Can we move beyond class and focus on how an individuals vision for the future can never provide what humans truely want… a collective vision for the future which preserves freedom and human dignity.
Neoliberalism is a late 20th Century reactionary response in economic ideology against the continued progressive development of the modern mixed economy which generally replaced more pure capitalism from the mid-20th century.
It is neither in itself an economic system, nor is it particularly responsible for prosperity (its responsible mainly for austerity).
I thank you are thinking of the promise of liberalism. Neoliberalism is too new to suggest it lead to the prosperity in history, and it’s hard to point to the society that embraced it that did well especially well with it. However classical liberalism was rooted in g-d. I think modern thinking is rooted in marxist religion
So throw a couple extra bones to the poors and maybe the race thing will solve itself? Why tax the fucking rich? Academics and politicians need to change the message to simply that: tax the rich. You can't fix one extreme without addressing the opposite extreme, in this case. Tax the rich and less tax for the poor (everyone else).
Yes and no. The “poor” may very little to no income tax. But the poor pay sales tax on almost everything they buy and that’s a flat 7-12% and so is really regressive. Although this is skipped for items paid for with government food assistance (eg, SNAP).
And if you’re working poor (ie making $20k/year) you’re paying 7.5% in payroll taxes to cover social security and Medicare. This is also flat and so regressive.
You certainly pay less percentage and less absolute taxes than the rich, but it’s still something.
The challenge is that it’s hard to reduce these taxes any lower. Unless you want to change social security to a straight income redistribution program and not the pretend pension it is now and do something like the first $50k isn’t taxed and 10x the taxes on people from 50-200k (currently only 0-168k is taxed but almost half of people only make 50k so taking off the bottom drastically reduces tax revenue).
Or you could remove sales tax on people who make less than $20k but that’s hard to monitor properly and rebates don’t help much with day to day needs.
>the poor pay sales tax on almost everything they buy . . . Although this is skipped for items paid for with government food assistance (eg, SNAP).
That is technically correct, but misleading, because even when it is not paid for by government food assistance, the sale of food is not taxed--at least, it is not in any of the 4 US states I've lived in.
Lots of food in my state is taxed. I’m not sure how they determine what is taxed and isn’t as the cashier does it all for you automatically. But I think things like fruit and diapers are not taxed, but processed foods are.
But I think the important part is that poor people spend a larger percent of their income on things with sales tax than wealthy so sales tax impacts them more significantly. Thats what I meant t saying it’s regressive [0].
Are you sure the basic rule isn't that if the food it is intended to be consumed at the seller's place of business, it is taxed? That's how it works in California. (As an exception, carbonated beverages are taxed.)
Specifically, food from the "hot bar" in a supermarket is taxable, whereas a can of ravioli for instance, is not taxable even though it is a processed food by almost anyone's definition.
I just looked it up and groceries are a lower rate (1% instead of 4%) from the state but there are local sales taxes of 2-5% depending on city and county.
Prepared food like the food bar is full sales tax.
They do, and it's progressive, but the trick is so do the rich because they make all their money on capital gains and that's a lower rate. It's really the middle class to honest small business owner level that gets hosed on income taxes, make enough money to pay a good bit of taxes but not enough to have exotic tax shelters and the really creative accountants.
These tools blabbering about “tax the rich” don’t have real jobs, assets, or a brain. The only thing the political class will be OK with doing is raising taxes on the middle - and that’s it. People who call for higher taxes with our two party system are my enemy. They can eff off.
And raising capital gains taxes? What so they can screw over the middle again when they retire and have to intermittently sell off? It’s absurd.
95% of people are astoundingly ignorant of how our tax system actually works. Once you get into a moderately advanced investment/tax strategy and start looking into forming an S Corp, tax advantaged accounts, etc. you realize how the rich really avoid taxes.
"Tax the rich" only gets politicians to move around the income brackets and punish high-earning, honest professionals like doctors, lawyers, and engineers. Numbskulls who have never even filed a 1040 can't comprehend that the mega rich do not derive the majority of their wealth from income.
We should simplify our tax system to eliminate sophisticated tax strategies and level the playing field. Income tax should be reduced overall.
Income tax should be abolished completely, since it is immoral. Government should derive their tax income from taxing corporations. And the best way to avoid any "tax optimization" schemes is to tax revenue, not profit. You run a business? 1-5% of your revenue goes to IRS, and you can do whatever you want with the rest. This would also have a nice side effect of reducing cost of accounting services since without tax avoidance schemes 90% of accounting work goes away.
