The governor of my state is a literal billionaire trust fund baby. His only prior achievements were in "philanthropy" and his singular legislative accomplishment is a corrupt scheme for the cannabis industry. It's like a comic book. The crazy thing is most people don't seem to mind.
Why the hell isn't this obvious? Presidents are recruited out of senators. Being a senator often runs in the family. And there are clans providing a lot of the past and current leadership, think Kennedy, Bush, Clinton. Of course there is a ruling class.
Pretending to be part of the working masses is simply good PR and positioning for one's career as a ruler, and these folks have figured it out a while ago. They're hustling like everybody else, good for them.
If they can have the cake and eat it too, why wouldn't they? The voters seem to eat it up every time and give them no reason to stop the act.
There is a ruling class, and there is an underclass. There used to be a middle class, but that has been squeezed out of existence. In the ruling class, typical income is above $1M. If there were still a middle class, it would be between there and $300K, but their number is demographically negligible.
It has been the great triumph of the effort to eliminate the middle class that an overwhelming majority of the underclass do not know they are; and firmly believe they are, as their grandparents were, middle-class. A mark of that success is that instead of resenting having been driven out of the middle class, people resent learning that they are not in it.
The point isn't the exact numbers, the point is the divide. You're unlikely to make the jump from the underclass to the ruling class nor vice versa because the superstructure keeps you in place.
If you have wealthy and powerful parents with wealthy and powerful friends, you'll likely end up being wealthy and powerful yourself even if you totally screw up your life choices. You probably still end up going to an elite college, hanging around in elite business clubs meeting other people in the same position as you.
No amount of hussle is going to turn someone with no familial wealth or connections into a Clinton, Kennedy or Bush. Just as no amount of staying late and working hard is going to turn a factory worker into a Bezos, Musk or Gates. The "family and friends" round of investment isn't going to yield much if neither your friends nor family have any wealth to spare.
The post I was replying to stated that the middle class was squeezed out of existence. It seemed to do so by defining it out of existence in a bizarre way.
Alternatively, the middle class can always exist if you decide to lower the threshold until it fits your quota. A gap of between 30% to 100% of the minimum for the higher threshold seems large enough when defining a "middle".
It could also indicate that the higher threshold is too high. Regardless of the reason, an income of $299K is plainly not underclass by any stretch of the imagination.
"A mark of that success is that instead of resenting having been driven out of the middle class, people resent learning that they are not in it."
US economic output has remained on the same sharp rising slope since 1975 as between 1945 and 1975. But since 1975, all of that increased income has been diverted to the ruling class, while the rest of the nation has been stuck at 1975 levels.
If $300,000/y seems to you like upper-class income, it is purely because you have been made accustomed to a 1975 level of prosperity, while the ruling class lives on 2021 income it has since 1975 diverted to its own pockets.
The ruling class will not give up its diversion of income from your pockets to their pockets without a fight. Imagine how angry they would be at being made to give that up; you should, by rights, be more angry at their ongoing confiscation of your income.
What is absurd is to pick a number X precisely at the estimated dividing line between two fuzzily-delineated groups A and B, and proclaim that X is certainly not group A.
"Are you saying cyan is blue? It is obviously green!"
I believe that most people will agree that $299K incomes are not close to underclass and will therefore conclude that the proposed dividing line is a bad one.
Compared to the likes of Bezos, Musk or Gates, every sub-C-level FAANG employee is part of the underclass.
Of course it's a gradient rather than a clear dividing line, but there are people who make 100x, 1,000x, 10,000x or more of what the lowest of the low are making and there's no gradual progression from the latter to the former. There are massive gaps that are impossible to bridge.
If you consider that the average person's economic situation worsened throughout 2020 while all the top billionaires drastically increased their wealth (if not proportionately, then at least in absolute numbers), this only widens that gap.
I agree that putting a single dividing line at $299k or whatever is silly, but yes, even a person making $299k is economically insignificant to a triple digit billionaire (or just any billionaire, to be honest). The divide isn't between people making $299k and people making $300k, the divide is between billionaires and people making subsistence level or less -- everyone else just falls on the gradient in between.
I agree to an extent, "upperclass", "underclass", "middle class", "lower class" and so on are not meaningful ways to describe societal structure, they're mostly arbitrary delineations to group income brackets with similar consumption levels and behaviors.
In the UK class still refers more to traditional social standing (i.e. someone from a bloodline of aristocrats would be considered "upper class" even if they have a measly income and no generational wealth or political status) but in the US this has almost entirely eroded to refer to how much money you make (with even distinctions between "new money" and "old money" evaporating over time). Most countries lie somewhere in between.
