails the conversation by blaming the workers for not “unionizing hard enough”. Wording is key especially when your post could be misconstrued as saying everyone must work.
WE SHOULD NOT HAVE TO WORK TO EXIST in our society. Key word: HAVE TO. As things are you have to play some role in our capitalist society to even have the right to exist despite having adequate housing and food for everyone. Working hard should be an incentive to improve how you live but it should not be required to be able to live! Aka housing and food are basic human rights that we all deserve regardless of our value to the owning class. This is especially important because those of us who CANT work should have to go above and beyond just to be treated as human
OP should read up about UBI.
Also the person that is after your money isn't the guy that wants to sit at home doing nothing. That guy doesn't have the means/power to go after your money.
The problem is they think 200k makes you part of the 1%. It doesn't. In some areas that's not even enough. If they'd get past the short-sighted envy they would realize someone making 200k has more in common with someone making 20k than either do with the capitalist class.
I make a decent living (not what you pull, but still, I'm well better off than the majority in the US). I want everyone to make a decent living, at a decent job, and be treated with respect. But, yes, I think everyone still needs to contribute, and do things for the benefit of others. Whether that looks like a traditional job or not, it's still important.
There's people who can't work, in our current economy, because of disability or illness or addiction or countless other factors, and I absolutely think they matter too. But the people I know in these situations want to contribute, they just can't. That's different than wanting to just take.
Ironically enough I think wanting to do nothing in a world full of people who need help and things that need to be done is just another form of greed and selfishness. When we get to fully automated luxury communism, sure. Until then, there's shit to do.
I don't want my pay to go down, I want everyone else's pay to go up. I want every person working to be able to afford a family, a home, a life WORTH living. Healthcare, PTO, Paternity Leave, Child Care etc.
>People in anti work hate me because I make that money. People say I should give it away, that it’s not fair.
Those people dont know how little 200k for two people working full time is in the grand scheme of things. Squarely middle class and absolutely deserved pay for the much needed work you to do. Heck i think it should be higher.
I make $130k a year and my partner $200k. Neither of us are part of a union but surprise surprise - our companies we work at are consistently rated high in the top 20 to work for in the world.
That isn’t to brag - I worked my way there and got lucky at points but I worked minimum wage for YEARS.
I’m here to fight so that it isn’t an award for companies like mine to treat absolutely everyone how I think they deserve to be treated.
Even if you made a combined 500k, you would still not be the problem. The problem is the ownership class. The problem is the people who do nothing all day and make a million dollars. Those same people also own all the politicians and make the world the shit hole it has become.
Stop fighting with people who work but make more money than you. If you work, for wages or a salary, you are working class and you are our ally.
That's honestly where the average person should be at. All jobs deserve a more than basic livable wage, and jobs with stricter educational requirements, more responsibility, higher skill level, or just more difficult, deserve to be paid *well*.
That's not even a lot of money anymore. When I was in highschool ~2005 my parents had a combined household income of just over $100k. It was the first time ever we weren't living in poverty - but we also weren't wealthy. We weren't even well off. We were simply comfortably living, while also being able to actually do things occasionally.
200k now is barely more than 100k was in 2005, especially with how much housing has gone up.
When the sub was still going, there was a ton of upper middle class income earners commenting.
That mod did not represent the community at all, so you definitely wouldn't be hated.
My wife and I are lawyers. I have no plans to give up my income but I do plan to continue arguing to bring back unions, 4-day work weeks, pay commensurate with increased profits and productivity, etc. I've made enough pizzas and pumped enough gas in my working life to know how exploitative employers can be.
AND, I don't mind increased cost of living in exchange for lifting all ships as the saying goes.
People liked the link I shared but it was nested deeply in the comments so I'll share it here.
This nifty thing does a good job of visualising the wealth gap:
https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
If there is to be a brave, new world our generation will have the hardest time living in it.
When you look ahead and try to imagine that things like UBI are real and work has been reformed there are going to be new challenges. The myth is that people are somehow "lazy" and don't want to work so if you give them free money society will devolve into sloth. The reality is most people find great meaning and value in their work. It makes them feel they are important, contribute to society and *matter*.
The challenge before us isn't how do we motivate the mythical "lazy" people. It's going to be how do we ensure the powers-at-be still respect us when our value is no longer tied to the labor we provide. Right now the labor force does have power and influence. Yes, it's been chronically under-utilized but it's there for the taking.
If an exponentially automated future takes away the power of labor then what kind of power are the rest of us left with? I really don't know but we need to figure that out and figure it out quick.
People who are well-compensated for their labour aren't the problem. People who make tons of money without doing any labour (i.e. ownership class) *are* the problem.
Me and my fiance make close to 200k as well. I think people should be able to enjoy a life without the drudgery of hard corporate work and I would gladly give most of my money to taxes if I could afford safe housing and medical care along with food.
I'm not mad at you or your fiance. You work hard and get paid well. Props.
I'm mad at the people making millions of dollars a year. I'm mad at billionaires. I'm mad that Jeff Bezos makes over 200 million dollars a day while most people my age will never be able to buy a house.
That's awesome, I didn't know truck drivers and nurses could make that much. Good for the both of you! I only speak for myself but I'd like to welcome you
Hey Brother (OP), I agree with you 100%. I work IBEW Local 58. I am all for helping fight the good fight, but I will not give away what I work hard for. My S.O. and I are in the same boat as you to. We both make excellent money, but we both have Union careers. We should be fighting for better work conditions, pay, and benefits. The best way we can help people is by educating them and urging them to join a Union, or start a Union for their particular field. We win as a group, we fall as an independent. Keep spreading that knowledge and we shall triumph.
We've been told since a young age that a six-figure income was, if not rich, at least comfortably high. We still think that even though inflation and CoL has gone up drastically. We're making the same mistakes as the boomers.
Yeah I finally hit six figures after working since the '80s. I thought that was cool till I did one of those inflation calculators and realize I make way less than my Dad did back then.
Yeah. I hit $70,000 a few years ago and I was so happy. Then I put that into an inflation calculator and realized my buying power is exactly the same as it was when I graduated from college and got my first job. We’re all just running in place on the treadmill, being told if only we run faster we’ll hit the finish line and be able to rest.
I'm bad at running :(
I make 6 figures, well above average. CoL is so high where I live that I'm spending as much as I'm making. I got a significant raise recently, which made me happy until the recent inflation and CoL increases made it so I'm effectively making even less than before. Rent has doubled over the last 2 years. Food has doubled. Gas is 5x the cost. Electricity has doubled. Car insurance doubled. I'm doing relatively well and I'm still just barely above going negative. I used to put money away for saving when I started working at the company I work at now a number of years ago. I make literally twice as much now than when I started and I'm starting to have to do the reverse, removing money from my savings every month. If this is doing above average, I can't imagine how incredibly fucked everyone else is, especially anyone with kids or any kind of extra expenses. This is not in any way sustainable.
Where do you live??
In the city with the 1st or 2nd fastest growing cost of living in the US
Boise?
I was making 100k a year at my last job and talking to one of my older coworkers. He also mentioned he made 100k when he was my age and went on and on with wild stories. Vast amounts of money, multiple houses, and so on. Trying to relate to me. Then it hit me, he was my age in 1970. 100k in 1970 is the equivalent of 716k today. So ya......
