This cartoon from The Seattle Times illustrates how America’s economic pizza is actually sliced per capita, highlighting the massive disparity between the Top 1%, the merely wealthy, the upper middle class, and the lower 50%.
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it HAS destroyED America
Why are they banned?
Hyper Rich muthafuckas down voting. Happy for ya.
Conservatives insist this is the only way. As long as conservatives exist, the normal people will never be permitted to regulate capitalism or charge billionaires with crimes.
We must delete the foot-soldiers to defeat the billionaire class.
TRUTH NUKE
I take issue with the lower class being illustrated as overweight
He looks normal sized
Correct: Americans are normally obese.
But US lower class is overweight. Artist was too kind, should add another 40 lb
Very funny to see this at the top of my feed when the poster is banned.
Ive read the Seattle Times for decades.Horsey has gotten better. He’s had some really bad takes in the past.
The people with crumbs STILL doing nothing despite having nothing to lose will allow America to be destroyed.
will allowhave allowedThat’s right, and none of the blame goes to the people who decide where the money goes and how it is spent.
You’ve spent half a century watching these people and knowing exactly what they will do. Sure, I guess if it makes you feel better, you can “blame them” the same way I’d blame a bunch of 12-year-olds playing with fireworks in a warehouse full of gasoline. But at a certain point, the people who knew exactly what was going to happen and kept allowing them to obtain matches are the ones who need to be held responsible and deserve whatever they get if not.
Can we identify those people? If not, there is no point in talking about holding them responsible. You risk burning energy with no result.
Hey look, I found one of those people!
Here’s looking at you, kid.
Capitalism is just feudalism with more math.
Trickle down feudalism yeah.
I just want a new season of Reacher where he goes undercover as a gay prostitute.
We need a The Expanse crossover with that Wesley guy. Watch me not have remembered his name right - the one who can walk in heels 😂
I cannot stop seeing this idea overlaid on every thing that I see or do or hear about. Every action is filtered through the lens of it being extractive and manipulative.
I feel extremely stressed because I see the bars of the cage and no one else around me wants to acknowledge them.
I do not like this. I would like it to stop please.
Reject consumerism, make things instead.
We have friends coming over, instead of ordering food from a mega corporation I am going to make pizza and potato wedges.
Where do the ingredients come from? Are you growing your own grain and milling it into your own flower? Do you have your own cows or goats to make your own cheese? Did you build your own oven? Fired with wood you cut down yourself?
Not buying the very last link in the chain doesn’t matter. It only makes you feel like you’re doing something.
You’d be more effective buying the pizza from a locally owned place.
You’re right, guess I’m just gonna give everyone hand jobs or are you going to tell me I need to build my own sex robot from scratch?
Giving someone a hand job, is doing it from scratch.
What’s the sex bot for?No, because I was planning on using a water based lubricant
Don’t let perfect be in the way of better.
I’m not.
I’m asking people to not treat better as the solution; They way they do with rent controls and school loan forgiveness. Buying locally is fine to do, for you in your life, but it has no effect on the larger problem. Too many people pretend it does.
When making something nice I would buy the ingredients from local independents where I can. I can almost see the farm I get cheese and garlic from on a clear day but there is a hill in the way.
Its also risky though, they sell fucking massive slabs of halloumi style cheese. Its a lot of money but also a lot of cheese.
Can’t do it for every ingredient with every recipe, but I am fed up of the just give up attitude I often hear simply because something isn’t 100% perfect in every way and using that as a reason to not even try. So I do what I reasonably can.
Also, ingredients are cheaper than a fast food place. Better quality too.
Like I said, it makes you feel better, that’s fine.
But don’t pretend it’s fighting the fight. Though if you don’t pretend, it may not make you feel better.Other than refusing to consume, what do you suggest doing that will achieve more and is easy for most people to do?
Organizing, protesting, voting and voter registration drives, marketing and coms. Even starting a union owned business, or something similar. Those kinds of things make a difference. Individual purchasing decisions don’t.
Many of those are much more difficult for most people to do, are of questionable benefit or they already do.
Refuse to give them money, it is the only language they understand.
