To be clear, the 1% I am speaking about are NOT the 1% of your neighborhood, county, or city(necessarily). I speak of the Global 1%. The 1% that make your retired home owning uncle with just under 1million in his retirement look like the firmly lower middle class that he is.
Yeah, I looked up some random articles and it looks like for the US it takes $5-10+ million to be in the top 1% of net worth, while globally I saw numbers under one million.
And according to one article that’s a bit old, $100K net worth puts you in the top 10% globally, and just $5,000 puts you in the top half.
That money only really makes wealthy Americans better off in living standards though, someone making 35k in France or 40k in Germany has a vastly better life than someone making 80k in a mid-high cost of living area in the USA.
On paper only. Two parents working a combined 90 hours a week to own a tiny piece of socially isolated car dependent urban sprawl is dystopian as fuck.
Europeans are much poorer individually by American metrics, but that is because they sacrifice individual wealth for collective wealth. They have great cities that they fight to make better for everyone.
Indeed. I have said a few times on here, usually in response to some rugged individualism argument, that anybody with the ability to read my words you are currently reading is among the luckiest humans to ever have lived. And even pretty high up there among the current living population.
Some people are so addicted to complaining that they have no perspective, at all.
I think they mean the $100 million to billionaire class. Or at least I've always taken it to mean that, no one in any fabricated middle class will be harmed.
The capital / oligarch class. The people who are so disgustingly rich that they use their wealth to erode democracy because they already have everything they could ever want
I just imagine if some other planet was making star trek-like first contact with us, I imagine the judgements they would be making.
So all these people are literally struggling to exist with any kind of happiness at all, while those people fill their pools with currency and burn it to heat their houses. They're not even close to being ready for us.
Unless you've had like 20 kids and have their families to look after, not one single person needs a net worth in the double digit million range. No one needs that, and you can be damn sure no one deserves it.
That money should've been filtered out from them looooong ago. Just their existence is killing lots of innocent people.
i think the number itself is fairly arbitrary. what we need to evaluate the cost of living and aggressively taxed above the point at which only exorbitantly lavish wants come into consideration.
i think this would be wildly different depending on externalities and extremely difficult to ensure fairness, while avoiding excessive means testing which can cause a lot of overhead.
it'd be interesting to hear other's ideas. that being said it's a lot easier to say fuck the rich than to determine an enforceable definition of excessive.
That's probably a better way to put it. Currently the rich people are in a "no taxes for us" club, so if we could actually stop making further bonuses to them legal and start actually charging them reasonable amounts, that'd be great and a lot of the problem would start solving itself.
The difference between $100 million and $1 billion is 90% of $1 billion.
People who have less than $100 million are much closer to the middle class than they are to being billionaires. We should be trying to recruit them to our side, not condemn them.
It's a common phrase used to refer to them. If you didn't know that you don't belong in this conversation. If you did know that and were still a prick you're being disingenuous.
No one's arguing that. I'm saying you knew what they meant and chose to be needlessly pedantic. Saying "The 1%" has been a common phrase for a very long time.