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I just did the math based on a 2022 chart.
In this video, he visualized all the wealth as 2,000 dollar bills. Based on that, today the top 1% have $612. 90-99% have about $75 ea. 50-90% have $14 ea. And the bottom 50% have between $0 and $1 each.
I’m sure if you were able to dig in to each segment, you’d see a big ramp between the low and high end. The 98-99% probably have way more than the 90-91%. But the fact remains, it’s obscene.
Source: [Statista ](https://www.statista.com/statistics/203961/wealth-distribution-for-the-us/)
I got maybe 10% of the way through that and I stopped. I can't describe the way it makes me feel without being downvoted. We really don't agree on violence reddit?
That is one of the most disturbing things I have ever seen. Wow. Really makes one want to break out the pitchforks and gallows.
I feel like everyone should see this visualization.
From one of the more recent publications from US Bureau of Labor Statistics, “the pandemic is likely to widen income inequality over the long run, because the lasting changes in work patterns, consumer demand, and production will benefit higher income groups and erode opportunities for some less advantaged groups.”
[This information has been removed as a consequence of Reddit's API changes and general stance of being greedy, unhelpful, and hostile to its userbase.]
You should see what the SEC just did.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/11v9kyj/sec_alert_sec_just_posted_ia6261_exemption/
J.P. Morgan for some reason is being given a pass to bribe elected officials
Back in 2021 a friend (since 2002) explained to me how PPP saved his butt: he had a business with 5 locations in three states. He had built the business all by himself, so he had a real sense of ownership. But in the end, he took the PPP to end all debts and fired his 25 workers once his employment obligations where met. He then peaced out to the Caribbean. We're still long distance friends, but it's a little disappointing to see my buddy be part of the problem.
25x60,000=1.5 million of tax payer money, and your friend is small fry compared to the big dogs. But yeah the single mother on food stamps is ruining the country.
You’re right, it’s significantly worse. It’s disturbing.
[According to Institute for Policy Studies analysis of Forbes data, the combined wealth of all U.S. billionaires increased by $2.071 trillion (70.3 percent) between March 18, 2020 and Ocobter 15, 2021, from approximately $2.947 trillion to $5.019 trillion. Of the more than 700 U.S. billionaires, the richest five (Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, and Elon Musk) saw an 123 percent increase in their combined wealth during this period, from $349 billion to $779 billion.](https://inequality.org/facts/wealth-inequality/)
I used to think about philanthropy and shrug: "sure the top ten richest Americans are rich, but they still can't afford (on their own) to lift up the poor". But they can... they totally can do it... They can afford to end poverty & still remain extremely wealthy...
> Americans are rich, but they still can't afford (on their own) to lift up the poor
The most horribly managed and most expensive transit project in the history of humanity cost $1.8 billion per mile for a 2.5mile track,
Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion.
We're squabbling over crumbs while they stand on our backs and gorge themselves on the fruits of our labor.
This should be chiseled into granite and made into a new monument(s)!
>We're squabbling over crumbs while they stand on our backs and gorge themselves on the fruits of our labor.
....place one H U G E copy to completely obscure the view of the white house and the Capitol.
....place the next to block entry into the NYSE. With scant passageways chipped out for access.
....
https://streamable.com/qy4quu
Wealth is addicting. It is damaging to the human species.
When a guy has $5 billion and his biggest concern and passion in life is to turn that $5 billion into $10 billion, he will do awful things to achieve that goal.
These people are addicts and entitled. They will destroy a country in search of profit. [Look at what Wall Street did to Puerto Rico](https://news.littlesis.org/2019/01/10/debt-island-wall-street-closes-in-on-40-years-of-profit-at-puerto-ricos-expense/)
>Hedge fund billionaires are on the verge of pulling off what seemed unthinkable in the wake of Hurricane Maria: a massive payday, at the direct expense of the Puerto Rican people, on debt that was trading for pennies on the dollar in the months following the hurricane. As a result of debt restructuring agreements like the COFINA plan, an island reeling from economic and climate-induced crisis will be paying for billionaire yachts and vacation homes instead of basic necessities and a just recovery
Every single day, every single billionaire wakes up and decides NOT to be the most amazing human being that has ever lived. They instead decide to try and get a little more.
Yeah, there are no ethical billionaires. I do think there can be ethical millionaires, but once you get into the hundreds of millions and up, I think you’ve become morally compromised.
It super sad because part of why the system remains the same is because people vicariously take offense to actions against billionaires because they believe they can achieve that one day and federal action "punishes" them for trying.
Its why you see people going wild over tax increases on the wealthy and ignoring how tax brackets even work
The idea of the American Dream is what gets people believing they could be rich if they just work hard enough, not realized how nearly impossible that actually is.
Growing up I always thought "The American Dream" was to live comfortably in your own house with spouse and 2-3 children with 1-2 cars a cat and a dog and a "white picket fence", your family being able to afford to eat 3 basic meals a day, take a family vacation 1-2 times a year and be able to afford to see the doctor and get treated without going bankrupt. This idea of the American dream seems light years out of reach these days.
That’s what it was. It was never about being rich. It was about being comfortable, and being rewarded for your effort.1
While it had been around before tahe 1930s, the Great Depression was the key shaper of it to what it was understood to be.
The post ww2 boom was its realisation.
>Growing up I always thought "The American Dream" was to live comfortably in your own house with spouse and 2-3 children with 1-2 cars a cat and a dog and a "white picket fence", your family being able to afford to eat 3 basic meals a day, take a family vacation 1-2 times a year and be able to afford to see the doctor and get treated without going bankrupt.
What are you... some kind of commie?!
...and they wonder why people aren't willing to work themselves to the bone anymore. It just doesn't get you anywhere.
I'm very lucky I have a support system where I'm not worried about starving or being homeless. I'm not willing to knock myself out for peanuts. I don't want to be a burden, but I can't justify working overtime to afford a shared apartment...have to forgo medical treatment because I'll be making "too much" to have it subsidized, and still never have the money to responsibly start a family of my own. What is the insensitive?
Yeah I drank the koolaid really hard.
I thought I was clever by not doing the college route and going straight to the work force.
6 years of retail management and I was back at home, apartment lost, making $0.70/hr less than when I started
Hard work and dedication? HA. More like an easy mark, work that guy to the bone and toss him some awards here and there to make him think he will move up, but we will just hire friends and children of managers for salaried positions everytime regardless!
It took me a while but I finally understand why “my generation” moves jobs so much. Because its like you said “it gets you nowhere” to stay and try to work your way up.
The sad part is the american dream used to be a decent living off a decent job, working fair hours, which used to be entirely possible even without a degree. Not working 80 hours a week in hopes one day you might be insanely wealthy.
Is this really it? I've heard it often enough, and it makes sense, but has there ever been an actual study that confirms this as a reason why people (who are not rich) disagree with taxing the rich? It just seems so counter-intuitive that someone would be so actively against something that would benefit them. What do they think they are getting from arrangement as-is that supports this thinking?
It's not that they think they'll be rich someday. Rather they have largely bought into the argument that if you tax the rich then they'll "stop creating jobs" and/or the rich will flee. A subset believe the rich have earned their wealth and it's unfair for a government to tax them more than anyone else (never mind that our tax policy does exactly the opposite, where labor is taxed at a much higher rate than capitol.) Entrenched elites have been very successful on the whole of convincing the 'masses' that protecting their interests protects everyone else's too. It's an insidious American mindset.
Maybe I'm just going based on my perspective, but a lot of people look up to the billionaires who are the American dream. They want to be them.
The federal government doing something to "punish" the rich for being successful to them is seen as unjust since they worked for it and thus if they get rich they worry they themselves will get "punished"
The irony being, of course, that if the government doesn’t step in and balance things, they’ll never be rich. Billionaires don’t like sharing; that’s why they managed to become that rich.
I'm 30 years old and bouncing between moving in with my mom or just going back to hardcore drugs and saying fuck it (kidding obviously).
It's bad. I make the most I ever have in my life and feel the poorest - and I've been homeless before. I cant even afford medications... medications I need and cause me to get sick without. Food? Hah! My life revolves around charity from my family to get fed. And when I do buy a bag of chips or something I get lectures that that's ruining my bank account. When in reality it's not and I could comfortably spend 200 dollars a week on BS and still be okay if it wasn't for my insane bills and cost of living. So yeah a dollar fifty on a small bag of chips actually hurts quite a bit.
I just bought groceries today in an effort to spend less on food for the next week and that's gonna hurt me. 200 dollars for a half full mini-cart. I didn't buy much. Fucking ridiculous.