The poor pay taxes through sales and payroll taxes, so it’s not just income tax, I think it’s a fairly safe assumption that it represents a larger share of their income than it does to rich people.
Most billionaires don’t even earn money from a salary, but instead from lower taxed capital gains.
But reducing the argument to rich vs.
poor also misses out how unfair the tax system is to the middle class of wage earners in the US.
Lol no. Poor heads of households pay less income taxes, but regressive taxes always target them. Hell, most states even extract fees from benefit payments!
Why? You can easily compel compliance and there are millions more poor people tha. rich people. The way laws are structured today, the marginal dollar costs a lot to extract from a billionaire.
I don't know how it works in the US but in the EU the working class pay a lot more tax, proportionally, than the rich:
In Spain if you work and you cost your company 26430 euros:
- The company pays 6430 for social security (calculated as a % of your salary, so this is effectively your tax even if on paper it's the company that pays it.)
- You pay 1270 for social security (on paper you pay it but the company gives it to the tax office directly)
- You pay 2338 for income tax (on paper you pay it but the company gives most of it to the tax office directly)
- You end up getting 16390 euros, or an effective tax rate of 38%.
This goes up if you pick a higher salary, obviously. If you work and you cost your company 67000 euros:
- The company pays 16300 for social security
- You pay 3101 for social security
- You pay 11582
- You end up getting 36016 euros, or an effective tax rate of 46%.
If you're a freelancer and you work for yourself it's more or less the same but there's also a fixed tax that while not being very high it's hard to deal with when you're earning 0 when starting out. In practice most people just risk it and don't report their activity at first for this reason.
But if you're truly rich, you don't work, you have assets that appreciate for you. Tax rate for capital gains is capped at 26% no matter how many millions you're earning.
This does not take into account that as a rich person you're going to be spending less of the money you earn than a poor person so you're paying less VAT (sales tax) as well.
> The company pays 6430 for social security (calculated as a % of your salary, so this is effectively your tax even if on paper it's the company that pays it.)> - You pay 1270 for social security (on paper you pay it but the company gives it to the tax office directly)
A contribution towards your pension is not a tax. It's a deferred payment. You will get that money later, with interest.
> Tax rate for capital gains is capped at 26% no matter how many millions you're earning.
Capital gains taxes charge you for the nominal increase in the value of the assets you sell, which means that you pay taxes for inflation. For example, if you bought an asset for 100EUR and sell it one year later for 103EUR, you will pay a capital gains tax on that 3EUR difference, even though you may not have actually obtained any benefit if inflation was 3% that year, so you are actually worse off than you were.
> But if you're truly rich, you don't work, you have assets that appreciate for you
You will pay taxes if they appreciate, but you won't get your money back when they depreciate. You are taking a risk.
> This does not take into account that as a rich person you're going to be spending less of the money you earn than a poor person so you're paying less VAT (sales tax) as well
If two people buy the same asset for the same price, they both pay the same amount in VAT. If the rich person ends up buying more stuff, they pay more VAT than the poor person.
And at the end of the day, most of the income taxes obtained by the government are paid by the upper quintile of the population. Which is to say, the working class enjoys social services they can't afford thanks to a small percentage of the population that pays on their behalf.
Not only that, Spain is one of the few countries in the world with a wealth tax, which starts once you reach 700k EUR, so it's not exactly taxing billionaires, either.
> A contribution towards your pension is not a tax. It's a deferred payment. You will get that money later, with interest.
That's quite a naive take. European public pension systems don't work like that. The money is not invested, it is spent immediately to pay pensions to those who have already reached retirement age. What you get is a promise that some day you'll also get paid pension. But there's no guarantee that this will happen, since, as I said, this money is not invested, or set aside in a vault, it's spent immediately. And given current demographic trends you have very slim chance of ever seeing that money again.
> European public pension systems don't work like that
People should have voted for a better system, then. In Spain I've heard the same people complain about the unsustainability of the pension system while also complaining about the "Austrian backpack" approach, which is one way to address that problem.
Personally, I would prefer something like every person born in the same year contribute to the same pension fund, to be invested and redistributed as they turn 65, sort of like a mandatory annuity. It would avoid introducing these sort of inter-generational tensions.
> And given current demographic trends you have very slim chance of ever seeing that money again
That can be solved via immigration. People may not like the solution, but it is available to them, should they choose it.