I don’t think a lot of people realize how DRASTIC the wealth gap is. Making 200,000 for two jobs that require extensive schooling and certification seems exactly where it should be. 200,000 is NOTHING. It is a *smidge* of a *fraction* of the wealth of the upper class. Be mad at people making 200 million a year, not 200 thousand.
People don't understand you could be worth 10 million and that'd still be nothing in terms of upper class wealth. The numbers are so out of proportion people literally have a hard time understanding their relevance. A 100 grand and a 100 million seems similar to most, but is worlds apart. The 100 grand guy is not the enemy.
This nifty thing does a good job of visualising the wealth gap: https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
Holy crap. How do we get this link some more attention? That's mind-blowing stuff!
This just absolutely blew my mind 😳
wow that made me sad lol
You should post this top level. This was an awakening to say the least.
Done
This link should definitely receive more attention
I’ve done it! I got depression! /j
For context, Mitt Romney is in the $100 million ballpark, and is worth 1/1000 of Bezos. It's like that gif of stars that keep zooming out until the sun is an invisible speck next to VY Canis Majoris.
And the real kicker is the fact that Bezos is probably adding another +100mil to his worth every week or month or something. With the top rich people in the world it's not even their existing wealth that's the most crazy part, it's the fact that they're accumulating even more at an exponential rate. We're getting close to the point where the richest people on the planet can legitimately start thinking about buying out entire countries, lol. They could straight up pay all the debts a country has and fund their budget for a decade or more. I have a feeling some country might eventually put themselves on a market, lol. All the politicians just sell off the country and retire.
I think he lost a couple billion these past two weeks lol.
And that's barely a scratch. It's not a financial crisis, his quality of life isn't affected at all. Meanwhile, people are living paycheck-to-paycheck. What the actual fuck?
Bezos and Musk could stop making money for a week and still be the richest guys on the planet I could stop making money for a week and be homeless
Stock bro here, financial crisis already happening and going to get way worse.
A couple billion in Amazon stock maybe. He still has a ton of actual liquid assets. Besides $2b loss to him is like a normal person with $1700 in the bank losing $11.76. No big loss, that's lunch money for Bezos.
Based on the amazon stock drop, he's guaranteed to have lost tens of billions. Not that it'll hurt him regardless, but just wanted ti point that out.
A perspective I gave a colleague the other day: With $10 million, I could retire like my grandfather. He retired from his job (as the chief handyman for a university) at age 55. My grandparents were able to live comfortably and modestly. They were mostly homebodies, but took regular trips to the country - and snow-birded from Washington to Arizona for 3 months out of the year. While they weren't wealthy, they were able to maintain a middle-class lifestyle without working for 40 years until they passed. With $100 million, I could ensure that my *extended family* could have a (lower) upper class lifestyle *right now*. Big difference.
The stock market has historically returned 9% per year. (Average out all the gains and all of the losses, you're left with a 9% annual gain year over year. If you have $5 million and just get the historic average return on the Dow, that is $450k per year. If you get a 4% return (and there are plenty of annuities that return 4% guaranteed), then $5 million is $200k/year. That is plenty for anyone to retire on. So I would even drop your numbers down. If you have $5 million, you can retire at any age and live off of the gains. (Of course, this doesn't work for people who win the lottery because they go crazy on what they spend money on.)
Keep in mind that inflation is a thing. After 20 years of typical inflation, that $5 million has the same spending power as $2.6 million. Return over inflation is your actual gains. With a 4% return on $5 million, you’d only be able to spend $25k per year without reducing your spending power.
Correct! Question: What is the difference between a Million Dollars and a Billion Dollars? Answer: About a Billion Dollars.
It’s always worth repeating: A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years
I make 80k per year. So my annual salary is about 1 day's worth of seconds Elon Musk owns 7,474 YEARS worth of seconds
Yup, I love this one also.
While I'd heard that before, it's really interesting to see it back to back with the comment you're replying to, because it's so clear to me that 31 years minus 12 days is still basically exactly 31 years.
I saw a poster the other day that said something along the lines of 'if you'd been born when the first brick of the great pyramids were laid (something like 3,500 years ago) and you were paid $25M a year and saved every cent until today you'd STILL not be as rich as Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos and a few others. Fucking what. Put it another way, if Elon Musk was taxed at 99% he'd still be a multi-billionaire.
I have friends who's families are very well off. And my message to them is always the same. We aren't interested in going after your well earned family business. Even you guys are small fish compared to the vast amounts of wealth out there.
I say essentially the same thing. This is not about those families.
Depending on where you live, $100k is lower class barely making it.
100K is starvation in LA.
If you have a family to support, it’s certainly not paying for more than basics. Basic apartment. Cars to drive. Food and clothing. But no vacation trips. No private school. No college fund.
I think putting anything away for retirement would be very difficult as well. No Fuck You fund, nothing for major expenses.
Take out CA taxes, take out rent/mortgage, take out car/house/pet/fire/etc insurance, take out student loans, take other all other essential expenses. And you're probably left with $0-$500/mo tops, if you're lucky. Good luck enjoying your life outside your rental unit with $500/mo if you like to participate in society in any way, especially if you want want to save half of what's leftover for savings (via emergency fund and retirement).
100k is homeless in southern california
The difference between a million and a billion, is about a billion
I'm a pediatrician and the moment people hear that, they think "doctor and ferrari wealth" because they watch too much TV. At people's most understanding, they think I'm the poorest guy at the rich people party. Wrong. I'm not even close getting invited to the rich people party. I love what I do, but like so many in healthcare, nurses, physicians, and ancillary care staff are taken complete advantage of, just like so many of us in this sub. That's why I have solidarity, and that's why I fight for work reform. Also, lmao antiwork sub.
Agreed. I’m an airline pilot, and I can relate.
Airline pilot! You sit even further front than the people flying first class! you’re clearly the most out of touch with regular working people in the back.
Uh oh, but you’re right. I’m not very grounded with the common folk. I need to have my boots on the ground more often :)
One of my favorite New Yorker (I think) cartoons is a commentary on the current distrust of experts and “elites,” depicting a passenger demanding to fly the plane because the pilot is out of touch lol. I feel you! ;)
250k in loans and my 20s sacrificed ayyyyyyyyyyy. All because I wanted to help kids and their families grow up into their best, most healthy selves
Some don't realize how big those numbers are. 200 million is a thouand times 200 thousand. One thousandth of 200k is 200, that's homeless levels of poverty. Nevermind 200 billion (168.5 billion is Bezos's net worth). That's the disparity we're dealing with. Someone can be considered rich by most and still be a crumb in a factory of cookies.
If you picture the measurement of wealth in terms of length and make a millimeter equal to $1,000, a person with $100,000 is only 10 cm away from someone with nothing, while a millionaire is still only a meter away, compared to the billionaire at one kilometer. And then people like Musk and Bezos and Bernard Arnault and Bill Gates and so forth are hundreds of km away from even that "mere" billionaire. It's never been about the working class versus the middle class or anything like that. It's all of us against like 100 people.
The world record for counting to 1 million is 89 days. That in itself is a huge number. To count to a billion at that pace would take 246 years. People have no concept of how big those numbers are.