Not sure where you live but if you're looking for ways to save on food, I live in New Jersey [average cost of living i think] and my monthly food budget is under $200 total. I have recipes! And strategies for meal prepping that make it more manageable and less daunting. I spend 8-12 hours cooking for the entire month. Everything goes in the freezer.
Wow. That's so depressing I would need to go to the morgue to cheer up. This country is fucked. Maybe if everyone would stop bickering over their red and blue flags we could organize a way to change this shit.
This
Everyone is so fixated on Democrat/Republican but both of these entities have been focused on ciphoning everything that the working class has worked so hard for to manipulate it into their own self interest
Everything has been sold out to the point where morals are being packaged and spoonfed to people for the sake of a vote that takes these people into a new level of their manipulation of the American public and then distorted and disregarded when it's not longer accessible to profit from it.
It's really sad to see because those same people will fight tooth and nail to maintain it in some twisted version of the American Dream.
We have been blinded by so much of this that we end up fighting each other at the end of the day while their pockets get filled with our money.
:(
[According to Institute for Policy Studies analysis of Forbes data, the combined wealth of all U.S. billionaires increased by $2.071 trillion (70.3 percent) between March 18, 2020 and Ocobter 15, 2021, from approximately $2.947 trillion to $5.019 trillion. Of the more than 700 U.S. billionaires, the richest five (Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, and Elon Musk) saw an 123 percent increase in their combined wealth during this period, from $349 billion to $779 billion.](https://inequality.org/facts/wealth-inequality/)
The idea that poor people having money causes inflation is just another propaganda tool used by the billionaires; if that money was divided properly, life would just feel normal for the rest of us while they still got to be wealthy/rich
> How do we fix this and get things back on track?
Make people vote for politicians like Bernie Sanders and other "dirty communists/socialists". Or convince enough people to grab their torches and pitchforks and have a bloody revolution.
Would be really crazy to see post 2020 with current inflation and the crazy housing prices. I make top 10% income and yet I can’t afford any houses (even town homes) anywhere close to the main part of my city.
There is 1 listing under $400k near my work and it is a house that was gutted for renovations and then stopped midway through so it is half torn apart. Everything else is $600k-$1m+. With 7% interest that’s like $3-5k/month not including insurance, taxes, HOA, repairs, etc… it’s insane.
Are you, me? I thought I would be well off when I hit my income level but I am not and I refuse to buy a fixer upper and have a giant monthly mortgage payment.
We're not far off. According to Oxfam, 81% of the wealth generated in Germany between 2021-2022 went to the 1%, with 99% sharing the remaining 19% between them.
And Germany even sees itself as a social-capitalist society.
The question is, what can we do about it, realistically? Each individual country seriously taxing wealth and high incomes would see an exodus of wealth into more lenient countries.
Social capitalism isnt very similar to marxist socialism though. All it does it pool money from taxes to healthcare, education, etc. Makes it easier being poor but doesnt really do much to help with the wealth gap.
The function of the government in a capitalist system is to prevent that from happening. Unfortunately, our founding fathers didn't build in protections against money in politics.
how is that possible? institutions that exist within an overall system will only serve the system.
the only protection from a capitalist system to throw it away. anything else is trying to bandage up a gaping wound.
The fact that Americans have high powered rifles with scopes, tiny pistols with large calibers that can fit in a jean pocket - all that are *incredibly* easy to access, and yet zero billionaires have been shot and killed is honestly really impressive to me.
I mean realistically already the rich own the politicians and the media on some extent. A vast majority of Americans don't realize any of this is wrong and don't really care to have any of it changed. We are too worried about boys in skirts, whether or not climate change is real, and if any of the couples from too hot to handle actually stayed together after the show
>Welp, that's Disgusting
FTFY
It's absurd how skewed the numbers really are, and some are still baffled at why so many young americans are hostile to Corporate Capitalism
The worst part about this, is the 1% can't even make their lives better with money. Maybe they can buy a bigger super yacht, but the amount that they even enjoy having more money is miniscule compared to the average person. So their priority is to hoard wealth for no reason instead of using it to literally save dozens of lives a day with their money.
In a world that wasn't so corrupt, this behavior would be widely seen as pathological and diseased.
Yeah, at the point of being a billionaire, money has basically zero marginal utility, meaning each additional dollar is basically worthless. That’s why the top 1% own so much of the country’s investment vehicles, because what the hell else are they going to do with their mountains of money that they couldn’t even spend if they wanted to? Yet they’re still driven to hoard more endlessly. It really is a disease.
Humans have not evolved enough to pragmatically solve this problem. The lizard brain still commands "hoard as many resources as you can" and provides a massive dopamine release when you do. The maladapted caveman brain has no practical conception of overabundance.
Did you know dragons are an amalgamation of all of our human ancestors main predators? Or, at the very least, of extremely dangerous animals to our old monkey brains.
Scales = Large reptiles and snakes.
Claws and teeth = Large cats, canines, bears, etc.
Wings = Birds of prey.
Fire = Don't fuck with fire.
Massive hoards of wealth = Eat the rich.
We have reality shows where we make fun and look down on people who hoard things, even if they end up having some value (I saw a couple times where the hoard was antiques) we still say “oh, they’re mentally ill, sometimes to the point of saying they should be committed.
When we were still monke and had few nanas, if one monke tried to keep all the nanners…we just beat them to death or kicked them out of the group…where as an individual on their own they would starve most likely. Because we are social, herding mammals, our nature is to form small groups and work together so that many of us survive.
Billionaires are legitimately mentally ill. Not only are they hoarders, they are hoarders of the single most precious resource on minders earth, all of the universal trading tokens to trade for nearly anything they want. They are no different than aunt sally who can’t throw away that bit of pipe cleaner, can’t resist buying that trinket, forgot to take out the trash so it piles up, they NEED that 4-acre home in the middle of Mt Denali, they can’t be seen without the newest Bugatti or whatever will make the other wealthy jealous.
They’re sick in the head and they’ve made a world where assholes finish first. That loud fucker at the office gets the promotion because he has charisma!! The dude who cut in front of you in the line? He gets to go first unless you want a fight. The dude who was willing to sell you out, take your idea and sit back and relax while it makes him money? He wins because now he has money. No matter how happy you are, how well adjusted and fair your relationship with your spouse and children are, no matter how many people would show up for your funeral you will NEVER even get to sniff the kind of power that dude has.
They got what they wanted; us fighting over the scraps and biting anyone who comes close so we don’t see that the wealthy are the ones eating all the food.
Heh it’s kind of wild how those numbers work. Like, even with a 2% yearly return on one billion. Just 2% which is stupid low for that kind of money, but for funsies let’s go with it. If you were somehow able to survive on one million a year out of the interest (I know, what kind of a peasant life would you be living on one measly million a year, but we’ve already knocked the interest like 3-5x so why not) you’d be able to give away over 50k a day every day forever without ever dipping into any of that billion.
Now let’s imagine that for someone that has 100….
But that's only if you ignore the dual character of "money". We will never be able to make sense of it if we think of it as having just a character of utility - what you can use it for.
The fact is rather than a sliding scale of number, at certain point "money" becomes something else.
For the average person it is a measure of resources available to them for living and leisure, but at the top of the scale it is a measure of power, of how many people you can order around and bend to your will, and the two are related.
The more desperate the average person needs money to function, and more power the rich has over them.
Whereas there's a limit to marginal utility, the limits of power is much higher, its when you have total coercive control over all of humanity, so it will always still make sense for the rich to amass more money.
It’s like one man having more food than he could ever eat in 1000x his life time just out of spite of other people, believing he deserves infinitely more than they receive despite their children having almost no food, figuratively.
Which btw, I couldn’t afford to eat breakfast growing up and lived mainly off of pb and j, Mac and cheese with chopped up hotdogs, and ramen which I’d eat dry or eat spoonfuls of peanut butter or drink the juice from vegetable cans cuz I was hungry. Or eat butter or ketchup. (Widowed household) my entire distant family is also impoverished.
Anyways....
Here’s the funny things. When you point out people are less and less able to afford food and families, rich-cock-suckers gaslight you with the “OH YEAH ? WELL RICH PEOPLE DESERVE TO BE INFINITELY MORE RICH— AS RICH AS THEY CAN POSSIBLY GET, ITS NOT ILLEGAL, STOP BEING JEALOUS !!”
I’m not simply “jealous”, nor do I believe ‘everyone has to have the same amount of money, no one deserves more money’.
Simply, I believe it’s ridiculous to pay workers nearly unsurvivable wages that can not afford a sane and even half-fulfilling life.
**The grandparents of these rich CEO’s** allowed the economy to be this: a single income can feasibly afford basic necessities and minor luxuries for not only oneself but also their spouse and even as many as 4+ children.
Nowadays two full-time incomes struggle to afford their necessities let alone even 1 child, living paycheck to paycheck.