>People should have voted for a better system, then. In Spain I've heard the same people complain about the unsustainability of the pension system while also complaining about the "Austrian backpack" approach, which is one way to address that problem.
Spain is a... pathologically left-wing country, I would say. That indicates, among other things, a profound lack of knowledge of economics, which explains what you say (and some other stuff).
>That can be solved via immigration. People may not like the solution, but it is available to them, should they choose it.
Spain's youth unemployment rate is at around 28% right now. As long as there is a single unemployed Spanish person, especially young people, we shouldn't be accepting any more immigrants.
> Spain's youth unemployment rate is at around 28% right now. As long as there is a single unemployed Spanish person, especially young people, we shouldn't be accepting any more immigrants.
You can expect commenters on HN to interpret this as racism, but actually, it is just a simple logic: First you need to fix the economy so that it can create jobs, then you invite potential workers to immigrate.
Take Poland as an example of this: they way are ahead of Spain on "demographic collapse" curve, but also have a blooming economy - unemployment rate is one of the lowest in EU at 2.7 percent. Two millions of Ukrainian refugees came in there in the past year, and you know what? Most of them found jobs.
> That indicates, among other things, a profound lack of knowledge of economics
The assumption here is that economies led by right wing governments are more successful, which is hilariously untrue.
Having strong social protections and higher taxes does correlate with higher living standards, though. No social protections and no taxes correlate mostly with failed countries, so there is that.
People complaining about the current social security ”demise”, and people claiming that the Austrian backpack is the solution, are the same, i.e. people who believe that individualized plans are preferable to socialized ones, but fail to understand that it creates more disparity, and less security.
The Austrian backpack is extremely beneficial to large companies, thus is of no surprise that it gets touted in the news from time to time.
They don’t talk that much about its biggest drawback: in a market where wages are already low and talent is rarely valued, it would make firing people so cheap, companies wouldn’t really have any incentive to keep highly paid employees, even if they are excellent performers.
The top 1 percent’s share of federal income taxes paid rose from 38.8 percent to 42.3 percent in 2023.
The top 50 percent of all taxpayers paid 97.7 percent of all federal individual income taxes, while the bottom 50 percent paid the remaining 2.3 percent.
I think it varies. I’m not adding more details than the sibling comments, but due to the complexities of tax reduction, it’s more accessible to the rich to recover a greater percentage of their income via accounting tricks or unique investments, than people who are filing simple tax forms and investing in simple registered accounts.
Difference in scale being a difference in kind. More money is easier to shelter if it has a legal origin.
Define poor. I would call poor anything less than a 11 figure income so the definition of poor is subjective in and of itself. The relative difference in wealth should not so great so throwing a bone to the poors is only using a band-aid to triage a gaping wound that has been bleeding for a very long time. When I say "tax the rich" I am not talking about using current our current tax system. Whaty I am really saying is "make the people who exploit others pay for the exploitation." Watching rich get richer while poors get poorer is sickening and defending the rich is also sickening to hear.
This is obviously a step in the right direction, but not a solution.
However, I think Americans would be well served by reflecting on their their thoughts and feelings on the subject of race and introducing class to the conversation. It’s my experience that many Americans simply use race as a proxy for class, often incorrectly.
I’ve been saying this for years, but it’s gradually become almost racist to imply that it isn’t racism that’s the biggest problem.
People hate the lower class. Hate. Look at public policy, how people react to their presence, etc. Essential workers were basically human sacrifices.
And you know who is poor and struggling? A population of former slaves in a country that hates poor people and doesn’t believe in helping them. Or a population that you deny legal rights to so that you can have cheap labor. Or even white trash, I mean, dress like a poor person and watch as staff follow you around while you shop. But yeah, racial groups like African Americans and Mexicans are poor for a reason and yeah people hate poor people
It is absolutely considered racist to advocate for focusing on class instead of race. Try saying that in any group of millennial liberals and you will get an earful. It's very disappointing and politically unsavvy.
Because it is reductive and unhelpful. What is happening now is called triage. Of course helping all of the wounded is the goal but you tend to those bleeding out before those suffering from slivers. To stand up in the ER and exclaim “but we are all suffering! We should all be helped at the same time!” is simply counter productive at best.
It is absolutely important to spend time imagining solutions that could help change the system itself to prevent future suffering but to offer them to people directly engaged in immediate disaster response is not productive.
To put this in nerd terms don’t be the guy who suggests switching to Haskell/pure FP as a solution to the problem you are debugging in a production legacy OO system that needs to be fixed immediately. Like logically and long term you are probably right but what was the point beside making you feel smug?