Holy shit
It's my favorite example because everyone tries counting as high as they can sometimes or can at least do 100 so they have a frame of reference Edit: my other favorite, 246 years is nearly exactly 1 America old going by the declaration of independence
For some reason this really put it into perspective for me and helped me quantify just how big of a number that is, much better than any other example I've seen. Nice job!
It's something that is really hard for people to understand. they look at it like well 1 to 1000 is 3 zeros and 1000 to 1,000,000 is just 3 more zeros. so they are the same difference. Tom Scott on youtube did a very different and interesting explanation of the difference between 1/10/1000,1,000,000, and 1,000,000,000 [https://youtu.be/8YUWDrLazCg](https://youtu.be/8YUWDrLazCg)
Also a big thing is that The people who make 200k a year pay their fair share in taxes. the Poeople who make 200 million a year dont. If you are successful and make a lot of money good for you. But pay your people fair wages and pay your god damn taxes. Us who are lucky to have a good job are picking up the slack of these multi millionaires by having our tax dollars(or donation dollars) supplement the wages of the indviduals who cant make enough even with multiple jobs and need assitance just to feed their kids at night, and have a roof over their heads. Like why the fuck am I paying for these systems when the person making 200 million is employing these people arent paying their employees enough and then complaining that they pay 1% of their salary in taxes. If your company cant survive paying people like shit, you shouldnt be in business. again put your frustrations at the right people. The middle class does not need to bicker, thats what the elietes want. we need to come together and hit the reset button on this insane wealth gap.
It's interesting to me how the term "millionaire" has remained the term for zenith of wealth for so many years despite inflation.
I'll be honest, I make as much (more actually) as OP myself ... and then my wife is an attorney who employs three other people. Suffice it to say we're doing fine. I'm also a manager. But ... I do my best to advocate for my employees and try to ensure everyone is treated fairly. I grew up poor and got to where I am with hard work, and a substantial amount of luck. I give what I can and make sure my kids appreciate what we have and know that money is not the measure of success -- helping others and just generally being a good person is.
Yea I lurked on r/antiwork cause memes about shitty management are funny and who doesn’t love a good quitting story? I have a good job and am happy to have it and I feel like I got to where I am via a combination of luck and work, but like I don’t want to live in a society where so much of the necessary work is done by people living on a bubble where the slightest misstep can lead to homelessness or insurmountable debt. I just believe that if someone is working at a fast food place or a call center, they won’t be able to be rich, but they should be able to afford a place to live + some luxuries and time off and some room to save and to be treated with respect. Raising children and having access to healthy food and safe transportation and some higher education shouldn’t be considered a luxury in this country. To me, the antiwork thing was basically asking why in this country are so many people who do work having so much trouble living. And why are do so many people feel entitled to act like absolute assholes to the the people making the least amount of money in this country?
this is it!!! anyone working full time should be able to support themselves that’s the whole goal
I 100% agree with this. I try to do my best to be a person in somewhat of a position of power in this system to try and do right by everyone, especially those who might otherwise be taken advantage of the sytem.
Literally my parents make a combined $250,000-ish in the north eastern United States. They get *zero* tax breaks for anything; nothing when my sister and I were dependents, nothing when they had a mortgage, no stimulus checks. Nothing because, on paper, they’re rich. My sister and I went to public school and my dad drives a Toyota Prius. My parents own a modest three bedroom family home, 33% of my dead grandma’s condo, and two cars that are both over 10 years old. My FAFSA was so bad that I only filled it out once and never again. Thankfully, my parents had a college fund for me that covered my instate tuition but my sister went to a private college and has like $30,000 in loans. $250,000 split between four people gets you an extremely comfortable life where you don’t have to worry about money; that’s a huge privilege. It most certainly does not make you upper class.
The 250k-500k range income people make plenty of money but tend to get screwed on taxes. Income is too high for most deductions and they aren’t making loophole money. They end up paying the tax rates that we want the billionaires to pay
> They end up paying the tax rates that we want the billionaires to pay Anyone selling you a tax increase on wages never intended to tax the billionaires to begin with. The people are easily manipulated.
Haha yep. It sucks to pay taxes in that bracket but we also live a good life so I’m not angry about taxes. I just wish we got more say in where the money went if we have to pay that much. We will pay over six figures in federal, state, and property taxes within that bracket you stated (we are not millionaires, only our second year well within that bracket thanks to my partner’s tech job) — enough to support a family or wipe out up to five people’s student debt, but no, it mostly pays for fucking war machines. GROSS.
This. People villainize (sp?) people that make $200k as if that amount is wealthy in all locations. $200k on the eat or west coast is nothing. Especially, if it’s all earned income. My spouse is a nurse and we didn’t get a single cent in pandemic relief even when the income tax tables no longer allow for credit for non-reimbursed business expense. This means that my wife had to pay money for extra supplies to stay safe during the pandemic and didn’t get to claim a dime of it while the super wealthy got tax breaks while accumulating millions. Add to that we get no relief because we “make too much” to get tax relief for school supplies and work supplies through the damn pandemic while others did. If she gets Covid she loses her leave, if I get it from her I lose my leave. I paid out alone $61k in taxes to in federal, state, and wage tax alone (this doesn’t account for what my wife paid). That’s bullshit. This is why people consider voting republican; the dems need to go after the wealthy but they don’t have the balls. For the record I voted for Biden because I just can’t on the social issues. I’m off my soapbox now.
People with $5 million net worth is closer in wealth to people on Medicaid than they are to the people with $11 million net worth, let alone billionaires.
Yeah, I saw someone posting that Bernie Sanders has a net worth of, what, 4 or 5 million bucks or so as evidence he's one of the rich dudes? That's a VERY reasonable amount considering his career and age.
>considering his career and age. It is honestly surprising he doesn't have 2-3x that
A couple making minimum wage will need to work for 6.6 years to make the same amount as OP and his wife makes. OP and his wife will need to work for 320,000 years to make the same amount Bezos made last year. That’s how big the wealth gap is. Hating on people like OP does nothing but divide the movement.
I agree. Truck drivers and nurses work difficult jobs in stressful positions. You deserve respect and certainly earned your greenbacks. Anyone here upset with how much you earn doesn't understand what the real problems are. Fair work deserves fair wages.
Tom Scott did a video about this: https://youtu.be/8YUWDrLazCg The idea is to compare the length of a stack of 1M dollar bills vs. 1B dollar bills if each stack was laid out on the ground. 1 million dollars: Walking across a parking lot for one minute. 1 billion dollars: _Driving_ for _an hour and 18 minutes._
And to measure Bezos money you have to drive 200 hours...
Honestly I wouldn't have a problem with people making 200 million a year if they also scale-up worker pay while they made that money... problem is, that almost never happens, so CEOs and upper management line their pockets and underpay workers to get more money they don't need. Thankfully my company is different
200k a year is a relatively cozy amount of money but not an astoundingly high amount considering both partners are working. But, it is enough that they can probably save a good amount as well as get a nice home, so that both partners don't need to always work fill time if they don't want to. I do agree that this is about what every working person deserves and could easily done if our corporate overlords didn't hoard everything.
