I’m not really sure what their point even is… the top 20% of income earners is $100K or more in a three person household, which is basically any professional (bachelor’s out of college median $50K) with a partner that works at a similar level. Top 20% of wealth is where you hit those same people, but older with their retirement savings. That’s not actually who they are chastising, they are targeting those with six figure incomes in inexpensive markets with a single family income - but the reason we don’t talk about “the rich” in he top 20% is because it covers a huge number of people that are not rich.
Besides, we normally criticize them for being the core GOP voting base.
My household almost squeaks into the top 20%, based on my 25+ years in software development and my spouse’s part-time library assistant job. We are what I like to think of as “temporarily comfortable.” E.g. we can afford things for the most part – though this month was a little rough due to shelling out for some necessary house maintenance among other things.
But we don’t have anything to invest, other than what goes into my IRA. We have a $14K car and a $19K car and a $90K house in a working-class, somewhat run down but not poor neighborhood. Vacations are week-long road trips to visit our family once a year or so, with less common 1-2 night motel stays elsewhere. We have serious doubt about our prospects for retirement, or even surviving for long without medical insurance. If we had a child, we would also be freaking out about future college expenses. We both went through ramen-eating phases in our 20s to early 30s. I delayed a lot of dental work for a decade because I couldn’t afford it and then still had to stretch it out over about 6 years.
I still recognize I’m better off financially than a lot of people and that kind of horrifies me. And this is why I’m a socialist.
I’m in a similar position, although renting instead of owning. Having finally achieved my lifetime goal of a six figure salary, we’re still juggling due to cost-of-living and medical bills, etc. Hypothetically, we could save up enough to put a down payment on a house over the next quarter century, but only if we can pay off the car and it doesn’t immediately break down and also only if there are no unexpected medical bills. We’ve had to raid our 401ks and savings to pay bills due to medical issues in the past, and although it’s slowly rebuilding, there’s not much there. The idea of retirement is kind of like a fairy tale.
That said, we’re not starving and we can keep our home warm enough that water doesn’t freeze inside. Still, when I was younger, envisioning the goal of a six-figure income, I expected more from it than that. Like, at least what my parents could achieve with a five-figure income.
The reason real estate overvaluation is difficult to deal with in the market is that there’s no upper end to it. There’s always a truck full of money someone wants to park somewhere. I wouldn’t say the math of it is hyperbolic, but for a given large range it is.
I thought praxis was supposed to take care of this, that it was supposed to be up to the men of ability to benefit from the rough and tumble of the market.
Er, no, this is exactly what happens when corrupt oligarchs get what they want, principle and ability be damned.
Maybe if we stopped empowering our rich to steal the resources, wages, and public budgets of impoverished regions, we could end hunger and survival insecurity for all time.
Maybe if we just give the surplus food that we’re already growing to the people who need it to survive, with no monetary exchange required on anyone’s part, it’ll end hunger?
Nah, making essential nutrition a commodity item is a much better idea.
I just don’t see how dismantling the entire class structure is less work or an easier sell than just giving people what they need to survive, when we already have it available in surplus.
Because the rich won’t allow us to have a universal safety net (or whatever implementation of food security you’re stuck on) until we cut their power down to democracy-sized morsels. I take that as a given.
The easier it is for proles to get by, the harder it is for plutes to celebrate their moral and intellectual superiority, and the harder it is for plutes to hire someone for their sexual fantasies.
I think the rich would fight back harder against trying to take large chunks of their power, compared to taking small chunks of their money.
For example, which do you think they’d fight harder against: a bill with a small tax hike to pay for taking food that was already being thrown away and providing it to those in need, or a law designed to weaken the Citizens United decision?
I think they’d fight harder, much harder, against the latter.
Maybe it’s addressing a symptom instead of treating the underlying disease. But when that symptom is “a whole lot of people are dying of starvation,” I think, in the short term, that’s worth taking our eyes off of the long game to deal with.
Why do you think it’s a given that overthrowing the oligarchy altogether is easier than willing small victories against them?
Sparks have flown when I try to explain to some entrenched “patriots” who claim to be defending “American culture” from The Scary Other - from Eastern-European communism and anarchism to Middle-Eastern
Islam - just how little they really know geographically and culturally. If you look at the widespread utopianism of the US Christian “intentional communities” of the 18th century, you can see a lot of the DNA of communism all over it. Marx and Engels were in communication with Shaker communes before they even wrote their manifesto.
The reactionary waves of publicizing communism, anarchism, labor unions, etc as being “un-American” seems to be very much a product of industry owners and investors of the early 20th century capitalizing upon fear of immigrants from Germany, Russia, Poles, Jews, etc and exploiting perceived cultural differences to drive xenophobia, and then cripple popular labor movements by repeated association. Re-inventing US Christianity into a popular movement of faux-moral conformism and ignorance was a more recent development.
@mindysan33 probably knows more about this,
(preemptive drunken posting disclaimer for typos grammar etc)