> helping all of the wounded is the goal but you tend to those bleeding out before those suffering from slivers.
I think this shows your biases. As an example, at my previous company, I was the only one who had grown up on welfare, was a high school dropout, lived near a superfund site, etc.
However, I’m an older, straight, white male, and the millennials I worked with were all from much more privileged economic backgrounds.
But somehow it was okay by the company for them to make public statements such as “we need to quit hiring so many straight, white males", but bringing up class was inappropriate?
Triage doesn't operate on race or category. It looks at the individuals and their individual needs.
You wouldn't operate a hospital triage assuming that someone should go to the front of the line just because they're black, and you shouldn't operate a social triage that way either. Some people have a scratch, and some people are bleeding out
Who the hell cares what the kids who can’t even balance their checkbook care about? That’s our problem guys. When do we stop letting the kids drive the car?
> Some people hate criminals, which are disproportionately poor
Part (or all) of the reason ”criminals are disproportionately poor” is or seems to be the case is that both law making and law enforcement are biased against poor people, in part because some people hate poor people.
> Nobody gets hate crimed for being an honest person making 20K a year and supporting their family.
Yes, when the victimization is through, rather than prohibited by, the law, its not a crime.
None of which, of course, means that class or poverty should replace race (or sex, or LGBTQIA status, or ethnicity, or anything else) in our concerns—life is too complex for only one of those things to be a concern.
I work as lead programmer these days. In the past I worked in a factory / in retail. I am horrified by how well everyone treats me now compared to back then. Everyone assumes good intentions from me now, forgives me, is in a hurry to help me. Back then, they assumed I was lazy, stupid, selfish, untrustworthy. The main difference is my clothes and my car, I’m the same person. Even landlords stopped withholding damage deposits, assuming I was a good guy, hand waving any imperfections in the unit I’m moving out of—this wasn’t true for most of my life
I am frankly not comfortable revealing to my boss or coworkers that I grew up poor because they’ll think of me differently, stop assuming such good thing about me, become wary, etc
Calling someone racist will never solve any problems. no one will ever be receptive after that statement. Let’s just agree calling people racist doesn’t affect someone who actually is and only hurts people that are sincere.
Yes, but the real people that don’t want us to solve the race issues are the ones that keep pointing out our race base differences whenever they get the opportunity. That doesn’t mean I condone silent complicity in the act of hate, but rather seek to promote vocal Complicity in the spirit of unity. In today’s day and age, it’s pretty clear that red and blue is a bigger differentiator than white and black
No. We are fundamentally a racist society, not a classist society. It was all blacks who were deemd 3/5th of a person. Not poor blacks. It was all native americans who were exterminated, not the poor natives. Our immigration bans throughout history have been along racial lines - Chinese Exlusion Act, Asian Exclusion Act, etc. Not poor chinese or asian exclusion act. Wealthy and poor jews were discriminated against by colleges around the country. So on and so forth.
When's the last time you asked yourself 'What class person X belongs to.'?
We think in terms of race and to a lesser extent religion.
Besides, it's not an either-or situation. Why can't we address both racial and class issues?
People are bending over backwards to avoid paying black Americans for trillions in stolen labor. Switching the topic from race to class is another attempted deflection by the dominant groups in the US.
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[ 615 ms ] story [ 3502 ms ] threadIt is neither in itself an economic system, nor is it particularly responsible for prosperity (its responsible mainly for austerity).
I could be wrong, but don't the poor pay very little tax anyways?
And if you’re working poor (ie making $20k/year) you’re paying 7.5% in payroll taxes to cover social security and Medicare. This is also flat and so regressive.
You certainly pay less percentage and less absolute taxes than the rich, but it’s still something.
The challenge is that it’s hard to reduce these taxes any lower. Unless you want to change social security to a straight income redistribution program and not the pretend pension it is now and do something like the first $50k isn’t taxed and 10x the taxes on people from 50-200k (currently only 0-168k is taxed but almost half of people only make 50k so taking off the bottom drastically reduces tax revenue).
Or you could remove sales tax on people who make less than $20k but that’s hard to monitor properly and rebates don’t help much with day to day needs.
Tl:dr; the poor pay taxes, but not that much.
That is technically correct, but misleading, because even when it is not paid for by government food assistance, the sale of food is not taxed--at least, it is not in any of the 4 US states I've lived in.