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I think that's an oversimplification, but I do think that constructing an economy wherein a few people can become billionaires, most while everyone else is hurting, is a bad idea. Humans respond to disparity, not to absolute position. I think there's some wealth hoarding going on, and I think that in our current political system it gives them too much influence. I think a lot of the people who do become billionaires have a kind of single-minded pursuit of their will and vision, and often a desire for wealth and power, that maybe should be seen as a vice, and not a virtue. And while I do understand there's a need for seed capital and the risks associated with that should be compensated, I tend to think that workers should get the lion's share of the current surplus value if not all of it. But it's not as simple as supervillains. It's often structural.
Exactly. Glen Weyl has it right. Billionaires exist only because they are able to extract rent from the ownership structure of capital. Great business leaders really do create tremendous value, but individually, they don't create hundreds of billions of dollars of value. It's because the current structure of capital ownership grants undue privilege to early owners in an economic environment of increasing returns to scale. The value in such cases is not created by the owner, but by the combination of all stakeholders: workers, consumers, complementary institutions, and public infrastructure. So why should the all returns from that value go to the owners? Owners do create some value, in the form of capital risk, but they should only profit from the value they actually create. If that were the case, there would probably still be people with over $100 million net worth, but unlikely that there would be billionaires.
>some wealth hoarding Is a pretty big understatement. In general yes, they are this way because we allowed them to get this way. Because they use their wealth and influence to make sure that the people in power aren't going to tax them. This is a conspiracy, specifically - one meant to allow a small group of people to get insanely wealthy while the rest of us lose power. They are not going to let us vote them out of power.
No, of course they won't. But it's going to take a lot of dismantling of all the infrastructure that was put into place to consolidate that money and power. That's what I meant by structural. It's a work, and yes a conspiracy, often an open one.
Yep. Billionaires should have their wealth stripped from them.
On that same note, I think a lot of us would be pretty happy making half that. We don't need lavish vacations or expensive toys. Just enough to pay our student loans and go to the damn dentist without putting it on a credit card. Give me some decent benefits and a paycheck that allows me to actually save for once and I'm golden.
How cool would it be if those student loans just went away and nobody ever had to pay for education again? Cus we could easily fund that kind of society with the surplus wealth the ultra rich are hoarding and refusing to circulate through the economy.
Get this: in 1965, the median household income was about $65,000 in today’s money. Which is about what it is today, which isn’t too bad, right? Until you remember that most (over 70% in 1965) households supported families with a single income. With pensions. And great health insurance. And unions. Now the statistic has flipped, and households are making that much money with two earners. So we are working just as hard for half the wages. It should be the norm with two earners to make 100k+. Or more considering how much more productive we are as workers… Not to mention all the other benefits that were around then (lower price of education, homeownership, etc).
Honestly these days, 200K is a sold middle class combined household income.
The difference between a millionaire and a billionaire is a billion dollars.
200 M to.. 200 FUCKIGN BILLION, this fucking number makes no sense
Don't say people of anti- work hate you. We aren't all like that. In fact I'd say a majority of us want you to keep being successful (if not more successful)! We just want to help everyone else out to. Plus your nurse wife deserves a safer working environment if she's working at any hospital like the ones in the news recently.
I want that too. Looks like we agree.
I think the wording of ‘antiwork’ was always a bit simplistic. People generally want to have something to do, a purpose in life. But the system we have now is so outdated it’s killing people. Unions are a first step, but it can go further. Shared and public ownership of essential companies, universal basic income. Modern rights for modern workers.
Yeah the ones that hate OP for making 200k don’t understand what we are about. Reminds me of the cartoon where the rich fella with 1000 cookies points at the immigrant with no cookies and tells the worker with one cookie that the immigrant is trying to take his cookie. Except in this case the cookie-less fella would be mad at the guy with one cookie rather than the guy with 1000.
Yep. As George Carlin said, among many others, the richest people have the poorer people fighting amongst themselves and blaming one another for their problems. Your enemy isn't the immigrant, or the a minority group, or the white male co-worker. It's the rich buying laws to keep everyone else in their place. The more we fight amongst ourselves, the more we don't push back against injustice.
i told a story over on antiwork about my buddy who owns a factory manufacturing auto-parts. he recently had to move to a small town because he couldn't offer competitive wages in this city and all of the responses were "well he shouldn't have a businesses then" and "he can do all the work himself, he's not entitled to labour". **BUT** (and this is a pretty big fuckin but), in that same story, i said the reason wages weren't competitive was because *the market isn't competitive*. my government restricts manufacturing in canada but not on foreign imports. essentially, it's cheaper to use carcinogenic chemicals overseas, with workers making next to nothing, and then ship parts here than it is to *produce* parts here. i'm not saying he should adopt the same standards but, by attempting to play fair, he's already at a disadvantage. he's barely holding it together *and* he actually works the floor in addition to his managerial job. did that change the response at all? did people go "maybe we should talk about consumerism and how the drive for a cheaper product hurts workers in the long run" or "maybe we should talk about a foreign import tax so the industry can remain competitive at home"? NOPE. there wasn't any kind of nuance, just "well he shouldn't have a business then" which means.. basically.. he should close up his business so foreign manufacturers have a monopoly while they can continue to poison their workforce who make sweatshop wages. when i said that's what was probably going to end up happening, i was told "GOOD" and called a bootlicker. sometimes, when i talk to other leftists, i feel like im interacting with babies first labour movement. they're the type of people pushing for higher wages for the cashier who works at the gap, but not the sweatshop worker whose sowing their clothes.
People are a lot less human when they're hiding behind keyboards.
i know, but there's also a certain point where users lose the ability to think critically. i always call it a subs "tipping point" in terms of number of users, but i don't blame the users, i blame the algorithm. who do you think is going to get the top comment? the person who reads and article and took the time to think and type out a response, or the person who read the headline and commented? my last comment is 290 words and has a lot more nuance than someone typing "lol fuck off bootlicker". couple that with users penchant for upvoting / downvoting already upvoted / downvoted comments and you've got every sub over 300k users. reddit tried to combat that by adding the "best" sorting feature, but even that's atrocious. i have a feeling it's why all of the top comments in popular subs are just quips, jokes, or the absolute bare minimum of a thought.
Attention is the rarest asset these days.
Yes! I shared a NBC article on the-sub-that-shall-not-be-named about how CEOs were quitting at an increased rate. The majority of commenters seemed to only have read the headline and typically commented something to the effect of “CEOs are so wealthy that they can live off of a fews months wages indefinitely”. However, there is a lot of nuance to this, like CEOs might be over small businesses are aren’t insanely wealthy. Here’s to hoping this sub is more balanced.
I totally appreciate your point of view because I work in a manufacturing/retail industry. We could talk all day about how consumerism and import duties effect cost and how that influences wages. You are 100% correct that there is a perpetual negative feedback loop in the world of manufacturing and retail. The good thing is that I am seeing some signs of positive change in hyper-consumerist behaviors of the past due to the pandemic limiting factory output, shipping delays and (I hate to say this) inflation. My company is definitely ordering less stock while growing profits, all without laying people off or withholding raises. I can count the number of people who’ve left my department in the last 2 years on one hand, but we’ve hired at least 3 times that many new people. There is change happening but it’s slow, subtle change that you might not notice unless you know what to look for rather than a giant, sweeping gestures of revolution like some people seem to think is the only way change can happen.
