Let me make this clear here. It’s actually impossible to hoard millions in personal fortune and also live an ethical life.
Some people are taking this as a personal attack against their families, who make something in the six figure range. This post is not about you. In full scale, families like that are not what I’d consider to be “wealthy”.
I’m talking about the multi-millionaire/billionaire CEOs, politicians, and media moguls. This isn’t about your uncle who’s a surgeon and saves people’s lives. Please don’t misinterpret that. They’re not nearly on the same scale of “wealthy”.
But if your uncle is the head of a multinational corporation that utilizes cheap overseas labour and exploits third world countries, fuck that guy actually.
(NB: US-centric economic discussion. Long post. Press J to skip.)
Americans think that the country’s wealth looks like this:
Above is is a rather famous graph that shows where Americans think the money is. Americans think that the distribution of income in America looks like these pretty colors. The very richest people, the top 20% (all the fancy millionaires and Bill Gates and, like…. the richest rich Hollywood celebrities???) are the yellow bar, and Americans assigned them a little more than half the money in the country. Next comes the orange, the Really Rich Folks. Americans think that the Rich Folks (whom we picture as the brilliant cardiac surgeons and brilliant bankers and eccentric uncles with mansions – the Rich Folks you can realistically dream of being), have a good chunk of the wealth in the country; maybe 20%. And they believe the upper middle class (red) has almost as much wealth as the Rich Folks (Those in the red are the ‘rich’ people that we know personally, after all, so that sounds sensible.) The working class and poor folks (dark blue – the bottom 20%) even holds some of the country’s wealth as well. You can see the rationale. There are lots of working class and poor people in the USA, so all of their money put together must add up to something.
What if you ask Americans to sketch out the ideal income distribution?
If you ask the Americans where they think the money should be, they say it should be distributed the way it is in the graph above. Look at that nice, fair-looking distribution. This isn’t particularly revolutionary. It wasn’t a poll of leftist Tumblr children. This is a fairly good, balanced study presented by Harvard. The polled Americans say that in an ideal world, there should be more money in the class with the upper-middle-class folks (red) than they think there currently is; there should be more wealth resting with the hardworking folks, the happily-white-collar people, the normal-rich ones. America thinks it’s only fair that we have more wealth resting with those folks, and a little bit less wealth with Mark Zuckerberg (yellow). America believes firmly that the orange (brilliant cardiac surgeons, famous musicians) are okay where they are – that they have a fair amount of the wealth and their portion can stay the same. In their ideal world, Americans also expanded the ordinary middle class (light blue). These normal Americans generally think that this class, which almost all Americans believe that they belong to, should have more wealth. And the working class (people who can’t afford vacations or new cars, and everyone poorer than that) should have more general wealth than they do. That’s only fair, Americans say, as they arrange this ideal distribution of wealth. This would be a satisfactory balance of money.
Here’s the actual distribution of wealth in the United States:
Yeah… yeah.
Here’s all the graphs together:
Yeah. The wealth of the nation disproportionately belongs to the top 20% of rich people. The rest of the middle and lower classes are crushed into less than 20% of the rest of the wealth, savaging each other for crumbs.
So, no, nobody cares about your Rich Uncle Joe. Nobody is particularly thirsting to put Rich Uncle Joe ‘first against the wall when the revolution comes’ if that’s what people are afraid of.
Rich Uncle Joe the surgeon probably makes about $300,000 per year if he’s a decent general surgeon at an ordinary American hospital. Rich Uncle Joe’s decent, hardworking, saves-lives-every-day income is the orange-ish line in the graph below. (These are deeply shitty colors, by the way.) Rich Uncle Joe is definitely richer than a poor person, but his six-figure income isn’t influencing the nation.
Because the runaway red line in this graph is the 1%.
This graph is also showing you time. In 1979, when incomes were more equal, Rich Uncle Joe would have been Handsomely Rich, a man who commanded respect and moderate wealth, a man able to hold up his head in the company of the truly wealthy people in the nation. He might even perceive himself as being in the same social class as the Rich. He might build himself a fine mansion, golf with political influencers, hire a personal secretary, and invite the rich folks over for dinner (fondue, natch, in a wood-panelled den with a Persian rug) and count himself as an equal.