But I think the important part is that poor people spend a larger percent of their income on things with sales tax than wealthy so sales tax impacts them more significantly. Thats what I meant t saying it’s regressive [0].
[0] https://www.accuratetax.com/blog/regressive-sales-tax-infogr...
Specifically, food from the "hot bar" in a supermarket is taxable, whereas a can of ravioli for instance, is not taxable even though it is a processed food by almost anyone's definition.
Prepared food like the food bar is full sales tax.
And raising capital gains taxes? What so they can screw over the middle again when they retire and have to intermittently sell off? It’s absurd.
"Tax the rich" only gets politicians to move around the income brackets and punish high-earning, honest professionals like doctors, lawyers, and engineers. Numbskulls who have never even filed a 1040 can't comprehend that the mega rich do not derive the majority of their wealth from income.
We should simplify our tax system to eliminate sophisticated tax strategies and level the playing field. Income tax should be reduced overall.
Most billionaires don’t even earn money from a salary, but instead from lower taxed capital gains.
But reducing the argument to rich vs. poor also misses out how unfair the tax system is to the middle class of wage earners in the US.
Why? You can easily compel compliance and there are millions more poor people tha. rich people. The way laws are structured today, the marginal dollar costs a lot to extract from a billionaire.
In Spain if you work and you cost your company 26430 euros:
- The company pays 6430 for social security (calculated as a % of your salary, so this is effectively your tax even if on paper it's the company that pays it.)
- You pay 1270 for social security (on paper you pay it but the company gives it to the tax office directly)
- You pay 2338 for income tax (on paper you pay it but the company gives most of it to the tax office directly)
- You end up getting 16390 euros, or an effective tax rate of 38%.
This goes up if you pick a higher salary, obviously. If you work and you cost your company 67000 euros:
- The company pays 16300 for social security
- You pay 3101 for social security
- You pay 11582
- You end up getting 36016 euros, or an effective tax rate of 46%.
If you're a freelancer and you work for yourself it's more or less the same but there's also a fixed tax that while not being very high it's hard to deal with when you're earning 0 when starting out. In practice most people just risk it and don't report their activity at first for this reason.
But if you're truly rich, you don't work, you have assets that appreciate for you. Tax rate for capital gains is capped at 26% no matter how many millions you're earning.
This does not take into account that as a rich person you're going to be spending less of the money you earn than a poor person so you're paying less VAT (sales tax) as well.
A contribution towards your pension is not a tax. It's a deferred payment. You will get that money later, with interest.
> Tax rate for capital gains is capped at 26% no matter how many millions you're earning.
Capital gains taxes charge you for the nominal increase in the value of the assets you sell, which means that you pay taxes for inflation. For example, if you bought an asset for 100EUR and sell it one year later for 103EUR, you will pay a capital gains tax on that 3EUR difference, even though you may not have actually obtained any benefit if inflation was 3% that year, so you are actually worse off than you were.
> But if you're truly rich, you don't work, you have assets that appreciate for you
You will pay taxes if they appreciate, but you won't get your money back when they depreciate. You are taking a risk.
> This does not take into account that as a rich person you're going to be spending less of the money you earn than a poor person so you're paying less VAT (sales tax) as well
If two people buy the same asset for the same price, they both pay the same amount in VAT. If the rich person ends up buying more stuff, they pay more VAT than the poor person.
And at the end of the day, most of the income taxes obtained by the government are paid by the upper quintile of the population. Which is to say, the working class enjoys social services they can't afford thanks to a small percentage of the population that pays on their behalf.
Not only that, Spain is one of the few countries in the world with a wealth tax, which starts once you reach 700k EUR, so it's not exactly taxing billionaires, either.
That's quite a naive take. European public pension systems don't work like that. The money is not invested, it is spent immediately to pay pensions to those who have already reached retirement age. What you get is a promise that some day you'll also get paid pension. But there's no guarantee that this will happen, since, as I said, this money is not invested, or set aside in a vault, it's spent immediately. And given current demographic trends you have very slim chance of ever seeing that money again.
People should have voted for a better system, then. In Spain I've heard the same people complain about the unsustainability of the pension system while also complaining about the "Austrian backpack" approach, which is one way to address that problem.
Personally, I would prefer something like every person born in the same year contribute to the same pension fund, to be invested and redistributed as they turn 65, sort of like a mandatory annuity. It would avoid introducing these sort of inter-generational tensions.
> And given current demographic trends you have very slim chance of ever seeing that money again
That can be solved via immigration. People may not like the solution, but it is available to them, should they choose it.