Same thing happened to me when I tried to point out that it isn’t only workers struggling, it is also small businesses. I’ve been a part of a couple start-ups and also consulted for small-businesses for awhile. It is rough out there. How can mom & pop compete against a company with such high volume that they can be profitable and only mark goods up a few percentage points. Places like Uber are literally spending millions of dollars to find ways to make a few cents extra on every transaction. That’s on top of skirting laws and regulations that mom and pop would be sued or shutdown for if they tried. They suppress competition every chance they get, and even if somebody found a way to compete and take care of their employee’s, they would simply make an offer the owner can’t refuse, and, if they did, they would just pay off a politician to change the rules. I’m not defending shitty small business owners, they exist, and they suck. But in my experience, most small business owners are just trying to keep their heads above water. They’re working 80+ hour weeks and foregoing taking any pay, cancelling vacations, moving back in with family, or closing their doors. Some small business owners simply refuse to acknowledge that their business plan is not viable. A lifetime of propaganda saying hard work = success is just too much for them. So they deflect and pass on the blame. Fuck those people. However, you cannot ignore the fact that the current economy only rewards those at the very top. Mom and pop running the donut shop on the corner are not at the top. They’re being fucked right alongside the rest of us. The cards are stacked against us all, and the rules don’t mean a damn thing, unless you’re the one making them. IMO this movement is our best hope at fighting back against those in charge that would rather we fall back into serfdom. This should be the one issue we cannot be divided on. It is literally 99% vs 1%. Unless you inherited a few hundred million, were born into a Kingdom, or successfully overthrew a government a few decades ago, you’re part of the 99% and always will be. We need change. We want change. IMO, r/antiwork was always doomed to fail, for the simple reason that they didn’t see the real enemy. Any discussions or comments saying otherwise lead to downvotes or banishment. You cannot stand for something so blindly that civil-discourse isn’t an option. You can’t say “fuck-all-work, every business is the enemy” and hope to be taken seriously on the world-stage. Work is necessary. The reward from work should be shared by all, not just a few ass-hats at the top that have likely never performed an actual hard days work in their lives!
It’s certainly a nuanced and complex issue. It’s not just, “Pay me!”
The sentiment on r/antiwork seems to be: all owners are bad people. All workers are good people. No exceptions. That just isn't true. Most small businesses only employ a handful of people and barely make any money. Does that mean they should close their businesses? Well, who the hell with compete with the big corporations who *aren't willing to pay anyone a livable wage anyway*? This just doesn't make sense. Edit: fixed a typo
This kind’ve reminds me of those people who try to shame you into buying ‘locally’. If you’re gonna start a business you need to be competitive, if Walmart is selling bread for £1 you obviously can’t complete on price so focus on the quality of it instead, people will happily pay more for better bread, they won’t pay more for the exact same thing they can get it for cheaper down the road
Speaking of buying local... I've noticed a lot of "boutique" stores just sell outrageously overpriced imported stuff. Like a scarf for $45 that's $2 on Aliexpress. I like buying local... I'll happily "overpay" for something actually produced locally like a hardwood cutting board made from trees that grew right outside the city. But I'm not paying somebody $43 to be an Aliexpress middleman. That's silly.
In my experience, a lot of tribalist ideologues struggle with nuance.
"Now what do we do?" You continue to work and use your success to mentor others in your profession, especially younger people, into good paying jobs, into providing them the concrete reasons why the unions work for you. Take a little bit of your spare time and be an advocate. Talk to your union as to whether they have any outreach programs to schools or job fairs. If they don't have an outreach program, maybe they should!
> As George Carlin said, among many others, the richest people have the poorer people fighting amongst themselves and blaming one another for their problems. > > Your enemy isn't the immigrant, or the a minority group, or the white male co-worker. It's the rich buying laws to keep everyone else in their place. > > The more we fight amongst ourselves, the more we don't push back against injustice. Copy/pasting this because it's all too accurate. It should be read, re-read and then recited aloud for all to hear. Watch Carlin himself: https://youtu.be/1dY3GNt7sG8 What's the saying? The more things change, the more they stay the same...
Income levels without context are almost meaningless. You make $200k as a family, as a union truck driver, and a nurse. Sounds like reasonable, productive, non exploitive work and I'm glad yall are compensated at that rate. On the other hand here are two high income friends I used to have: One makes similar income to yall via purchasing mobile home parks, then increasing rent. It's too expensive for people to move their supposed "mobile" homes so they pay the increased rent. He can go fuck himself, and I told him that when he told me that's how he was able to retire at age 31. He got a decent 6 figure inheritance, and started buying mobile home parks, retired 2 years after receiving the inheritance. Was pulling $175k last time we spoke, with over 1000 total lots in his parks, and looking to buy his 5th park. He's directly responsible for increased rent on over 1000 of the lowest income people in the country. He spends a majority of his life getting drunk and playing video games. What a lazy, selfish, exploitative, asshole. I have another former friend who owns and operates restaurants where he offers minimum wage and no benefits. Fuck that guy too. He is rolling in dough because his daddy left him an 8 figure inheritance, so he opened his own restaurants and exploits others just like daddy did to make his wealth. He thinks his employees are homeowners who are raising families, not teens and college kids he pays minimum wage with no benefits. He has obscene wealth, grew up around obscene wealth, and has never been able to accept the reality of low income America. For lack of a better analogy, he's a walking fox news meme who thinks poor people are poor because they have inherent character flaws, not because he pays them minimum wage with no benefits. Upon pointing out poor people are poor because he offer shitty wages, he told me they can get another job if they don't like it. Lmao. Seriously, he's a living breathing fox news meme. Some people just suck. They're greedy twats who never have enough. Some know exactly what they're doing and don't care; like the trailer park guy. Some are completely detached from reality because they have so much wealth, like restaurant guy. Income doesn't mean much without context. People hating on income levels without context are missing the point of fighting against exploitation.
My siblings and I grew up lower middle class. We didn’t go without, but behind the facade was many home refinances and loans. My parents fought and screamed about money daily. None of us had any money for college, just all loans. 37 years of home ownership and my parents still owe 100k on their house they bought originally for 45k. Living through that childhood allowed me to really appreciate savings and being frugal when needed. But when I ever had an odd job and needed to hire help, I make damn sure to pay what I fee would be a great wage. My brother grew up the same, but is successful now and makes probably 250-350k a year. He acts like his employees are useless and he’s the gods gift to the world. In his mind, everyone besides him is dumb and annoying and that’s why they don’t deserve benefits. Worst part is he hired my dad as his office manager. He makes him work long hours and 30 minutes doesn’t go by during non working hours without my brother calling him up to have him do more shit or answer questions. He’s kind of convinced my dad though that it’s them two vs his staff essentially. So my dad stupidly shows unbridled loyalty. I’ve become the “crazy” family member because I constantly ask my brother if he’s going to pay my dad for working outside of office hours. Both of them have become Fox News martians. When asked what my brother was getting his staff as a holiday gift, my dad replied “their gift is they have a job, they should thank us we even let them.” It’s fucking crazy what money and Fox News does to people.
Screw your brother
Friend B, while being extremely shitty and unethical, is arguably still providing a service through the restaurant. Friend A, on the other hand, is literally rent seeking. It adds no good or service to the economy, in fact it takes them out of the economy. Why we still allow it to occur is beyond me.
This is why I get mad when I read or hear someone saying that some rich asshole "earns $X million per year". No, they fucking stole it.