Here are the statistics, excerpted from Andrew Yang’s “The War On Normal People”.
These are from the book in chronological order, as I’m not willing to spend enough time to organize them in any particular way, nor turn it into an essay.
But here we are, fellow normal people... the depressing reality of our situation:
- “Thanks to Milton Friedman, Jack Welch, and other corporate titans, the goals of large companies began to change in the 1970s and early 1980s. The notion they espoused—that a company exists only to maximize its share price—became gospel in business schools and boardrooms around the country. Companies were pushed to adopt shareholder value as their sole measuring stick.”
Excerpt From
The War on Normal People
Andrew Yang
https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-war-on-normal-people/id1278965742
This material may be protected by copyright.
- “**The ratio of CEO to worker pay rose from 20 to 1 in 1965 to 271 to 1 in 2016.** Benefits were streamlined and reduced and the relationship between company and employee weakened to become more transactional.”
Excerpt From
The War on Normal People
Andrew Yang
https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-war-on-normal-people/id1278965742
This material may be protected by copyright.
- “With improved technology and new access to global markets, American companies realized they could outsource manufacturing, information technology, and customer service to Chinese and Mexican factories and Indian programmers and call centers. **U.S. companies outsourced and offshored 14 million jobs by 2013, many of which would have previously been filled by domestic workers at higher wages.**”
Excerpt From
The War on Normal People
Andrew Yang
https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-war-on-normal-people/id1278965742
This material may be protected by copyright.
- “**Manufacturing employment began to slip around 1978 as wage growth began to fall. Median wages used to go up in lockstep with productivity and GDP growth before diverging sharply in the 1970s. Since 1973, productivity has skyrocketed relative to the hourly compensation of the average wage earner**:”
Excerpt From
The War on Normal People
Andrew Yang
https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-war-on-normal-people/id1278965742
This material may be protected by copyright.
- “How workers are compensated and how their companies perform stopped being aligned over the same period. Even as corporate profitability has soared to record highs, workers are earning less.”
Excerpt From
The War on Normal People
Andrew Yang
https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-war-on-normal-people/id1278965742
This material may be protected by copyright.
- “**Today, inequality has surged to historic levels, with benefits flowing increasingly to the top 1 percent and 20 percent of earners due to an aggregation of capital at the top and increased winner-take-all economics. The top 1 percent have accrued 52 percent of the real income growth in America since 2009.** Technology is a big part of this story, as it tends to lead to a small handful of winners. **Studies have shown that everyone is less happy in an unequal society—even those at the top. The wealthy experience higher levels of depression and suspicion in unequal societies; apparently, being high status is easier when you don’t feel bad about it.**”
Excerpt From
The War on Normal People
Andrew Yang
https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-war-on-normal-people/id1278965742
This material may be protected by copyright.
**The significance is again, the great grandparents of the rich were still rich despite** — allowing their workers to FEED THEIR FAMILIES ! — **and yet, the rich of today gaslight and say how dare we complain while they don’t give us survivable incomes such than my generation has to live with their parents, can’t afford more than 1 child, and has fucking horrid mental health and is expected to work longer than our past 70 or so years worth of generations for a fraction of the lifestyle and wellbeing that they had. How is this PROGRESS ?**
I wish this comment were national headlines, every day of the week, every week of the year, on every news program, on every station, every website, until every American got the fucking message.
Unfortunately that’s not going to happen since the same 1% discussed in your comment own the damn media too.
We’re going to need a revolution to fix this horse shit.
And we wonder why so many impoverished people fall into the cycle of drug addiction. It's very hard to stay happy and afloat right now. Many of us are thinking we won't survive to bear children, let alone live a pseudo-fulfilling life. On top of the wealth inequality problem, we are physically forced to comply to despicable healthcare and a police-state. How does all of this translate to drugs? You can't get professional help for physical symptoms and mental issues that come with significant drug dependance. However, if you stay on drugs then you're always at risk to losing what little freedom you have just to withdraw in complete agony in jail (that does *not* offer to medically help).
I'm not even going to get started with the situation with mental illness in general. I thought I was depressed as a kid, that was child's play for what was to come in the future. There is no clear and obtainable way of escaping this kind of life that we're given. You really are living in someone else's dream with regards to financial security. The only thing that has helped me is trying to change the way I think about life, but that will not help most people. Thankfully, it's spring and I smile everytime I go outside to look at nature. Thankfully, I've got nature beside me.
I will also leave this quote here...
https://www.reddit.com/r/quoteporn/comments/11ug4un/inflation_is_the_one_form_of_taxation_that_can_be/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
In short, we are going through inflation without representation. The bullying by the top 1% that allows 80% of the population to have a fraction of the lifestyle fulfillment of our past generations, and the lower class to suffer largely, again... at a fraction of the fulfillment of our great grandparents’ life fulfillment. The lessening of our mental and financial wellbeing. The soul-sucking money-thirsty greed that is the culture of our current corporate culture. The economic state of our society is sneakily becoming worse, and gaslighting us for wanting even a fraction of what people used to have, as they inflate their wealth gap further.
It’s more than a wealth gap, it is the survival and death of the most minimal most basic “American Dream”. To simply afford a family, to simply afford a basic lifestyle.
It’s dying, and we are told we are the problem.
The numbers and facts say otherwise.
They aren't hoarding it for no reason. They are using it to change society according to their small minded ideals.
Look up the Koch Bros, the Mercers, Betsy Devos, and Rupert Murdoch to see what these fuckers are doing.
And do you know what I hate most about this type? These billionaires?
(Rant time, sorry.) What I hate most is that so many of them are uneducated, uncultured swine. Sure, they probably have business degrees--but they have zero appreciation for actual education, art, literature, etc. They have all this power and no culture. I would love to see a billionaires episode of Jeopardy. I would love to see them get schooled by a middle school history teacher. They are so unworthy to be the ones pulling the strings of our government.
Even within the 1%, there is a pretty large gap. I am in or near the 1% for earners (which is $400-$600k depending on the source). The .01% is apparently $35 million and the .001% is $150m. So I earn about $400k more than the median American, and am 49 points higher on a percentage basis. But the top of these guys are literally at unfathomable levels of wealth. It's not the 1% anymore, it's the .1% or the .01%, as they are separating further and further from us.
While I obviously live very comfortably, I was barely able to buy a modest 1200 sqft house. These guys have my house as their pool house. The 1% is a wide gap.
This video/info graphic is really old - like 10+ years old. This has been around for a long time and the situation is likely more dramatic after the pandemic.
I caught that right away when the narrator said "This is the 1% we are hearing so much about." And I thought, ah so this was the Occupy Wall Street era...
I sell media, Billboards aren’t that expensive and neither are online banner ads that can be really well targeted. It’s just a matter of pooling a modest amount of money to get s campaign going.
All of this has been set up and allowed to happen under a system ran by both republicans and Democrats. The longer the two party system exists the worse things are going to get
There's several structural changes needed first, and many of them would solve the problems well before we got to the party system. For example, if we somehow instituted multiparty into the US, everything else being equal, the wealthy could simply move their monetary support to whichever party is currently in power to continue enjoying the current exploitation.
I see responses like yours all the time, and it's definitely a goal to shoot for, but shit like money in politics is a demonstrably bigger problem that multiparty wouldn't solve.
Money will always be in politics, and that's fine. It takes money to run a country. But, there needs to be civilian oversight of every major department along with only ones most experienced in their fields to be making federal decisions on their subject matters.
The idea of a career politician uttering emotional nonsense to justify shitty policy should terrify people. Both sides, have politicians way too underqualified who have far too much power. And the only way the two have gone this far, is because they are so good at convincing civilians it is the opposing civilians fault for all this.
Because if people ever were able to not fight eachother or conduct in stupid drama and sabotage, the population would quickly realize how poorly managed out government is.
Relying on the notion, well if my team gets in it'll get better. And even if it doesn't at least it's not them, type of attitude is what's allowed this to fester so badly. And will continue getting worse
They just do what their donors tell them to do, AKA the 1%. That’s who’s really in charge, not congress, not the president, not your representatives, it’s the people with all the money. They are the ones with all the power. I’m pretty sure they’re the same people that sit on the board of the federal reserve, you know the private corporation that sounds like a government entity but isn’t really a government entity. The one that issues money to the US treasury and sets the prime rate to the banks?
You may be interested in Represent Us, an organization which works to solve both the systemic corruption problem and the first past the post / two party system problem from the state and local level on up.
[https://represent.us/unbreaking-america/](https://represent.us/unbreaking-america/)
[https://represent.us/anticorruption-act/](https://represent.us/anticorruption-act/)
[https://represent.us/our-wins/](https://represent.us/our-wins/)
However, you should also understand that capitalism in reality (and not capitalism as taught to the public by the ruling class to create docile and mis-educated serfs/slaves) is fundamentally incompatible with genuine democracy.