Spain is a... pathologically left-wing country, I would say. That indicates, among other things, a profound lack of knowledge of economics, which explains what you say (and some other stuff).
>That can be solved via immigration. People may not like the solution, but it is available to them, should they choose it.
Spain's youth unemployment rate is at around 28% right now. As long as there is a single unemployed Spanish person, especially young people, we shouldn't be accepting any more immigrants.
You can expect commenters on HN to interpret this as racism, but actually, it is just a simple logic: First you need to fix the economy so that it can create jobs, then you invite potential workers to immigrate.
Take Poland as an example of this: they way are ahead of Spain on "demographic collapse" curve, but also have a blooming economy - unemployment rate is one of the lowest in EU at 2.7 percent. Two millions of Ukrainian refugees came in there in the past year, and you know what? Most of them found jobs.
The assumption here is that economies led by right wing governments are more successful, which is hilariously untrue.
Having strong social protections and higher taxes does correlate with higher living standards, though. No social protections and no taxes correlate mostly with failed countries, so there is that.
The Austrian backpack is extremely beneficial to large companies, thus is of no surprise that it gets touted in the news from time to time.
They don’t talk that much about its biggest drawback: in a market where wages are already low and talent is rarely valued, it would make firing people so cheap, companies wouldn’t really have any incentive to keep highly paid employees, even if they are excellent performers.
The top 1 percent’s share of federal income taxes paid rose from 38.8 percent to 42.3 percent in 2023.
The top 50 percent of all taxpayers paid 97.7 percent of all federal individual income taxes, while the bottom 50 percent paid the remaining 2.3 percent.
I do believe that is taxing the rich
Difference in scale being a difference in kind. More money is easier to shelter if it has a legal origin.
However, I think Americans would be well served by reflecting on their their thoughts and feelings on the subject of race and introducing class to the conversation. It’s my experience that many Americans simply use race as a proxy for class, often incorrectly.
People hate the lower class. Hate. Look at public policy, how people react to their presence, etc. Essential workers were basically human sacrifices.
And you know who is poor and struggling? A population of former slaves in a country that hates poor people and doesn’t believe in helping them. Or a population that you deny legal rights to so that you can have cheap labor. Or even white trash, I mean, dress like a poor person and watch as staff follow you around while you shop. But yeah, racial groups like African Americans and Mexicans are poor for a reason and yeah people hate poor people
It is absolutely important to spend time imagining solutions that could help change the system itself to prevent future suffering but to offer them to people directly engaged in immediate disaster response is not productive.
To put this in nerd terms don’t be the guy who suggests switching to Haskell/pure FP as a solution to the problem you are debugging in a production legacy OO system that needs to be fixed immediately. Like logically and long term you are probably right but what was the point beside making you feel smug?
Also: intersectionality.
I think this shows your biases. As an example, at my previous company, I was the only one who had grown up on welfare, was a high school dropout, lived near a superfund site, etc.
However, I’m an older, straight, white male, and the millennials I worked with were all from much more privileged economic backgrounds.
But somehow it was okay by the company for them to make public statements such as “we need to quit hiring so many straight, white males", but bringing up class was inappropriate?
You wouldn't operate a hospital triage assuming that someone should go to the front of the line just because they're black, and you shouldn't operate a social triage that way either. Some people have a scratch, and some people are bleeding out
real change can't be popular in the mainstream
Nobody gets hate crimed for being an honest person making 20K a year and supporting their family.
Plenty of people hate poor people.
> Some people hate criminals, which are disproportionately poor
Part (or all) of the reason ”criminals are disproportionately poor” is or seems to be the case is that both law making and law enforcement are biased against poor people, in part because some people hate poor people.
> Nobody gets hate crimed for being an honest person making 20K a year and supporting their family.
Yes, when the victimization is through, rather than prohibited by, the law, its not a crime.
None of which, of course, means that class or poverty should replace race (or sex, or LGBTQIA status, or ethnicity, or anything else) in our concerns—life is too complex for only one of those things to be a concern.
I'm not sure what definition you're using for hate. What year is it describing sounds more like a lack of compassion or disinterest.
I am frankly not comfortable revealing to my boss or coworkers that I grew up poor because they’ll think of me differently, stop assuming such good thing about me, become wary, etc
When's the last time you asked yourself 'What class person X belongs to.'? We think in terms of race and to a lesser extent religion.
Besides, it's not an either-or situation. Why can't we address both racial and class issues?