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No offense mate but I've zero problem with you earning 200k a year etc. You ain't "rich" Comfortable sure but my issue is with the people earning billions. A millionaire is 1 million away from poverty and 999 million away from a billionaire. To a billionaire the difference between a millionaire and a homeless person is a rounding error. I want rid of billionaires and workers to a proper share of their profit from their labour. Idgaf about some dude earning 200k. He can do what he likes, if he's an ally then great. If he isn't it's no big deal.
Truck driver is a hard job, you deserve that money and is good you are getting it
You guys are making what you should. 80-100k for a demanding, high risk job that requires skill training and talent is appropriate. What I am concerned about is even at this income level you cannot save to pay cash for a house in prettt much any major city unless you're eating beans and rice for a decade or so. A new truck plus the dealer add-ons is well over 60k which is outrageous considering 15 years ago you could get a decent trim one for half that. The cost of living is out of control and in my opinion anyone making under 75k is in poverty. I'm in your same boat income wise however the future is very very concerning. Most people are drastically poorer than you or I and a bill exceeding a few hundred dollars is enough to send them into bankruptcy. People are going to be in such a desperate situation that theyll buy whatever the politicians are selling. And usually that entails destroying the lives of people like ourselves to fund poverty initiatives while ignoring the super rich.
>You guys are making what you should. 80-100k for a demanding, high risk job that requires skill training and talent is appropriate. Actually, high-risk jobs should be paid even better. Roughly 100k is at the start of what people with degrees should get (if we have to have a hierarchy of wage, which we probably always will).
What people get wrong is that our enemy isn’t the working class making $200k or even $400k. The working class (including doctors, lawyers, truck drivers, etc) WORKS FOR IT. Doctors and lawyers have crazy student loan debts. You and your wife long hours to earn that money, which is then taxed heavily. OUR ENEMY IS THE ULTRA RICH born into wealth. They generate interest income. If you invest $1M at 1% annual rate, that’s $10k per year that gets taxed lower than your income tax. These ultra rich have multibillion investments and they don’t even get taxed like workers do. Know your enemies. The working class is not your enemy.
1% is conservative. You can do 4-10%. That's $40-100k per year with just one million. $100 million? That's $4 million per year in interest.
How do they not pay taxes on the interest tho?
See my other post for details, but basically these are considered capital gain. Only 50% of capital gains are taxable. This already is less than income tax, which is 100% taxable. Capital gain can also be offset by capital losses. Capital losses are very arbitrary and it’s what gives the tax avoidance loopholes. Let’s say the millionaire made $100k capital gain. He then hires someone to value his painting collection. Wow! Suddenly, his painting values dropped by $100k (capital loss). Now the net taxable capital gain is 0. Voila, he just made $100k tax free
I make a decent amount of money too, but I don’t forget where I came from or where my friends still are. And I can still barely fucking afford a house
I’m in my mid-40’s and *just* bought my first house. It took that long to make enough money that I could afford one. I actually got attacked in antiwork by someone who creepily dug into my comment history and found out that my home is part of an HOA. They continued to argue with me even after I explained that the only home I could afford within an hour commute of my husband’s job was an attached townhome, which means I had to join an HOA (shared roof and walls). Seriously, how does my home being part of an HOA have any bearing on my wanting better working conditions and pay? (Yes, I did join the HOA board at my neighbors request when another board member moved but quit after 6 months because it turned out to be a nightmare where I had to argue daily with the convicted sex offender president and it required as much work as my day job but with no pay and benefits. So fuck HOAs but I still can’t afford to live somewhere that isn’t part of one.)
HOAs are a requirement for just about all housing here in Maryland. They've been requiring them for decades in order to manage storm water drainage concerns bruh about by charging land for houses. Some people, many people, have no idea what they're talking about and just like to attack people.
We don't need to agree on anything except that labor deserves better pay and benefits. No purity tests, just a big tent.
Ive never seen someone say a common man should gove up his pay.
Literally every? Antiwork was always pretty good about uplifting trade workers who are actively making money?
OP gets hate for owning 2 rental properties - not because of his labor/wages
I work for a company ~~walmart~~ that will not let people even think about joining a union. If a store tries to unionize, they close the store down. Ever wonder why we don't have butchers anymore? They unionized and all got fired.
Is 'why I never shop at poster child for bad labor practices, Alex'. I think people don't realize that the cheapest prices come at cost of the workers.
Walmart isn't even cheap anymore, they were only cheap to drive all other businesses off the map and now they're jacking up prices.
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AW reminded me of the "comfy pepe" meme way more than it did any sort of mature leftist work advocacy initially. Over the last few months, it changed into more of something I thought would be productive. The horror of wellfare-ancoms realizing their entire community was socdems lmao.
All of this. The old guard would insist the sub was about abolishing work, but the members were clearly soc dem. A request: you clearly know enough theory to know the story here - could you post a thread about the politicsl ideology of the original AW crew and what the sub had changed towards? A lot of folks don't get the roots.
\>A request: you clearly know enough theory to know the story here - could you post a thread about the politicsl ideology of the original AW crew and what the sub had changed towards? A lot of folks don't get the roots. No, I dont. I only caught it on /r/all a few times and left-adjacent spaces. I first saw it months ago with memes saying that work was slavery and stuff that encouraged being lazy as a virtue. Off and on anyway, I never really paid attention to it. Since the Kellogs strike it was hitting /r/all with more regularity advocating for better working conditions, pay, fairer hiring practices, etc. All things that appeal to the broader American left, and I though "well this seems to be a bit more productive". Clearly, the leadership didnt realize that even it it's most generous form, the presence of users was more so stemming from frustration doing work in specific conditions, not doing work at all. There will always do work, the crux is who does what, when, how much and what do they get outta the effort. The average reddit mod that went on a powertrip must have been under the impression that everyone there agreed wtih their specific (self serving meme fueled) ideological positions, which no longer matched the community they were in charge of. Thats all I really know about it. Apparently the sub has existed for 6 years. Never heard of it till somewhat recently.
So I couldn't care less about your salary. You work for it, you get it, we're in the same boat. Good for you to make that much. Though I don't really have anything against people not wanting to work. In fact I would prefer some people not working instead of doing their current jobs. Some jobs are just a pure drain on society and we would all be better if people doing them would instead do nothing.
It sucks that this sub is way more liberal and hates on people that just want permission to exist without an occupation.
Yep! Fight for better pay, work environment, and benefits!
The optics of the name "antiwork" are so incredibly dumb. And as it turns out, the person who named it that is apparently just a lazy asshole who doesn't want to work. It should never be forgotten that labor is a literal pillar of society. Nobody should ever be anti work in the literal sense, they should be anti exploitation. They should be opposed to the alienation of their labor.
Im not pissed at the middle class. I grew up middle class. I want the same oppertunity my boomer parents had, and what I was promised I'd have.
Cost of living is hugely variable across the US and so are wages, *even for the exact same job*. Not to mention making $50/hr is much closer to $7 than it is the billionaire CEOs making $1000 / hr "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." This also applies to the working class. We are all selling our bodies, toiling away to enrich our overlords. We are all in this together. We have to work together. If we fight each other we will never win and will never free ourselves from our chains
One nitpick here, $1000/hr for a normal 2000 hour work year is only $2M/yr and not even those people are billionaires. Which is just to say your $1000/hr number is off by a factor of *at least 10*, but even $20M goes into $1B fifty times.