Even starting a union owned business
Hey everyone. You want to change society? Just start a business. Easy peesy! Don’t make small changes in your life, make massive financial overhauls.
Not buying the very last link in the chain doesn’t matter.
It absolutely does. You’re cutting out the part with highest markup. Skipping an entire manufacturing process.
You can get the ingredients for a fraction of the cost compared to a finished product.
Maybe. But price wasn’t the argument being made. That’s a non sequitur.
I’m sorry where do you think profit comes from? It’s not grown on profit trees, it’s baked into the price. Higher markup, higher price, higher profit.
Non sequitur my ass
The idea is capitalism. As in, buying from large corporations. Whatever the price or profit, the topic was about who and where you’re buying from, not for how much.
“You want to change society. Yet you participate in it. Curious…”
I buy the majority of my groceries from a local farmers market. Things I can’t get there I buy from Wal Mart. I buy pizza from a local mom and pop shop, where they live above their restaurant. I do everything I can to make buying from mega corps a last choice decision. My partner and I will be starting our garden next year and growing a lot of our own vegetables. We’ll be raising pork pigs so we don’t have to buy factory pork. There’s so many little things you can do as an individual to choke off the billionaires.
But if you want to keep bending over like you seem to be acting, more power to you. Just don’t blame others for society collapsing.
Take back power anyway you can.
Tenant unions, worker unions, worker cooperatives, community land trusts, tool libraries.
Work towards owning your business and your home and your community WITH your coworkers and your neighborhood and your community.
We can overcome the tyrants if we work together. Federal elections are only one small piece of the puzzle and no one will save us but ourselves.
I do not like this. I would like it to stop please.
Then do something. Why does someone else need to rattle the cage for you to break free? Why are Americans, who masturbate to the 2nd amendment, so afraid of taking back their country? There’s 350 million of you, trillions of guns, and merely a few hundred of them. Start turning the streets red.
Because those who see what you see are in areas where they would be alone, considered a lone madman. Rest assured, people are gathering and talking.
“All experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustimed.”
Yes and the middle class who think they have money keep voting for this.
In my experience the difference in voting is really between the educated class and the uneducated class. Educated people are tend to be left wing. Uneducated people tend to be right wing. I’m pretty sure the data bears that out.
This is well studied in “capital and ideology”. Over the last 40 years in usa, euorpe educated tend to vote left, wealth votes right, which is a switch from how it used to be.
However it seems like at least in usa there isn’t that much difference between left and right when it comes to taxing wealth. Hence the steep rise in inequity since regan
During the Reagan era, lobbyists were allowed back into Washington, and officials on both sides (or non-partisan) were quickly captured.
Paul Krugman has a great comment about it. Paraphrased, politicians tend to listen more to well-dressed, well spoken lobbyists than they do nerdy economists.
He cut taxes for the wealthy by enormous amounts
I assume by he you mean Reagan and not Krugman.
Krugman is a dyed-in-the-wool Keynesian.
Yeah,regan
It’s hurt America more then we’ll ever know. Trickle down economics isn’t it when your top 1% is super greedy
In elementary school history, I learned supply-side (trickle down) economics came from Taft, and they failed spectacularly then. I think the only reason it comes back is because it gets resurrected by the owner class, as a justification to break the 3conomy in their favor.
Seriously, the only reason to not have a dictatorship it to make societies more public serving. We really need to start recognizing government capture efforts and capitulation are nothing short ot treason, aiding and giving comfort to enemies of the people and state.
Perhaps the survivors will figure it out.
Most of the world has been damaged by it. The us is putting no taxes on wealth, many other country followed suit
I like “this is not a joke”. I really appreciate anybody trying to put into perspective how insanely unequal things are by using real numbers where possible.
The problem is that things are so unequal that it’s just about impossible to illustrate. For example, the “Top 1%” label is perfectly accurate, but doesn’t illustrate both how small and also how large the top 1% is. 1% is still 3.5 million people, which is large. It isn’t just Bezos and Musk. It’s also guys who own car dealerships.
OTOH, it’s also small. There are 4 people in that illustration, and the “top 1%” should really be 1 guy in a room of 100.