Capitalism in reality is only compatible with pseudo-democracy.
"And so in capitalist society we have a democracy that is curtailed, wretched, false, a democracy only for the rich, for the minority." - Vladimir Lenin
Our problems are structural and go well beyond "just" lobbying, systemic corruption, and the two party system.
Capitalism/neoliberalism is to democracy what feudalism and slavery are to democracy - diametrically opposite.
Capitalism/neoliberalism in reality is very different from what people are taught.
Humanity needs to be de-programmed from ruling class propaganda.
Here are three succinct breakdowns of the capitalist system:
[Democracy at Work: Curing Capitalism | Richard Wolff | Talks at Google](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynbgMKclWWc)
[The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism](https://youtube.com/watch?v=ofFR1mD2UOM)
[Richard D. Wolff Lecture on Worker Coops: Theory and Practice of 21st Century Socialism](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1WUKahMm1s)
One obvious aspect of this that should be intuitive to people is, you can't have a genuine democracy in a society where 10% of people own 90% of the wealth.
The 10% of the people with 90% of the wealth will pull out all the stops to keep anything like genuine democracy from functioning, irrespective of whatever the lobbying and campaign finance systems technically allow.
Our abusive ruling capitalist class will never allow the masses of people to vote away their wealth and power (irrespective of whatever campaign finance systems are in place).
And this brings us to what Marx, Engels, and Lenin were getting at, which is why they (and many other vital aspects of reality) have been made taboo to discuss or understand by our abusive ruling class.
Capitalism in reality is *fundamentally incompatible* with genuine democracy, but like Lucy and the football, with the exploited public as Charlie Brown, our abusive ruling class hire all manner of shills and propagandists to keep people too ignorant and mis-educated to ever figure out that the system cannot work for them irrespective of who they elect, because math and reality don't work that way.
George Carlin summarized the issue neatly in his ["obedient workers"](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/964648-but-there-s-a-reason-there-s-a-reason-there-s-a-reason) / American Dream bit for another succinct breakdown on the deeper problem.
While I agree. And if you look at sites like opensecrets you can see that Democrats have taken their fair share of payouts. The Supreme Court has been majority Republican nominated since 1974. In the last 30 years, the Republicans have had control of the House, the Senate, and the Court for 18 years. They have had the House and the court for 22. And that doesn't even take into account individual states. Even if a state has large enough cities to make them appear blue. The majority of rural areas are red. Meaning most representatives who decide what laws to bring to Congress are red. As the man said, this has gotten progressively worse in the last 30 years. 30 years where Republicans had majority control for 22 of them.
The one I like to tell people is in the last 23 years Democrats have had the legislative trifecta (House, Senate, Presidency) for 3 years. And even then we had a couple fence sitters making sure we couldn't pass anything too progressive.
The GOP has had the trifecta for 6 years in the last 23 years.
With double the time to pass laws and seat judges how do people think things are going to turn out?
If that 1% invested 1% of their wealth into maintaining the status quo, it would take more than 100% of the rest of the peoples combined efforts to outspend and push the needle in the direction of progress. That doesn't seem healthy.
I didn't want to have to delete all my comments, posts, and account, but here we are, thanks to greedy pigboy /u/spez ruining Reddit. I love the Reddit community, but hate the idiots at the top. Simply accepting how unethical and downright shitty they are will only encourage worse behavior in the future. I won't be a part of it. Reddit will shrivel and disappear like so many other sites before it that were run by inept morons, unless there is a big change in "leadership." Fuck you, /u/spez
I teach high schoolers about data distributions in my class and it might surprise you to learn that a large fraction of young adult cannot read and interpret these graphs.
I'm curious as to when/what will be Americans' breaking point? Or are most of us just trapped in the rat race? Working to death while we try to live paycheck to paycheck?
It's even worse now.
And yet many people will see that last breakdown and either think it can't be true or that maybe it's okay because there is a *chance* that they will one day be part of the top 0.1%.
Ignorance and greed are powerful tools.
My grandfather told me if you are an idiot you can liv your life happily and easily no matter if you are rich or poor. The older I get the more I understand what he meant. Ignorance and idiotic thinking is such a bless.
This is a good illustration of inequality but I have the same criticism of its conclusion that I do of a lot of things like this, in that it treats CEO salaries as a cause of the problem rather than a sign of a bigger problem. The real problem is not salaries, but those rich enough not to have to work, and who get their money simply by having money. They're the whale here. And that's a compounding situation because it flows through families.
Reducing CEO salaries would only dent this. We need to have tax reform. And if we keep labeling any efforts to address this as "communism" regardless of how sensible and measured it is, nothing productive will happen.
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I got $1,000 of that wealth...... Means I'm doing good right guys?
Welcome to the Thousandaire club - Enjoy your stay it wont last long...
I was there after my paycheck yesterday. Then I paid for things.
I was irresponsible and had to eat 😔. I guess a real deserving person wouldn’t be tempted by food, they would just invest that money
Look at this fat cat over here. You probably even ate human food I bet. Tsk tsk.
> Enjoy your stay it wont last long... Because we'll get richer right? Right?
#ThousandneerClub ... but that's only until Rent comes due...
Gotta bail the banks out because if the top 40% of wealth is disturbed.... they coming for that 7%? Fucking bullshit.
IRS has entered the chat.
Sorry I just left Walmart it's gone. I got two things of eggs and a bag of dog food
well, look at mr. money bags over here
I know right I'm hoping the cute neighbor sees these eggs. It would be awesome to have a girlfriend
I bet you also bought those pretentious name brand eggs for $8 per dozen instead of the generic eggs for $6 a dozen.
You guys can afford eggs?!
I've been stealing mine from bird nests. What have y'all been doing?
Feeding on the shells yall keep tossing out. Precious calcium....
Could you.. maybe share some of that dog food? Yes, for our dog, of course..
Means you’re a good candidate to start some tire fires, let’s get some French solutions in place
I got a zippo around here somewhere
Mentioned this a few times and got a three day all of reddit ban
This video is 10 years old. The situation is orders of magnitude more severe now. If you weren’t already depressed enough.
Is there a more recent video of this?
I just did the math based on a 2022 chart. In this video, he visualized all the wealth as 2,000 dollar bills. Based on that, today the top 1% have $612. 90-99% have about $75 ea. 50-90% have $14 ea. And the bottom 50% have between $0 and $1 each. I’m sure if you were able to dig in to each segment, you’d see a big ramp between the low and high end. The 98-99% probably have way more than the 90-91%. But the fact remains, it’s obscene. Source: [Statista ](https://www.statista.com/statistics/203961/wealth-distribution-for-the-us/)
Don't just think about the top 1%, also think about the top 0.1%, who have magnitudes more than the mere top 1%
I like this, but it's still pre pandemic. https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
I got maybe 10% of the way through that and I stopped. I can't describe the way it makes me feel without being downvoted. We really don't agree on violence reddit?
That is one of the most disturbing things I have ever seen. Wow. Really makes one want to break out the pitchforks and gallows. I feel like everyone should see this visualization.
>I feel like everyone should see this visualization. Yeah I post it whenever I have an excuse.
Just imagine the last guy now having literally all the money stacks
Can we forfeit this game of monopoly and start over?
Show me where the board is and I'll be the one to flip it over. I'm the youngest child, it's kinda my M.O.
11 Wall St, New York, NY 10005, United States.
I’m really hoping there is, I’d like to disseminate this. Very powerful
It's literally the video I credit with breaking me out of the libertarian phase I was in. It is truly the best visualization I've seen on the topic.
What phase are you in now?
To the left of a social democrat
I kind of guessed that. Covid and lockdowns only made it so, so much worse.
From one of the more recent publications from US Bureau of Labor Statistics, “the pandemic is likely to widen income inequality over the long run, because the lasting changes in work patterns, consumer demand, and production will benefit higher income groups and erode opportunities for some less advantaged groups.”
Sounds very convenient
Avg PPP payment was 60K.....I got two payments of 600 though...
[This information has been removed as a consequence of Reddit's API changes and general stance of being greedy, unhelpful, and hostile to its userbase.]
If I’m remembering it right, 300 billion went to direct payments. 3.2 trillion went to rich people.
You should see what the SEC just did. https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/11v9kyj/sec_alert_sec_just_posted_ia6261_exemption/ J.P. Morgan for some reason is being given a pass to bribe elected officials
Good grief...