By 2007, the super-rich had separated themselves utterly from Rich Uncle Joe. Their money makes more money than Rich Uncle Joe makes. Rich Uncle Joe might impress a starry-eyed tumblr teen who really needs the $50 that his wife slips into their birthday card (“I have rich people in my family and ACTUALLY they’re lovely!”) but he has been left behind. Like OP says: Uncle Joe is not located on the same scale. His wealth is a fraction, which the oligarchs don’t stoop to notice. Also note: 2007, where this graph leaves off, was ten years ago. When The Economist published a graph of American wealth inequality in 2017, they had to break it into pieces to look good in the magazine, because they couldn’t show the 1% on the same graph as everyone else and have it look meaningful. Even with Rich Uncle Joe working his little butt off during all the hours God sends him, he can’t raise the average wage of the 99% until you can see it on a nicely formatted graph. He’s in the top 20-40% of wealthy people in the USA but he is closer to us than to them.
And, given that general surgeons work themselves to death and have mounting levels of educational debt, Rich Uncle Joe’s best hope for his earthly reward is to have all of his debts (including his mortgage) paid off and his retirement savings secured before he loses his hands, meaning that he will have to work 60+ hour weeks at antisocial times in order to be able to stop working when he’s 65, with enough money to cover the remaining 20 years of his life, including the expensive eldercare that he and his wife will require. Since one or the other is statistically increasingly likely to come down with a debilitating illness as they age – cancer or dementia or a stroke, and so on – and the costs of healthcare and eldercare are skyrocketing, Uncle Joe will always feel like he has to hustle to ensure comfort and survival in his winter years. Rich Uncle Joe is ‘rich,’ so he’ll want a private room if he has to go into a nursing home for the end of his life; the average cost of an ordinary private room in the USA in 2016 was $253 per day, so if he wants him and his wife to die in comfort, he will think of this increasingly as he gets older; a fact he is never able to forget or set aside, because he works in healthcare and knows what happens…
And those are the people that Americans assume are comfortable and happy and positively rolling in their well-earned wealth…
Because here’s the thing: Americans, we all think we’re middle class! We think we’re doing okay, and if we work really hard, we’ll probably get rich. Maybe if we win the lottery or publish that fantasy novel, we’ll be super-rich. So we, Americans, we don’t ask too much of the rich. We make things nice for the rich, because we imagine that one day, we will be one of them. AMERICANS DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT THE RICH ARE. Americans picture ourselves being “rich” and we picture ourselves shopping at the expensive store, going out to eat, living in The Nicest House On the Main Street of Lobster Neck, Massachusetts and going on one (1) vacation to Italy. We say, “Oh, let’s not make things TOO hard for the rich, because that’s what I’m going to be someday.”
STOP THIS. THAT FANTASY LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL, BUT IT IS THE TINIEST SLICE OF THE HUMBLEST PIE. THE RICH HAVE THE WHOLE BIG PIE, LEAVING THE REST OF US A SCATTERING OF CRUMBS TO FIGHT OVER, AND THAT FANTASY LIFE IS SIMPLY A SLIGHTLY LARGER CRUMB. You are picturing yourself rich, but you are picturing simply an ant on the table, holding up that large crumb, going “ooh, this piece of crust has a tiny dot of cherry filling stuck to it! I’m rich!” and somewhere someone in the distance has an ACTUAL CHERRY and everyone’s like “WOW YEAH one day I’ll win the lottery and get the BIG CHERRY TOO!” but, you know, we aren’t exactly dividing up the pie. The Republican guy who votes to make things nicer for rich people, and votes to make things worse for poor people, genuinely thinks that he’s a middle-class guy with an enviously high standard of living, who is absolutely going to be rich someday. He’s good and moral, he thinks, and he is going to get the big crumb like Uncle Joe.
His whole world is crumbs, in which looms that beautiful mental picture of the slightly bigger crumb.
He can’t conceive of the pie. He cannot picture what pie looks like. He thinks pie is what happens when you get, like, three whole cherries together. So he votes, thinking he is supporting the possibility of cherries for Normal Guys Like Him.
Stop picturing Uncle Joe when you picture “the rich.” The rich we’re talking about wouldn’t even give Uncle Joe a seat at a dinner party.
Anyway, I myself don’t really believe in revolution. and cutesy leftist slogans make me a Tired. But I hate it when people shovel shit and call it sugar. And then get mad when people point out that it’s shit. Like, if you’re doing this, the people you’re stanning for hold you in contempt, if they think of you at all! Have a little gotdamn dignity.
One thing I haven’t seen anyone mention yet about the FCC disaster is how it’s going to affect LGBTQ teens.
If they repeal net neutrality, then your ISP is going to be charging you separate extras for each website you access, right?
Which means they’re going to TRACK which websites you access, because of course they will, how else are they going to know what to charge you for?