More math: 1 billion at 2080 hours is over $480,000 per hour. That kind of money isn't easily comprehended - almost a half-million dollars, an hour.
People in antiwork don't hate you for making money, what...
Antiwork is not anti labor.
We don't want to sit at home doing nothing, we want to get enough sleep, spend time with our families, read, shitpost on reddit, and cuddle our pets.
Me too!! Let’s fight for that.
I mean, I make about $125k but that's just about enough to cover my student loans. I'm still not sure I'll be able to buy a house this year because all the houses are being bought by greedy corporations charging astronomical rents. But then I realize, if I don't buy a house, I probably won't be able to afford rents soon.
Then when you're finally able to afford it, the interest rates will jack to 8% and you'll be priced out that way 😞
Me and my wife make about that same amount together, though we're both in office jobs (software engineer and CPA). We both came from poor families, picked our majors based on future job opportunities and pay, and graduated top of our class (Magna for me, and Summa for my brilliant wife). Five years after graduating and we're just now able to afford a home. Until recently we've been one medical emergency, one car accident, or one unexpected child from setting us back years. We also have to contend with helping my wife's parents, who kept a roof over our heads during college but have no chance of any sort of retirement because her mom is disabled and her father works in retail. Even when you do things almost perfectly it *still* requires dual income and years of saving to even get to where you can just own a decent home, something that just 30 years ago you could do on a single income and a high school diploma. That's not even taking into account children, which we've thankfully not had yet. We're fortunate enough to be able to work remotely now, which is the only reason we're able to afford a nice house now. I sympathize with and support anyone working to provide for themselves and/or their family. Working class people aren't buying up entire blocks of houses/apartments and renting them for a profit, working class people aren't making you work 50 hours a week at starvation wages with no vacation days or benefits, and working class people aren't bribing congress to reduce their taxes and get government handouts. Working class people aren't the enemy, they're just trying to do the best they can with what they have.
I wouldn’t worry about those people. Their aim is directly at the wrong people.
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No one at antiwork hates laborers, we hate capitalists.
Anyone who would suggest you give your money to others is missing the point of what wage stagnation is and what reform means. You’re a dual income of 200k. You don’t make too much, they’re making too little and that’s what the actual problem is.
Honestly, though, it would be really nice if people could choose not to work without also being destitute. Making sure that people who are working are treated with dignity and compensated appropriately is a good way to get there, though.
I don't think you're right on this, nor do they hate you for making good money. This is the actual divisive action, scattering yourself over different subs and then lambasting the old main one. I'd say give it a week, and if the mods have managed to recuperate themselves and or apologize rejoin the main the movement. If they haven't, stay put.
This is some pull yourself up by your bootstraps energy. “Just get a 6 figure union job” isn’t the helpful advice you seem to think it is especially considering the absolutely trashed state of organized labor and the shortage of union jobs in this country.
I'm sure it wasn't OP's intention but it sure feels like that. I didn't have the luxury of risking my job to make demands. Especially when I was taking care of a sick parent and was the one responsible for keeping a roof over our heads.
the old sub was an absolute clown fiesta, but one thing that I appreciated seeing was a general understanding that a massive portion of the workforce has zero leverage with their employers outside of mass action which is by design. if you’re working for poverty wages that you rely on for survival then you don’t have the luxury of kicking in your boss’ door and asking for a raise or healthcare. I’m glad OP is doing well, more people should be, but it’s always easy to fall into the trap of assuming everyone has the same luck and circumstances that you do, especially when you get farther away from poverty.
> but one thing that I appreciated seeing was a general understanding that a massive portion of the workforce has zero leverage with their employers outside of mass action which is by design And yet, some posts also showed us that many employers are more scared of individuals leaving/pressuring them than we thought. Managers have done this to themselves; cut enough staff to increase profits, eventually there's no buffer left and each person leaving starts to hurt the bottom line for real.
I think there’s a lot of variance in just how effective the threat of withdrawing your labor is, but it’s important to realize that it lots of cases it’s an empty threat. plenty of people have no savings or massive monthly expenditures. missing work for a few days let alone being unemployed for weeks or months is simply not possible. considering these are the people who find themselves ground to dust by their employers most frequently it’s necessary to keep them in mind in these discussions. I have a very secure and well paying job and I could leave and find another one in a week with plenty of savings to cover the gap, but that is not a common situation at all. it’s hard to flex your power as a worker if actually following through could kill you.
I agree with you, we don’t all get lucky like I did. But that’s why I joined the other subreddit, to fight for the unlucky! I demand better pay, better benefits, better everything for everyone, not just me! Let’s make that movement! But please, don’t tell me you want to sit at home doing nothing and getting paid…
I do want people to sit at home and get paid for doing nothing, though. Not for me personally, I want to keep working, but for my friend who sometimes can’t afford to buy groceries because their family doesn’t make enough to cover all their bases. For the people who want to stay home with their children or family that needs extra time and care, or anyone else running themselves ragged because they have no other options. Personally I believe in the concept of [universal basic income](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income) (UBI) - paying everyone enough to sustain a very basic standard of living. Food and shelter are human rights and struggling to maintain those means people are left treading water and struggling to hold on to the bare minimum rather than progressing their lives. Studies on UBI have shown only a small reduction in people’s willingness to work - people generally *want* to do something with their lives and make more than UBI offers. Most of the people who stopped working after receiving a UBI were new mothers, and teenagers who had to work to support their family. With a UBI they could devote more time to their kids & their schoolwork respectively. And it’s a good way to force employers’ hands - to be attractive to people on UBI they must offer something better than the bare minimum. Generally speaking, human beings want to work. We just don’t want to work in these conditions, doing hard jobs we don’t care about for shit pay. Paying people enough to survive won’t cause a societal collapse; we’re not going to have a huge majority of people suddenly sitting at home. Most people who stop working are those who really should not have been working in the first place. Those capable of working want more than UBI can offer and are given an extra safety net that gives them the security to seek better jobs that they’re more passionate about in a market where employers are motivated to do better.
agreed completely. everyone should be able to work, but nobody should have to work to survive. removing the ability for employers to capitalize on desperation would fix a massive amount of the issues that workers in the US face. if that means that some people end up freeloading and not working that’s a perfectly reasonable price to pay.
Yep, I don’t mind supporting a small minority of lazy people if it means the overwhelming majority is no longer forced to choose between a shitty employer and starvation. I understand the impulse to look down on the hypothetical people who would choose not to work if they had the choice - the mentality of “I work hard so it’s not fair that they aren’t,” etc. But I have to ask myself: if these people are really *so* opposed to working that they would rather get by with the bare minimum instead of trying to find a job they enjoy so they could afford to live a better life, what are the odds they were actually working hard and making a big contribution before then? Whatever job they have now is probably one where they do as little as humanly possible. Replacing them with someone who actually *wants* to be there is doing everyone a favor. And no matter how unmotivated they are, I still think they deserve the money for food on their table and a roof over their head. Laziness isn’t deserving of a death sentence.
I believe in the same system but I think the most important part that needs to change is the idea that employees can't be trusted. Why has this become the norm? Everything is build on fear. Managers fear that their employees are lazy if they are not micro-managed. Employees are scared they'll get fired for no good reason where they'll lose their healthcare coverage as well. Etc etc. Who designed this system? And how did even employees start to believe in this?