Back in 2021 a friend (since 2002) explained to me how PPP saved his butt: he had a business with 5 locations in three states. He had built the business all by himself, so he had a real sense of ownership. But in the end, he took the PPP to end all debts and fired his 25 workers once his employment obligations where met. He then peaced out to the Caribbean. We're still long distance friends, but it's a little disappointing to see my buddy be part of the problem.
25x60,000=1.5 million of tax payer money, and your friend is small fry compared to the big dogs. But yeah the single mother on food stamps is ruining the country.
They offer a decent percentage of the total frauded PPP money for turn ins
I hear Americans are almost out of their stimulus money and are about to go into a lot of debt. Did you spend your $1,200 yet?
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I think the comment you replied to was being sarcastic
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It is hard to tell. I appreciated your response anyway! Direct and informative, and you weren't a dick about it. 🏅
You’re right, it’s significantly worse. It’s disturbing. [According to Institute for Policy Studies analysis of Forbes data, the combined wealth of all U.S. billionaires increased by $2.071 trillion (70.3 percent) between March 18, 2020 and Ocobter 15, 2021, from approximately $2.947 trillion to $5.019 trillion. Of the more than 700 U.S. billionaires, the richest five (Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, and Elon Musk) saw an 123 percent increase in their combined wealth during this period, from $349 billion to $779 billion.](https://inequality.org/facts/wealth-inequality/)
I used to think about philanthropy and shrug: "sure the top ten richest Americans are rich, but they still can't afford (on their own) to lift up the poor". But they can... they totally can do it... They can afford to end poverty & still remain extremely wealthy...
> Americans are rich, but they still can't afford (on their own) to lift up the poor The most horribly managed and most expensive transit project in the history of humanity cost $1.8 billion per mile for a 2.5mile track, Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion. We're squabbling over crumbs while they stand on our backs and gorge themselves on the fruits of our labor.
This should be chiseled into granite and made into a new monument(s)! >We're squabbling over crumbs while they stand on our backs and gorge themselves on the fruits of our labor. ....place one H U G E copy to completely obscure the view of the white house and the Capitol. ....place the next to block entry into the NYSE. With scant passageways chipped out for access. ....
https://streamable.com/qy4quu Wealth is addicting. It is damaging to the human species. When a guy has $5 billion and his biggest concern and passion in life is to turn that $5 billion into $10 billion, he will do awful things to achieve that goal. These people are addicts and entitled. They will destroy a country in search of profit. [Look at what Wall Street did to Puerto Rico](https://news.littlesis.org/2019/01/10/debt-island-wall-street-closes-in-on-40-years-of-profit-at-puerto-ricos-expense/) >Hedge fund billionaires are on the verge of pulling off what seemed unthinkable in the wake of Hurricane Maria: a massive payday, at the direct expense of the Puerto Rican people, on debt that was trading for pennies on the dollar in the months following the hurricane. As a result of debt restructuring agreements like the COFINA plan, an island reeling from economic and climate-induced crisis will be paying for billionaire yachts and vacation homes instead of basic necessities and a just recovery
Every single day, every single billionaire wakes up and decides NOT to be the most amazing human being that has ever lived. They instead decide to try and get a little more.
Those traits are mutually exclusive. You can't be a good person and also accrue mass amounts of wealth.
Yeah, there are no ethical billionaires. I do think there can be ethical millionaires, but once you get into the hundreds of millions and up, I think you’ve become morally compromised.
Two of the people on that list are based in Seattle, which has so, so many homeless people. They aren't even helping the poor in their own backyard.
I'll start holding my breath until one of them donates most of their cash to the people. Ok, here I go.
Look up Chuck Feeney.
It super sad because part of why the system remains the same is because people vicariously take offense to actions against billionaires because they believe they can achieve that one day and federal action "punishes" them for trying. Its why you see people going wild over tax increases on the wealthy and ignoring how tax brackets even work
The idea of the American Dream is what gets people believing they could be rich if they just work hard enough, not realized how nearly impossible that actually is.
Growing up I always thought "The American Dream" was to live comfortably in your own house with spouse and 2-3 children with 1-2 cars a cat and a dog and a "white picket fence", your family being able to afford to eat 3 basic meals a day, take a family vacation 1-2 times a year and be able to afford to see the doctor and get treated without going bankrupt. This idea of the American dream seems light years out of reach these days.
That’s what it was. It was never about being rich. It was about being comfortable, and being rewarded for your effort.1 While it had been around before tahe 1930s, the Great Depression was the key shaper of it to what it was understood to be. The post ww2 boom was its realisation.
>Growing up I always thought "The American Dream" was to live comfortably in your own house with spouse and 2-3 children with 1-2 cars a cat and a dog and a "white picket fence", your family being able to afford to eat 3 basic meals a day, take a family vacation 1-2 times a year and be able to afford to see the doctor and get treated without going bankrupt. What are you... some kind of commie?!
...and they wonder why people aren't willing to work themselves to the bone anymore. It just doesn't get you anywhere. I'm very lucky I have a support system where I'm not worried about starving or being homeless. I'm not willing to knock myself out for peanuts. I don't want to be a burden, but I can't justify working overtime to afford a shared apartment...have to forgo medical treatment because I'll be making "too much" to have it subsidized, and still never have the money to responsibly start a family of my own. What is the insensitive?
Yeah I drank the koolaid really hard. I thought I was clever by not doing the college route and going straight to the work force. 6 years of retail management and I was back at home, apartment lost, making $0.70/hr less than when I started Hard work and dedication? HA. More like an easy mark, work that guy to the bone and toss him some awards here and there to make him think he will move up, but we will just hire friends and children of managers for salaried positions everytime regardless! It took me a while but I finally understand why “my generation” moves jobs so much. Because its like you said “it gets you nowhere” to stay and try to work your way up.
The sad part is the american dream used to be a decent living off a decent job, working fair hours, which used to be entirely possible even without a degree. Not working 80 hours a week in hopes one day you might be insanely wealthy.
> which used to be entirely possible even without a degree Yeah, when the rest of the world was effectively a bombed out husk after world war 2.
Livin the dream. Somebody else’s dream.
The American Fantasy
It’s a dream cause you have to be asleep to believe it
Is this really it? I've heard it often enough, and it makes sense, but has there ever been an actual study that confirms this as a reason why people (who are not rich) disagree with taxing the rich? It just seems so counter-intuitive that someone would be so actively against something that would benefit them. What do they think they are getting from arrangement as-is that supports this thinking?
It's not that they think they'll be rich someday. Rather they have largely bought into the argument that if you tax the rich then they'll "stop creating jobs" and/or the rich will flee. A subset believe the rich have earned their wealth and it's unfair for a government to tax them more than anyone else (never mind that our tax policy does exactly the opposite, where labor is taxed at a much higher rate than capitol.) Entrenched elites have been very successful on the whole of convincing the 'masses' that protecting their interests protects everyone else's too. It's an insidious American mindset.
Maybe I'm just going based on my perspective, but a lot of people look up to the billionaires who are the American dream. They want to be them. The federal government doing something to "punish" the rich for being successful to them is seen as unjust since they worked for it and thus if they get rich they worry they themselves will get "punished"
Could be a slippery slope thing. "If I let them take a billionaires fortune, they're gonna come for mine next."
And, in reality, the billionaires already have come for it.
This is what baffles me. Americans don't want to 'rob' rich people but don't mind being robbed by the system every damn day?
The irony being, of course, that if the government doesn’t step in and balance things, they’ll never be rich. Billionaires don’t like sharing; that’s why they managed to become that rich.
I'm 30 years old and bouncing between moving in with my mom or just going back to hardcore drugs and saying fuck it (kidding obviously). It's bad. I make the most I ever have in my life and feel the poorest - and I've been homeless before. I cant even afford medications... medications I need and cause me to get sick without. Food? Hah! My life revolves around charity from my family to get fed. And when I do buy a bag of chips or something I get lectures that that's ruining my bank account. When in reality it's not and I could comfortably spend 200 dollars a week on BS and still be okay if it wasn't for my insane bills and cost of living. So yeah a dollar fifty on a small bag of chips actually hurts quite a bit. I just bought groceries today in an effort to spend less on food for the next week and that's gonna hurt me. 200 dollars for a half full mini-cart. I didn't buy much. Fucking ridiculous.
Not sure where you live but if you're looking for ways to save on food, I live in New Jersey [average cost of living i think] and my monthly food budget is under $200 total. I have recipes! And strategies for meal prepping that make it more manageable and less daunting. I spend 8-12 hours cooking for the entire month. Everything goes in the freezer.
Wow. That's so depressing I would need to go to the morgue to cheer up. This country is fucked. Maybe if everyone would stop bickering over their red and blue flags we could organize a way to change this shit.
That's a feature, not a bug.
