I think it’s true the American system is broken, but I think the two Americas narrative is a bit of an oversimplification. There’s definitely plenty of people (over represented on this site) that aren’t yacht wealthy, but also aren’t paycheck to paycheck broke. Well paid laborers (SWE, other engineers, consultants) that can afford most day to day good, but struggle a bit more on big purchases like housing. I think ideally we’d tax the wealthy enough to allow more people to fall into that bucket of doing well but not crazy multiple homes well.
fuzzfactor|5 months ago
Well Bernie said Wednesday, the top 1% now owns more wealth than the bottom 93%. I don't know how accurate that is but I'll trust his figure for now. If any math comes up I'll leave it to volunteer statisticians to provide accurate error bands ;)
What if the top 1% "only" controlled 10% of the wealth & power?
That would still be an incredible bonanza for every one of them, 10:1 is living pretty large.
But when you think about it, what difference would that make to the other 99% after all? There's just so many of them.
It's probably pretty grim, let's see:
Right now the other 99% have got almost a full 7% of the wealth and I guess people have been getting by figuring they've been doing as good as they can.
People do call that a "rich" country :\
Now if the balance was "upset" or more fair like that, whichever way you want to look at it, those 99% would end up with a total of 90% of the wealth that the 1% didn't accumulate for themselves when they are at the 10% level.
So with the cards stacked only 10:1 in favor of the current 1%, they would all still be fabulously wealthy.
But not the poor 99% who didn't start out that great to begin with, they're just not near parity at this level.
With only 90% of the wealth, that's not quite up there by a long shot, but at least it's maybe about (90/7 =) 12x as much as they have now.
For 99% of the people. Would that even help anybody at all?
If you were one of the 99% you would have 12x as much under such nominal conditions yourself. Would that even move the needle anyway? I admit that 12x as much disposable income would result from a more attainable offset than 12x as much total income, but that could be significant anyway.
How would a mere 12x disposable income make you feel?
There's no way you'd be anywhere close to the 1%, no matter how you look at it :\
So it's a question worth asking.
Would anybody still say it was a rich country by comparison?
Do they say that any more? Or maybe something else entirely?
When you do the math?