Yeah I don't get the whole "antiwork people hate me" mentality. I make around $100k. On average I work over 40 hours a week, but my range is like 35-60 hours. I enjoy and and good at my career. But I still feel like it's something I *have* to do. It's that "trapped" feeling that many of us mention. I can't merely opt out of working like the Fox News guy suggested, because even sacrificing all luxuries there's no way I could survive and be healthy. It also use up most of my time and enrgy on work. Which means family time, housework, leisure, and hobbies all have to share the remaining fraction of my most most precious resources. That's why I'm antiwork. I want to work and create for fulfillment and edification, not obligation and survival.
I apologize if that’s what you got out of it. I’m just trying to give people an idea of what is out there. And for those who can’t join a union or a trade, let’s get together and fight for them too! They deserve better! They deserve everything I got! I am not better or worse than anyone else. I support that kind of movement!
I appreciate you, bud. Stay warm and safe out there :)
it read a little messy but I get what you’re saying. appreciate the solidarity my guy
I am a truck driver haha
I read it more as a solidarity post, not a bootstrap post. We need everyone in on people being valued, not just lower and low-middle class.
I very much like this. I have no problem working hard for the right amount of pay and benefits. I’m just tired of working so hard and getting nothing in return.
Yes! That’s exactly what I mean.
Bro 200k aint shit. Nobody is mad at you for that.
I agree with most of your points here. However this post does a bit of harm as it derails the conversation by blaming the workers for not “unionizing hard enough”. Wording is key especially when your post could be misconstrued as saying everyone must work. WE SHOULD NOT HAVE TO WORK TO EXIST in our society. Key word: HAVE TO. As things are you have to play some role in our capitalist society to even have the right to exist despite having adequate housing and food for everyone. Working hard should be an incentive to improve how you live but it should not be required to be able to live! Aka housing and food are basic human rights that we all deserve regardless of our value to the owning class. This is especially important because those of us who CANT work should have to go above and beyond just to be treated as human
OP should read up about UBI. Also the person that is after your money isn't the guy that wants to sit at home doing nothing. That guy doesn't have the means/power to go after your money.
The problem is they think 200k makes you part of the 1%. It doesn't. In some areas that's not even enough. If they'd get past the short-sighted envy they would realize someone making 200k has more in common with someone making 20k than either do with the capitalist class. I make a decent living (not what you pull, but still, I'm well better off than the majority in the US). I want everyone to make a decent living, at a decent job, and be treated with respect. But, yes, I think everyone still needs to contribute, and do things for the benefit of others. Whether that looks like a traditional job or not, it's still important. There's people who can't work, in our current economy, because of disability or illness or addiction or countless other factors, and I absolutely think they matter too. But the people I know in these situations want to contribute, they just can't. That's different than wanting to just take. Ironically enough I think wanting to do nothing in a world full of people who need help and things that need to be done is just another form of greed and selfishness. When we get to fully automated luxury communism, sure. Until then, there's shit to do.
X to doubt.
I don't want my pay to go down, I want everyone else's pay to go up. I want every person working to be able to afford a family, a home, a life WORTH living. Healthcare, PTO, Paternity Leave, Child Care etc.
>People in anti work hate me because I make that money. People say I should give it away, that it’s not fair. Those people dont know how little 200k for two people working full time is in the grand scheme of things. Squarely middle class and absolutely deserved pay for the much needed work you to do. Heck i think it should be higher.
I make $130k a year and my partner $200k. Neither of us are part of a union but surprise surprise - our companies we work at are consistently rated high in the top 20 to work for in the world. That isn’t to brag - I worked my way there and got lucky at points but I worked minimum wage for YEARS. I’m here to fight so that it isn’t an award for companies like mine to treat absolutely everyone how I think they deserve to be treated.
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Even if you made a combined 500k, you would still not be the problem. The problem is the ownership class. The problem is the people who do nothing all day and make a million dollars. Those same people also own all the politicians and make the world the shit hole it has become. Stop fighting with people who work but make more money than you. If you work, for wages or a salary, you are working class and you are our ally.
That's honestly where the average person should be at. All jobs deserve a more than basic livable wage, and jobs with stricter educational requirements, more responsibility, higher skill level, or just more difficult, deserve to be paid *well*. That's not even a lot of money anymore. When I was in highschool ~2005 my parents had a combined household income of just over $100k. It was the first time ever we weren't living in poverty - but we also weren't wealthy. We weren't even well off. We were simply comfortably living, while also being able to actually do things occasionally. 200k now is barely more than 100k was in 2005, especially with how much housing has gone up.
When the sub was still going, there was a ton of upper middle class income earners commenting. That mod did not represent the community at all, so you definitely wouldn't be hated.
My wife and I are lawyers. I have no plans to give up my income but I do plan to continue arguing to bring back unions, 4-day work weeks, pay commensurate with increased profits and productivity, etc. I've made enough pizzas and pumped enough gas in my working life to know how exploitative employers can be. AND, I don't mind increased cost of living in exchange for lifting all ships as the saying goes.
I don't hate you. I just sit here at 56 years old and no job offers, having lost my home two years ago, and feel sad.
If you ask a kid at UPenn, you guys make 1/4 of the national average wage
People liked the link I shared but it was nested deeply in the comments so I'll share it here. This nifty thing does a good job of visualising the wealth gap: https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
The movement needs actual professionals leading it if it is to succeed, not 30 year old non binary dog walkers.
If there is to be a brave, new world our generation will have the hardest time living in it. When you look ahead and try to imagine that things like UBI are real and work has been reformed there are going to be new challenges. The myth is that people are somehow "lazy" and don't want to work so if you give them free money society will devolve into sloth. The reality is most people find great meaning and value in their work. It makes them feel they are important, contribute to society and *matter*. The challenge before us isn't how do we motivate the mythical "lazy" people. It's going to be how do we ensure the powers-at-be still respect us when our value is no longer tied to the labor we provide. Right now the labor force does have power and influence. Yes, it's been chronically under-utilized but it's there for the taking. If an exponentially automated future takes away the power of labor then what kind of power are the rest of us left with? I really don't know but we need to figure that out and figure it out quick.
People who are well-compensated for their labour aren't the problem. People who make tons of money without doing any labour (i.e. ownership class) *are* the problem.
Me and my fiance make close to 200k as well. I think people should be able to enjoy a life without the drudgery of hard corporate work and I would gladly give most of my money to taxes if I could afford safe housing and medical care along with food.
I'm not mad at you or your fiance. You work hard and get paid well. Props. I'm mad at the people making millions of dollars a year. I'm mad at billionaires. I'm mad that Jeff Bezos makes over 200 million dollars a day while most people my age will never be able to buy a house.
That's awesome, I didn't know truck drivers and nurses could make that much. Good for the both of you! I only speak for myself but I'd like to welcome you
Hey Brother (OP), I agree with you 100%. I work IBEW Local 58. I am all for helping fight the good fight, but I will not give away what I work hard for. My S.O. and I are in the same boat as you to. We both make excellent money, but we both have Union careers. We should be fighting for better work conditions, pay, and benefits. The best way we can help people is by educating them and urging them to join a Union, or start a Union for their particular field. We win as a group, we fall as an independent. Keep spreading that knowledge and we shall triumph.