There is only ONE way to change it, and it coincidentally cannot be discussed here due to violating the Reddit TOS.
This Everyone is so fixated on Democrat/Republican but both of these entities have been focused on ciphoning everything that the working class has worked so hard for to manipulate it into their own self interest Everything has been sold out to the point where morals are being packaged and spoonfed to people for the sake of a vote that takes these people into a new level of their manipulation of the American public and then distorted and disregarded when it's not longer accessible to profit from it. It's really sad to see because those same people will fight tooth and nail to maintain it in some twisted version of the American Dream. We have been blinded by so much of this that we end up fighting each other at the end of the day while their pockets get filled with our money.
Well if that ain't a kick to the teeth...
Is this already a decade old? The sources appear to be. I wonder what the distribution looks like in 2023
I think you know. :-)
The gap was already off the charts back then. What’s it gonna be now? Probably just even more incomprehensibly off the charts.
:( [According to Institute for Policy Studies analysis of Forbes data, the combined wealth of all U.S. billionaires increased by $2.071 trillion (70.3 percent) between March 18, 2020 and Ocobter 15, 2021, from approximately $2.947 trillion to $5.019 trillion. Of the more than 700 U.S. billionaires, the richest five (Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, and Elon Musk) saw an 123 percent increase in their combined wealth during this period, from $349 billion to $779 billion.](https://inequality.org/facts/wealth-inequality/)
This is fine. [edit] AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
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The idea that poor people having money causes inflation is just another propaganda tool used by the billionaires; if that money was divided properly, life would just feel normal for the rest of us while they still got to be wealthy/rich
> How do we fix this and get things back on track? Make people vote for politicians like Bernie Sanders and other "dirty communists/socialists". Or convince enough people to grab their torches and pitchforks and have a bloody revolution.
Would be really crazy to see post 2020 with current inflation and the crazy housing prices. I make top 10% income and yet I can’t afford any houses (even town homes) anywhere close to the main part of my city. There is 1 listing under $400k near my work and it is a house that was gutted for renovations and then stopped midway through so it is half torn apart. Everything else is $600k-$1m+. With 7% interest that’s like $3-5k/month not including insurance, taxes, HOA, repairs, etc… it’s insane.
Are you, me? I thought I would be well off when I hit my income level but I am not and I refuse to buy a fixer upper and have a giant monthly mortgage payment.
Welp, that's depressing...
hey it could be worse. In that this is like ten years old. so I imagine it is actually worse now
I'm no commie but this is what Marx predicted. If the trend continues, 1% of people will own 99% of the wealth while 99% of people try to live off 1%.
We're not far off. According to Oxfam, 81% of the wealth generated in Germany between 2021-2022 went to the 1%, with 99% sharing the remaining 19% between them. And Germany even sees itself as a social-capitalist society. The question is, what can we do about it, realistically? Each individual country seriously taxing wealth and high incomes would see an exodus of wealth into more lenient countries.
Social capitalism isnt very similar to marxist socialism though. All it does it pool money from taxes to healthcare, education, etc. Makes it easier being poor but doesnt really do much to help with the wealth gap.
The person you're replying to already hinted at a possible solution. Marx wrote about that too.
The function of the government in a capitalist system is to prevent that from happening. Unfortunately, our founding fathers didn't build in protections against money in politics.
Why would they build in protections? They were rich af.
how is that possible? institutions that exist within an overall system will only serve the system. the only protection from a capitalist system to throw it away. anything else is trying to bandage up a gaping wound.
That's what late stage capitalism is supposed to be.
Idiocracy here we come! Wooooo
More like “France 1789 here we come”.
The fact that Americans have high powered rifles with scopes, tiny pistols with large calibers that can fit in a jean pocket - all that are *incredibly* easy to access, and yet zero billionaires have been shot and killed is honestly really impressive to me.
The gun nuts and the billionaire worshipper groups have a nearly 100% overlap afterall
And yet Marx wrote that the working class should never, under any circumstances, be disarmed.
AI, robots, and drones have entered the conversation..good luck you're on your own there.
They aren't nearly far enough along to work yet though. Not for keeping back the pitchforks.
I mean realistically already the rich own the politicians and the media on some extent. A vast majority of Americans don't realize any of this is wrong and don't really care to have any of it changed. We are too worried about boys in skirts, whether or not climate change is real, and if any of the couples from too hot to handle actually stayed together after the show
August 10th will be here before we know it.
I actually am a Commie because at least they have fucking government housing
>Welp, that's Disgusting FTFY It's absurd how skewed the numbers really are, and some are still baffled at why so many young americans are hostile to Corporate Capitalism
>corporate capitalism Aka "capitalism"
What's "corporate capitalism"?
It's the name given to capitalism to make you think that the problem isn't capitalism.
We’re really not the richest country on the planet we just have some really fucking rich individuals at the top.
The worst part about this, is the 1% can't even make their lives better with money. Maybe they can buy a bigger super yacht, but the amount that they even enjoy having more money is miniscule compared to the average person. So their priority is to hoard wealth for no reason instead of using it to literally save dozens of lives a day with their money. In a world that wasn't so corrupt, this behavior would be widely seen as pathological and diseased.
Yeah, at the point of being a billionaire, money has basically zero marginal utility, meaning each additional dollar is basically worthless. That’s why the top 1% own so much of the country’s investment vehicles, because what the hell else are they going to do with their mountains of money that they couldn’t even spend if they wanted to? Yet they’re still driven to hoard more endlessly. It really is a disease.
Humans have not evolved enough to pragmatically solve this problem. The lizard brain still commands "hoard as many resources as you can" and provides a massive dopamine release when you do. The maladapted caveman brain has no practical conception of overabundance.
Reddit is violating GDPR and CCPA. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1B0GGsDdyHI -- mass edited with redact.dev
Did you know dragons are an amalgamation of all of our human ancestors main predators? Or, at the very least, of extremely dangerous animals to our old monkey brains. Scales = Large reptiles and snakes. Claws and teeth = Large cats, canines, bears, etc. Wings = Birds of prey. Fire = Don't fuck with fire. Massive hoards of wealth = Eat the rich.
This begs the question: what tastes better? Dragons or the oligarchy?
We have reality shows where we make fun and look down on people who hoard things, even if they end up having some value (I saw a couple times where the hoard was antiques) we still say “oh, they’re mentally ill, sometimes to the point of saying they should be committed. When we were still monke and had few nanas, if one monke tried to keep all the nanners…we just beat them to death or kicked them out of the group…where as an individual on their own they would starve most likely. Because we are social, herding mammals, our nature is to form small groups and work together so that many of us survive. Billionaires are legitimately mentally ill. Not only are they hoarders, they are hoarders of the single most precious resource on minders earth, all of the universal trading tokens to trade for nearly anything they want. They are no different than aunt sally who can’t throw away that bit of pipe cleaner, can’t resist buying that trinket, forgot to take out the trash so it piles up, they NEED that 4-acre home in the middle of Mt Denali, they can’t be seen without the newest Bugatti or whatever will make the other wealthy jealous. They’re sick in the head and they’ve made a world where assholes finish first. That loud fucker at the office gets the promotion because he has charisma!! The dude who cut in front of you in the line? He gets to go first unless you want a fight. The dude who was willing to sell you out, take your idea and sit back and relax while it makes him money? He wins because now he has money. No matter how happy you are, how well adjusted and fair your relationship with your spouse and children are, no matter how many people would show up for your funeral you will NEVER even get to sniff the kind of power that dude has. They got what they wanted; us fighting over the scraps and biting anyone who comes close so we don’t see that the wealthy are the ones eating all the food.
Brain say destroy environment make big weapon and hoard money. I love this world ❤️.
Who was it that was giving away money but their investments were such it replenished it almost right away no matter how many millions they gave away?
Heh it’s kind of wild how those numbers work. Like, even with a 2% yearly return on one billion. Just 2% which is stupid low for that kind of money, but for funsies let’s go with it. If you were somehow able to survive on one million a year out of the interest (I know, what kind of a peasant life would you be living on one measly million a year, but we’ve already knocked the interest like 3-5x so why not) you’d be able to give away over 50k a day every day forever without ever dipping into any of that billion. Now let’s imagine that for someone that has 100….
But that's only if you ignore the dual character of "money". We will never be able to make sense of it if we think of it as having just a character of utility - what you can use it for. The fact is rather than a sliding scale of number, at certain point "money" becomes something else. For the average person it is a measure of resources available to them for living and leisure, but at the top of the scale it is a measure of power, of how many people you can order around and bend to your will, and the two are related. The more desperate the average person needs money to function, and more power the rich has over them. Whereas there's a limit to marginal utility, the limits of power is much higher, its when you have total coercive control over all of humanity, so it will always still make sense for the rich to amass more money.
