179 points
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The wealthy are much better off though. If you looked at the wage increase of the top 1%, if has risen by $800,000 a year (https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/12/09/staggering-new-data-shows-income-top-1-has-grown-100-times-faster-bottom-50-1970) since 1970.

So capitalism is working exactly the way it is supposed to. Exploiting the middle and lower classes for the rich. This is exactly the progress they want.

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37 points

It’s a trickle-up economy.

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17 points

The working class gives the wealthy their blood and sweat and the wealthy turn it into urine and piss it back on their heads and then tell the working class the reason they smell like piss is because of immigrants.

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6 points
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It’s a sunshine economy: The wealth (moisture) slowly evaporates upwards.

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2 points

Sadly it does more than merely trickle up.
It’s more like a torrent going upwards.

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16 points

I would say in capitalism “middle class” however you define it is something that is not ideal to have. Rich will be employers who underpay poor people 50 cents a day or less (speaking in fully open market without state intervention on minimum wage and other basic needs) poor won’t have enough resources to fight for their right and will just pray to live to see better future or just die. Middle class is basically only ones who will have enough resources to fight but not have enough to be enslave other that’s why they are problem in state with pure open market and pure capitalism.

My definition of middle class is someone who has enough money to live somewhat peaceful life but don’t have enough money to call themselves rich.

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14 points

There’s an old definition of middle class that goes something like: has enough time to participate in politics.

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14 points

Much more than that. The richest men in the country doubled their net worth this year alone.

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10 points

It’s actually even worse than that. The doubling was just in the last few months. Essentially, election time. You can practically hear them salivating at an incoming Trump admin.

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1 point

Progress? … don’t you mean maintaining the status quo of human inequality for the past 10,000 years?

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6 points

The rich are getting progressively richer relative to everyone else, so I’d call it accurate.

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114 points

But somehow people are mad at queer folks and foreigners instead of the C-suite and their boards.

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34 points

Somehow? If it’s not obvious that there are several engineered distractions, then people aren’t paying attention.

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26 points

Easy: people get their “news” from places controlled by those C-suites and their boards.

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22 points

Last week at a get-together I actually heard a conservative family member say how the drones in the news are to distract from the important issues like immigration.

This is a standard boomer that keeps news on the living room TV all the damn time. It’s not even the disconnect from both reality and compassion that gets to me any more. It’s how widespread it is, and how the propaganda works even better in the real world than in fiction.

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79 points
*

But… I stopped going to Starbucks and quit buying Avocado toast? Can I buy a house yet?

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33 points

You’re posting here from a mobile or computer, right? Unless that PC is at the library, you’re paying an internet bill of some sort! /s

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13 points

Ugh, so lavish. I bet this guy also owns a water heater. No wonder he’s poor!

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2 points

Well there at a library right? To use a library computer you need a library card, and we can’t expect poor people to be responsible with a library card. Obviously the commenter is irresponsible with their money paying late fees. Maybe if they stopped buying a new phone every year, or wasting money on a library they could buy a house. However keep buying the new phone we make because the shareholders demand higher returns each year. They need to do as we say and give us their money but it’s their fault for any consequences they face for us forcing them to give us their money. A perfect capitalist system. /S

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61 points

Important to note here the important difference between “mean”, aka the average, and “median”, the middle number in a set. Assuming Krueger intentionally used “median”, the situation is actually worse than people realize.

The average can be affected by large outliers - like billionaires. IF the “average” American makes $50,000 a year, the median could actually be more like $30,000 (totally made up numbers, as an example).

In other words, the median is the more “accurate” number to use in these comparisons because the income of the extremely wealthy has less of an impact on the result.

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29 points

You’re right about everything, but the post explicitly talks about median for everything but healthcare, so it should be fairly accurate already

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11 points

True, yeah. I just wanted to be clear about it in case people confused median and mean. I work with high school students who struggle with the difference every year. So, thought maybe some adults who’d been out of school for a while might also not realize the difference.

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1 point

When talking about stuff like this, large diverse populations and a near continuous variables, a single measure of central tendency is not very informative whichever you choose. They necessarily misrepresent most of the population, quite a lot, just for the sake of what . . . brevity?

That seems lazy to me and makes me think the author doesn’t really care too much about the people they’re trying to describe.

At least pick a few points across the distribution, and a give a bit more time to understand or explain maybe like 5 or 6 “representatives” out of of however many millions are being summarised by the one statistic.

If the author can’t afford to draw a full fledged histogram - at least do a box-and-whiskers.

Maybe that twitter thing is just fucking awful.

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40 points

But the 1% got 100 x wealthier! Ain’t that great?

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21 points

That means the economy is booming. Fuck yeah! 😎

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