Which means your internet history is going to SHOW UP ON YOUR MONTHLY INTERNET BILL. You know, the ones the parents see every month, in a household with teenagers.
So suppose you have a gay teen, living in a household where it isn’t safe to come out? You know, like the one I was in? The one my husband was in? They now would not be able to look up any information, use any resources, or contact any allies online. You know, the thing I did. The thing my husband had to do. That option is completely off the table if Net Neutrality goes down.
There are lesbians and bi women who are not penis-repulsed.
And there are some who are penis-repulsed, with or *without* trauma.
“I would never date a trans woman,” is transphobic because it is a blanket statement on all trans women, implying they are men.
“I have penis-repulsion, which limits my sexual compatability with some women,” is a better, less transphobic thing to say cuz it also can refer to incompatability w/ cis women who prefer using strap-ons and dildos, while validating womanhood regardless of genitals.
bisexuals can’t speak for lesbians. no lesbian prefers dildos to human contact, porn lied to you.
i am a homosexual so as a female my sexuality is male incompatible, which includes trans women. i will never date a trans woman bc i am a lesbian. i have no thoughts on dicks bc i am a lesbian and my partners won’t have male genitals.
“there are lesbian who are not penis-repulsed” is a lie making us doubt our orientation to give males sexual satisfaction and gender validation. don’t fall for it. do you know what heteronormativity is? it’s this. social pressure to give peen a chance. you don’t know you hate it if you don’t try it. but when you pressure lesbians into sex with males it’s different, it’s corrective rape.
drop the t drop the t drop the t
also lots of us have never had anything to do with a “hard cock” so how would we “miss” it?
This got really bad really fast. First of all, not all lesbians are repulsed by penises. Just because you are doesn’t mean everyone is. I know tons of lesbians that aren’t attracted to males but are not horribly disgusted by penis. There are lesbians who aren’t penis repulsed the same way there are gay men who aren’t vagina repulsed. Lack of attraction does not mean repulsed by. Your statement also excludes lesbians who are trans women, because they’re more likely to be attracted to transwomen with various genitalia. Also not all trans women have a penis so you’re doing that exact blanket statement by saying youd never be attracted to transwomen because you think all lesbians are penis repulsed. If that’s how you feel then fine but don’t act like you can tell people what other lesbians are attracted to and exclude trans women from lesbianism and conversations about gay women sexuality. Saying all lesbians are automatically penis repulsed is kinda immature tbh.
Obama’s cabinet secretaries flew commercial or took the train, with a few, rare exceptions that were approved at the highest level, but Trump’s aptly named Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price sure loves to charter private jets and bill them to the US government.
Last week, Price chartered five jets, including flights that took off and landed at the same time as commercial flights to and from the same airport.
Price was flying to industry summits where he was discussing his policies with industry executives, which his spokesman described as “meet[ing] face to face with the American people to hear their thoughts and concerns firsthand.”
Price has announced plans to cut “hundreds of billions” in spending on health and housing. He calls this making “tough choices.”
Guys, the glass is the memorial. The glass has the numbers engraved on it. The glass is like the Vietnam Veterans wall of names in DC. Imagine if someone took a sledgehammer to that to break off the names. That’s what someone just did for the second time this summer.
This is exactly what I was talking about the other day. It’s not even just the bizarre urge to sexualize children, it’s that they’re sexualized with the explicit purpose of then policing their hypothetical sexuality. Little girls have sexuality forced on them for the sole purpose of teaching them that sexuality is meant to be shameful.
The founder and CEO of Who Speaks For Me?, an organization which is dedicated to the issues of women who have experience trauma and imprisonment, has had her intellectual property stolen by a White broadcaster from Utah.
Taylar Nuevelle coined the phrase “trauma to prison pipeline” and dedicates her work to outreach and education regarding the issue of women’s imprisonment after trauma. Her work is being stolen by Kim Fischer, a White woman who works for ABC4 in Utah, who claims that she has no idea who Nuevelle is and that her boss created the term “trauma to prison pipeline” out of thin air.
Nuevelle has clarified that she has no problem with the issue being discussed but is rightfully upset that her work is being claimed by people who have not lived the experiences which lead to her research and who have no personal investment in the issue.
You can also contact the ABC4 General Manager to complain about this journalistic plagiarism.
Hey! This is *really* important. The erasure of Black Women is an ongoing problem and if we don’t nip this in the bud, it’s going to grow into a huge issue for this Black intellectual who is doing such important work.
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