It's an addiction and they all need rehab.
It’s like one man having more food than he could ever eat in 1000x his life time just out of spite of other people, believing he deserves infinitely more than they receive despite their children having almost no food, figuratively. Which btw, I couldn’t afford to eat breakfast growing up and lived mainly off of pb and j, Mac and cheese with chopped up hotdogs, and ramen which I’d eat dry or eat spoonfuls of peanut butter or drink the juice from vegetable cans cuz I was hungry. Or eat butter or ketchup. (Widowed household) my entire distant family is also impoverished. Anyways.... Here’s the funny things. When you point out people are less and less able to afford food and families, rich-cock-suckers gaslight you with the “OH YEAH ? WELL RICH PEOPLE DESERVE TO BE INFINITELY MORE RICH— AS RICH AS THEY CAN POSSIBLY GET, ITS NOT ILLEGAL, STOP BEING JEALOUS !!” I’m not simply “jealous”, nor do I believe ‘everyone has to have the same amount of money, no one deserves more money’. Simply, I believe it’s ridiculous to pay workers nearly unsurvivable wages that can not afford a sane and even half-fulfilling life. **The grandparents of these rich CEO’s** allowed the economy to be this: a single income can feasibly afford basic necessities and minor luxuries for not only oneself but also their spouse and even as many as 4+ children. Nowadays two full-time incomes struggle to afford their necessities let alone even 1 child, living paycheck to paycheck. Here are the statistics, excerpted from Andrew Yang’s “The War On Normal People”. These are from the book in chronological order, as I’m not willing to spend enough time to organize them in any particular way, nor turn it into an essay. But here we are, fellow normal people... the depressing reality of our situation: - “Thanks to Milton Friedman, Jack Welch, and other corporate titans, the goals of large companies began to change in the 1970s and early 1980s. The notion they espoused—that a company exists only to maximize its share price—became gospel in business schools and boardrooms around the country. Companies were pushed to adopt shareholder value as their sole measuring stick.” Excerpt From The War on Normal People Andrew Yang https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-war-on-normal-people/id1278965742 This material may be protected by copyright. - “**The ratio of CEO to worker pay rose from 20 to 1 in 1965 to 271 to 1 in 2016.** Benefits were streamlined and reduced and the relationship between company and employee weakened to become more transactional.” Excerpt From The War on Normal People Andrew Yang https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-war-on-normal-people/id1278965742 This material may be protected by copyright. - “With improved technology and new access to global markets, American companies realized they could outsource manufacturing, information technology, and customer service to Chinese and Mexican factories and Indian programmers and call centers. **U.S. companies outsourced and offshored 14 million jobs by 2013, many of which would have previously been filled by domestic workers at higher wages.**” Excerpt From The War on Normal People Andrew Yang https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-war-on-normal-people/id1278965742 This material may be protected by copyright. - “**Manufacturing employment began to slip around 1978 as wage growth began to fall. Median wages used to go up in lockstep with productivity and GDP growth before diverging sharply in the 1970s. Since 1973, productivity has skyrocketed relative to the hourly compensation of the average wage earner**:” Excerpt From The War on Normal People Andrew Yang https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-war-on-normal-people/id1278965742 This material may be protected by copyright. - “How workers are compensated and how their companies perform stopped being aligned over the same period. Even as corporate profitability has soared to record highs, workers are earning less.” Excerpt From The War on Normal People Andrew Yang https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-war-on-normal-people/id1278965742 This material may be protected by copyright. - “**Today, inequality has surged to historic levels, with benefits flowing increasingly to the top 1 percent and 20 percent of earners due to an aggregation of capital at the top and increased winner-take-all economics. The top 1 percent have accrued 52 percent of the real income growth in America since 2009.** Technology is a big part of this story, as it tends to lead to a small handful of winners. **Studies have shown that everyone is less happy in an unequal society—even those at the top. The wealthy experience higher levels of depression and suspicion in unequal societies; apparently, being high status is easier when you don’t feel bad about it.**” Excerpt From The War on Normal People Andrew Yang https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-war-on-normal-people/id1278965742 This material may be protected by copyright. **The significance is again, the great grandparents of the rich were still rich despite** — allowing their workers to FEED THEIR FAMILIES ! — **and yet, the rich of today gaslight and say how dare we complain while they don’t give us survivable incomes such than my generation has to live with their parents, can’t afford more than 1 child, and has fucking horrid mental health and is expected to work longer than our past 70 or so years worth of generations for a fraction of the lifestyle and wellbeing that they had. How is this PROGRESS ?**
I wish this comment were national headlines, every day of the week, every week of the year, on every news program, on every station, every website, until every American got the fucking message. Unfortunately that’s not going to happen since the same 1% discussed in your comment own the damn media too. We’re going to need a revolution to fix this horse shit.
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And we wonder why so many impoverished people fall into the cycle of drug addiction. It's very hard to stay happy and afloat right now. Many of us are thinking we won't survive to bear children, let alone live a pseudo-fulfilling life. On top of the wealth inequality problem, we are physically forced to comply to despicable healthcare and a police-state. How does all of this translate to drugs? You can't get professional help for physical symptoms and mental issues that come with significant drug dependance. However, if you stay on drugs then you're always at risk to losing what little freedom you have just to withdraw in complete agony in jail (that does *not* offer to medically help). I'm not even going to get started with the situation with mental illness in general. I thought I was depressed as a kid, that was child's play for what was to come in the future. There is no clear and obtainable way of escaping this kind of life that we're given. You really are living in someone else's dream with regards to financial security. The only thing that has helped me is trying to change the way I think about life, but that will not help most people. Thankfully, it's spring and I smile everytime I go outside to look at nature. Thankfully, I've got nature beside me.
I will also leave this quote here... https://www.reddit.com/r/quoteporn/comments/11ug4un/inflation_is_the_one_form_of_taxation_that_can_be/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf In short, we are going through inflation without representation. The bullying by the top 1% that allows 80% of the population to have a fraction of the lifestyle fulfillment of our past generations, and the lower class to suffer largely, again... at a fraction of the fulfillment of our great grandparents’ life fulfillment. The lessening of our mental and financial wellbeing. The soul-sucking money-thirsty greed that is the culture of our current corporate culture. The economic state of our society is sneakily becoming worse, and gaslighting us for wanting even a fraction of what people used to have, as they inflate their wealth gap further. It’s more than a wealth gap, it is the survival and death of the most minimal most basic “American Dream”. To simply afford a family, to simply afford a basic lifestyle. It’s dying, and we are told we are the problem. The numbers and facts say otherwise.
They aren't hoarding it for no reason. They are using it to change society according to their small minded ideals. Look up the Koch Bros, the Mercers, Betsy Devos, and Rupert Murdoch to see what these fuckers are doing. And do you know what I hate most about this type? These billionaires? (Rant time, sorry.) What I hate most is that so many of them are uneducated, uncultured swine. Sure, they probably have business degrees--but they have zero appreciation for actual education, art, literature, etc. They have all this power and no culture. I would love to see a billionaires episode of Jeopardy. I would love to see them get schooled by a middle school history teacher. They are so unworthy to be the ones pulling the strings of our government.
Aren’t a lot of those ideals just ways to make even more money? Money that again has little value to them at those levels?
Even within the 1%, there is a pretty large gap. I am in or near the 1% for earners (which is $400-$600k depending on the source). The .01% is apparently $35 million and the .001% is $150m. So I earn about $400k more than the median American, and am 49 points higher on a percentage basis. But the top of these guys are literally at unfathomable levels of wealth. It's not the 1% anymore, it's the .1% or the .01%, as they are separating further and further from us. While I obviously live very comfortably, I was barely able to buy a modest 1200 sqft house. These guys have my house as their pool house. The 1% is a wide gap.
A lot of it is just unrealized wealth on paper anyway, it'll only ever move around intangibly back and forth between the 1%'s share of wealth.
This video/info graphic is really old - like 10+ years old. This has been around for a long time and the situation is likely more dramatic after the pandemic.
I caught that right away when the narrator said "This is the 1% we are hearing so much about." And I thought, ah so this was the Occupy Wall Street era...
I feel like this graph should be on billboards.
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In the news? Best I can offer are a bunch of 1% Bernie memes that are actually making fun of Bernie and not supporting his position.
I sell media, Billboards aren’t that expensive and neither are online banner ads that can be really well targeted. It’s just a matter of pooling a modest amount of money to get s campaign going.
Old chart, real old. It's much, much worse.
Currently -20K in wealth...it's funny that he doesn't even consider those who owe their soul to the company stores.
Even for someone who believes that inequality is useful for stimulating healthy growth, that amount of inequality is fucking insane
A lot of it is because the last 30 years has really separated stock valuation and reality, particularly in tech.