It’s also hard to remember that the “lower 50%” isn’t just “the poors”. It’s literally half the people in the country. It’s not 1 guy at a table with 4 people who is only getting crumbs, it’s half the people at that table getting crumbs. I would bet that at least 80% of Americans think they’re richer than the bottom 50%.
That’s also without trying to deal with the issue of “1 billion dollars”, which just isn’t a number that people have much ability to picture. 1 billion feels like it’s similar to “1 million”, but it’s not.
It also doesn’t do anything to show the scale in the top 1%. There is more difference from the top and bottom of that single percentage than there is in the entire pizza and crumbs.
Yeah. The difference between the net worth of Elon Musk and of Gary Tharaldson is basically Elon Musk’s entire net worth. And, Gary Tharaldson is a billionaire and the richest person in North Dakota.
The “merely multi-millionaires” are still a problem. Their wealth corrupts the democratic system. But, it isn’t as dangerous as Musk’s or Bezos’s power.
As a top 1 percenter, I feel seriously offended by the suggestion that I’d sit anywhere close peasants, let alone at the same table.
/s obviously, because I wouldn’t be on lemmy if I was anywhere close the top 1%
Actually the top 1% in the US is ~600k per year. It’s a lot of cash but not entirely outside the realm of possibility for some extremely senior software architect/manager combo at some VC startup, which is also within the lemmy target audience.
~600k per year
Why are you using income? It’s wealth that matters and that’s a ~$16M cutoff.
To reach that you’d need to be earning ~600k per year for 2-3 decades, to invest the majority of it, and to get absurd stock returns on top of that.
Which is still, just insane to think about.
Like holy crap I can hardly imagine seeing 4 dollar-digits of liquidity in my account. In my lifetime, and I think I work hard in a role in society like anybody else.
Something like that would require the most unlikely of windfalls. To think there’s people out there, somewhat “commonly”, going “Hmmm yerrs, let’s put $20k into these stonks. Indeeed…”
…and then they reap returns, and go on and start businesses with “risk” (but not much, proportionally) and then publish books about “quitting the rat race and following your dreams.”
And they might be a few zip codes away from me. It’s nuts to me. Incomprehensible, really. Just…damn.
I don’t wanna be rich, that sounds awful. I just wanna stop forever bracing against the next inevitable-but-untimeable calamity that threatens to throw us all out on the street.
Like holy crap I can hardly imagine seeing 4 dollar-digits of liquidity in my account. In my lifetime, and I think I work hard in a role in society like anybody else.
What do you mean by 4 dollar-digits of liquidity? Like $1000? That feels a bit low unless you’re in a country where the yearly income is 1-2K.
…and then they reap returns, and go on and start businesses with “risk” (but not much, proportionally) and then publish books about “quitting the rat race and following your dreams.”
It’s even lower than you’d think. The cutoff for basically never needing to work again in your life is around $1M so top 18% of the US. At that point as long as you’re willing to live off 30-40K and invest in index funds statistically you’ll only ever get wealthier. (at least historically for the last several decades)
Yeah but they would never admit to being a 1%er here if they know what’s good for them.
And besides, nowadays the real oligarchs are 0.1%ers or even 0.01%ers.
1%ers at this point are literally just the higher end of the upper-middle class…
Yeah, in terms of the wealth distribution the 1% are closer to the 99% than to the 0.1%. It’s borderline incomprehensible how wealthy the 0.1% is compared to the rest of us.
I gather this is roughly true wrt income (other estimates place this closer to 750k per household), but not wealth (which i believe is ~14 million to be in the top 1% in the US). Note that this income estimate does not include unrealized capital gains and that a 10% return on a 14 million portfolio is 1.4 million per year in passive income.
Most people in the lower 50% believe that anyone that has any money, especially $1M+ is part of the 1%. The complete lack of understanding of income and wealth escalation in the last couple decades is what keeps many people voting against their own interests. Many $1M-aires believe that with the right government policy and lower taxes, always lower taxes, they would quickly become part of the 1% and be “just like Musk”. They believe that the system that aides and abets billionaires would equally benefit themselves and cannot see that they are part of the riff raff, the same as a homeless person, in the eyes of the billionaire class.