Marxists often try to be similarly reductive by saying ownership of "the means of production" is the only class distinction. But even Karl Marx wouldn't have agreed with this strictly binary approach.
If you spend even a few seconds studying the biographies of the top billionaires, it should be obvious that even a small-scale business owner has less in common with them than with the working poor. If there is a single dividing line, I would say it is if money means being able to purchase goods and services, or if it means being able to exert political power.
A billionaire not only has at least a thousand times as much money as someone with a thousand dollars to their name. This level of wealth compounds. Merely having this amount of money readily available not only affords them easy access to credit (and thus additional liquidity) but it also affects other people's (and companies') behavior towards them. Poor people on the other hand have to resort to collective bargaining (e.g. labor/trade unions).
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 37.8 ms ] threadThe ones that always say their opinions are not a matter of politics.
The ones that claim "reality has a liberal bias."
When faced with divergent opinions or norms, goes straight to "misinformed" or "uneducated" for a label.
Generally speaking, they're nauseating, moralistic hypocrites.
If they can have the cake and eat it too, why wouldn't they? The voters seem to eat it up every time and give them no reason to stop the act.
It has been the great triumph of the effort to eliminate the middle class that an overwhelming majority of the underclass do not know they are; and firmly believe they are, as their grandparents were, middle-class. A mark of that success is that instead of resenting having been driven out of the middle class, people resent learning that they are not in it.
If you have wealthy and powerful parents with wealthy and powerful friends, you'll likely end up being wealthy and powerful yourself even if you totally screw up your life choices. You probably still end up going to an elite college, hanging around in elite business clubs meeting other people in the same position as you.
No amount of hussle is going to turn someone with no familial wealth or connections into a Clinton, Kennedy or Bush. Just as no amount of staying late and working hard is going to turn a factory worker into a Bezos, Musk or Gates. The "family and friends" round of investment isn't going to yield much if neither your friends nor family have any wealth to spare.
US economic output has remained on the same sharp rising slope since 1975 as between 1945 and 1975. But since 1975, all of that increased income has been diverted to the ruling class, while the rest of the nation has been stuck at 1975 levels.
If $300,000/y seems to you like upper-class income, it is purely because you have been made accustomed to a 1975 level of prosperity, while the ruling class lives on 2021 income it has since 1975 diverted to its own pockets.
The ruling class will not give up its diversion of income from your pockets to their pockets without a fight. Imagine how angry they would be at being made to give that up; you should, by rights, be more angry at their ongoing confiscation of your income.
"Are you saying cyan is blue? It is obviously green!"
What has led "most people" to conclude as they do is the actual topic under discussion. Thus you demonstrate begging the question.
<http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_Question>
Of course it's a gradient rather than a clear dividing line, but there are people who make 100x, 1,000x, 10,000x or more of what the lowest of the low are making and there's no gradual progression from the latter to the former. There are massive gaps that are impossible to bridge.
If you consider that the average person's economic situation worsened throughout 2020 while all the top billionaires drastically increased their wealth (if not proportionately, then at least in absolute numbers), this only widens that gap.
I agree that putting a single dividing line at $299k or whatever is silly, but yes, even a person making $299k is economically insignificant to a triple digit billionaire (or just any billionaire, to be honest). The divide isn't between people making $299k and people making $300k, the divide is between billionaires and people making subsistence level or less -- everyone else just falls on the gradient in between.
In the UK class still refers more to traditional social standing (i.e. someone from a bloodline of aristocrats would be considered "upper class" even if they have a measly income and no generational wealth or political status) but in the US this has almost entirely eroded to refer to how much money you make (with even distinctions between "new money" and "old money" evaporating over time). Most countries lie somewhere in between.
Marxists often try to be similarly reductive by saying ownership of "the means of production" is the only class distinction. But even Karl Marx wouldn't have agreed with this strictly binary approach.
If you spend even a few seconds studying the biographies of the top billionaires, it should be obvious that even a small-scale business owner has less in common with them than with the working poor. If there is a single dividing line, I would say it is if money means being able to purchase goods and services, or if it means being able to exert political power.
A billionaire not only has at least a thousand times as much money as someone with a thousand dollars to their name. This level of wealth compounds. Merely having this amount of money readily available not only affords them easy access to credit (and thus additional liquidity) but it also affects other people's (and companies') behavior towards them. Poor people on the other hand have to resort to collective bargaining (e.g. labor/trade unions).
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/joseph-epstein/j...