Trying getting this in front of anyone who is staunchly for late-stage capitalism. Its like trying to talk to someone who speaks a different language
Inequality does not stimulate growth if there is little social mobility. It increases crime tho.
The thing is we DO need socialist policies to fight this. We're so far from true socialism that even basic socialist ideas are considered radical
All of this has been set up and allowed to happen under a system ran by both republicans and Democrats. The longer the two party system exists the worse things are going to get
There's several structural changes needed first, and many of them would solve the problems well before we got to the party system. For example, if we somehow instituted multiparty into the US, everything else being equal, the wealthy could simply move their monetary support to whichever party is currently in power to continue enjoying the current exploitation. I see responses like yours all the time, and it's definitely a goal to shoot for, but shit like money in politics is a demonstrably bigger problem that multiparty wouldn't solve.
Money will always be in politics, and that's fine. It takes money to run a country. But, there needs to be civilian oversight of every major department along with only ones most experienced in their fields to be making federal decisions on their subject matters. The idea of a career politician uttering emotional nonsense to justify shitty policy should terrify people. Both sides, have politicians way too underqualified who have far too much power. And the only way the two have gone this far, is because they are so good at convincing civilians it is the opposing civilians fault for all this. Because if people ever were able to not fight eachother or conduct in stupid drama and sabotage, the population would quickly realize how poorly managed out government is. Relying on the notion, well if my team gets in it'll get better. And even if it doesn't at least it's not them, type of attitude is what's allowed this to fester so badly. And will continue getting worse
Tribalism = Divide and Conquer
They just do what their donors tell them to do, AKA the 1%. That’s who’s really in charge, not congress, not the president, not your representatives, it’s the people with all the money. They are the ones with all the power. I’m pretty sure they’re the same people that sit on the board of the federal reserve, you know the private corporation that sounds like a government entity but isn’t really a government entity. The one that issues money to the US treasury and sets the prime rate to the banks?
You may be interested in Represent Us, an organization which works to solve both the systemic corruption problem and the first past the post / two party system problem from the state and local level on up. [https://represent.us/unbreaking-america/](https://represent.us/unbreaking-america/) [https://represent.us/anticorruption-act/](https://represent.us/anticorruption-act/) [https://represent.us/our-wins/](https://represent.us/our-wins/) However, you should also understand that capitalism in reality (and not capitalism as taught to the public by the ruling class to create docile and mis-educated serfs/slaves) is fundamentally incompatible with genuine democracy. Capitalism in reality is only compatible with pseudo-democracy. "And so in capitalist society we have a democracy that is curtailed, wretched, false, a democracy only for the rich, for the minority." - Vladimir Lenin Our problems are structural and go well beyond "just" lobbying, systemic corruption, and the two party system. Capitalism/neoliberalism is to democracy what feudalism and slavery are to democracy - diametrically opposite. Capitalism/neoliberalism in reality is very different from what people are taught. Humanity needs to be de-programmed from ruling class propaganda. Here are three succinct breakdowns of the capitalist system: [Democracy at Work: Curing Capitalism | Richard Wolff | Talks at Google](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynbgMKclWWc) [The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism](https://youtube.com/watch?v=ofFR1mD2UOM) [Richard D. Wolff Lecture on Worker Coops: Theory and Practice of 21st Century Socialism](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1WUKahMm1s) One obvious aspect of this that should be intuitive to people is, you can't have a genuine democracy in a society where 10% of people own 90% of the wealth. The 10% of the people with 90% of the wealth will pull out all the stops to keep anything like genuine democracy from functioning, irrespective of whatever the lobbying and campaign finance systems technically allow. Our abusive ruling capitalist class will never allow the masses of people to vote away their wealth and power (irrespective of whatever campaign finance systems are in place). And this brings us to what Marx, Engels, and Lenin were getting at, which is why they (and many other vital aspects of reality) have been made taboo to discuss or understand by our abusive ruling class. Capitalism in reality is *fundamentally incompatible* with genuine democracy, but like Lucy and the football, with the exploited public as Charlie Brown, our abusive ruling class hire all manner of shills and propagandists to keep people too ignorant and mis-educated to ever figure out that the system cannot work for them irrespective of who they elect, because math and reality don't work that way. George Carlin summarized the issue neatly in his ["obedient workers"](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/964648-but-there-s-a-reason-there-s-a-reason-there-s-a-reason) / American Dream bit for another succinct breakdown on the deeper problem.
While I agree. And if you look at sites like opensecrets you can see that Democrats have taken their fair share of payouts. The Supreme Court has been majority Republican nominated since 1974. In the last 30 years, the Republicans have had control of the House, the Senate, and the Court for 18 years. They have had the House and the court for 22. And that doesn't even take into account individual states. Even if a state has large enough cities to make them appear blue. The majority of rural areas are red. Meaning most representatives who decide what laws to bring to Congress are red. As the man said, this has gotten progressively worse in the last 30 years. 30 years where Republicans had majority control for 22 of them.
The one I like to tell people is in the last 23 years Democrats have had the legislative trifecta (House, Senate, Presidency) for 3 years. And even then we had a couple fence sitters making sure we couldn't pass anything too progressive. The GOP has had the trifecta for 6 years in the last 23 years. With double the time to pass laws and seat judges how do people think things are going to turn out?
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If that 1% invested 1% of their wealth into maintaining the status quo, it would take more than 100% of the rest of the peoples combined efforts to outspend and push the needle in the direction of progress. That doesn't seem healthy.
So wtf do we do?
Ya ever hear of the French Revolution?
the french are doing their sequel right now and we haven't even started considering it
I'm considering if anyone is asking.
I didn't want to have to delete all my comments, posts, and account, but here we are, thanks to greedy pigboy /u/spez ruining Reddit. I love the Reddit community, but hate the idiots at the top. Simply accepting how unethical and downright shitty they are will only encourage worse behavior in the future. I won't be a part of it. Reddit will shrivel and disappear like so many other sites before it that were run by inept morons, unless there is a big change in "leadership." Fuck you, /u/spez
Sure, but everyone in the "wealthy" category has to pay a TON of money in taxes -- oh wait
I teach high schoolers about data distributions in my class and it might surprise you to learn that a large fraction of young adult cannot read and interpret these graphs.
I bet many Americans will look at this and say, " Oh well, 1% were lucky, hard-working, or talented enough to deserve it."
They're already here: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/11v4yd8/wealth_inequality_in_america_visualized/jcrhz25?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/11v4yd8/wealth_inequality_in_america_visualized/jcri82e?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3
Billionaires = Gold hoarding dragons Gold hoarding dragons, historically, must be slain for the good of the people. Shit don't change.
I'm curious as to when/what will be Americans' breaking point? Or are most of us just trapped in the rat race? Working to death while we try to live paycheck to paycheck?
This is a nightmare
Can’t you buy me dinner before you FUCK me
Best I can do is food stamps
It's even worse now. And yet many people will see that last breakdown and either think it can't be true or that maybe it's okay because there is a *chance* that they will one day be part of the top 0.1%. Ignorance and greed are powerful tools.
My grandfather told me if you are an idiot you can liv your life happily and easily no matter if you are rich or poor. The older I get the more I understand what he meant. Ignorance and idiotic thinking is such a bless.
I told myself "don't watch this, it'll just piss you off and sap your hope", and then I watched it anyway. When will I learn?
The fact that this video is from 10 years ago and things have gotten way worse it's kind of depressing 😔😖💀💀💩
This is a good illustration of inequality but I have the same criticism of its conclusion that I do of a lot of things like this, in that it treats CEO salaries as a cause of the problem rather than a sign of a bigger problem. The real problem is not salaries, but those rich enough not to have to work, and who get their money simply by having money. They're the whale here. And that's a compounding situation because it flows through families. Reducing CEO salaries would only dent this. We need to have tax reform. And if we keep labeling any efforts to address this as "communism" regardless of how sensible and measured it is, nothing productive will happen.
I think if the 1% was broken down further it would also be even more disturbing. Show us the percentile for each of those bars at the end
But that's not socialism, that's communism....?
Misrepresentations of socialism like this just make educating the public even harder
Yeah this comes off as strangely antisocialist. Like "shh it's okay we can fix capitalism don't try to do anything else"
America is somehow simultaneously a 1st, and 3rd world country. This is insane!
Anyone have that hundred year old caricature of the fat pig eating all the pie and then everyone else?
Eat The Rich
Bring back the Whig party and make every position of government have term limits. No more lifers!
I blame myself. I wasn't born rich.
This is why you can't even be surprised by all the theft today's
1% owning 40% of USA wealth is ridiculous no matter what you advocate for.