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How America's Top 20 Percent Perpetuates Inequality

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Re: How America's Top 20 Percent Perpetuates Inequality

#91

Post by mcbruiser3 »

harryh wrote: post #84
rarec wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Families making $200,000-300,000 lives paycheck to paycheck? Sorry, but just what in the everliving fuck are they doing with that money? Burning it for warmth?

FWIW here is my (rough) monthly spending for a family of 3 (husband, wife, 2yo son) in NYC. My income is in that range, but I've always been a saver (and I've had more than my fair share of lucky breaks) so I do not live paycheck to paycheck. https://gist.github.com/harryh/970743e082bc7c9857ac9149997cc... (I'm going to delete this gist later. Maybe silly but I don't feel 100% comfortable posting this data on the inte…

don't forget massive taxes for anyone in that tax bracket. so yeah, 200-300 can go VERY quickly in places like NY or SF. It's not rich at all and lumping everyone under one scale across the entire country makes ZERO sense.

Re: How America's Top 20 Percent Perpetuates Inequality

#92

Post by mcbruiser3 »

harryh wrote: post #81
flexie wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's see. Taxes take around 1/3 of it. Rent takes 1/6. Schools, kindergarten, nannies takes 1/6. That leaves around 1/3 for food, clothes, insurance, phones, cable, heat etc. for a NYC family. A family I know in the East Village says they spend $12,000 per month. They live 2 parents, 2 kids in a 500 square feet rent stabilized apartment (a walkup). The 140 square feet living room has a kitchenette in the corner. I b…

12k - 2.2k (rent) leaves 9.8k. You can get a great full time nanny for 3k a month. That leave 6.8k. Where is the rest of their money going? 6.8k for food/bills/clothing/etc is HUGE.

2.2K for rent, are you insane? try 3x that.

Re: How America's Top 20 Percent Perpetuates Inequality

#93

Post by mcbruiser3 »

JSONwebtoken wrote: post #72
jmaygarden wrote: post #27

If you define a class by the top 20% of income earners, then you can never have a "classless" society. You'll always have a mathematically top 20%. That's an entirely different idea than say nobles versus peasants or racial apartheid. I liked much of what the author had to say, but claiming that America has a more rigid class structure than a nation with a hereditary monarchy seems like a stretch.

Why should I not deserve to be in the top 20%? I worked hard, studied diligently, and obtained rare and pragmatic skills so that I may live my life to a greater degree of contentedness than 80% of people. Why should I not I want my kids to grow up with the privileges of the top 20%? I worked the hours of 3 standard people over my lifetime to accumulate the wealth I want to pass onto my offspring to secure my genetic…

> and obtained rare and pragmatic skills

mind defining exactly what those skills are? seems like maybe the market does not value them as much as you do, which in any merit-based or free market system is 100% OK

Re: How America's Top 20 Percent Perpetuates Inequality

#94

Post by rhino369 »

gizmo wrote: post #4

It's not a bad article, but it makes the same observations about opportunity we've read about a thousand times before. The article mostly describes the status quo, but doesn't say much about the root causes or about possible solutions. Maybe the full book is better, but I doubt it. The author doesn't strike me as a person with deep insights. One sentence from the article really sticks out: "The American ideal of a cl…

Inequality and lack of opportunity are not the same thing. Leaving aside the question of whether America actually has opportunity, if it did, some would still fail miserably.

Re: How America's Top 20 Percent Perpetuates Inequality

#95

Post by harryh »

mcbruiser3 wrote: post #92
harryh wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

12k - 2.2k (rent) leaves 9.8k. You can get a great full time nanny for 3k a month. That leave 6.8k. Where is the rest of their money going? 6.8k for food/bills/clothing/etc is HUGE.

2.2K for rent, are you insane? try 3x that.

I took the 2.2k from flexie's comment which does sound right for a studio apartment in the east village. 3x that would be 6.6k which would get you a very nice two bedroom. Maybe a 3 bedroom.

My point was that if they weren't spending so much on food/clothing/bills/etc than they would be capable of affording a perfectly nice apartment.

Re: How America's Top 20 Percent Perpetuates Inequality

#96

Post by harryh »

mcbruiser3 wrote: post #91
harryh wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW here is my (rough) monthly spending for a family of 3 (husband, wife, 2yo son) in NYC. My income is in that range, but I've always been a saver (and I've had more than my fair share of lucky breaks) so I do not live paycheck to paycheck. https://gist.github.com/harryh/970743e082bc7c9857ac9149997cc... (I'm going to delete this gist later. Maybe silly but I don't feel 100% comfortable posting this data on the inte…

don't forget massive taxes for anyone in that tax bracket. so yeah, 200-300 can go VERY quickly in places like NY or SF. It's not rich at all and lumping everyone under one scale across the entire country makes ZERO sense.

I disagree that lumping everyone in the entire country into the same tax brackets makes zero sense. Living in NY or SF is a luxury good. Just because I choose to partake in a luxury good doesn't mean that I should get a break on my taxes.

Re: How America's Top 20 Percent Perpetuates Inequality

#97

Post by [deleted] »

mac01021 wrote: post #63
jamescostian wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> efforts to redistribute wealth mostly destroy it Not sure what you mean by this. Isn't the goal here to destroy a lot of wealth? Wealth is a relative term - someone with $1B is not rich because 1B is an inherently big number, they are rich because $1B is orders of magnitudes greater than what most people will make in their lifetimes. Making people all have about the same in the bank other would destroy wealth.

While relative wealth definitely has value (mostly because it enables you to afford the labor of others), wealth itself is not fundamentally relative. - Almost everyone today (in western, developed nations) has more purchasing power than almost everyone did 100 years ago. Doesn't that mean that everyone is more wealthy? - As new technology is developed, Alice's wealth depends less on Bob's poverty, because she can re…

[deleted]

Re: How America's Top 20 Percent Perpetuates Inequality

#98

Post by [deleted] »

weberc2 wrote: post #51
jamescostian wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> efforts to redistribute wealth mostly destroy it Not sure what you mean by this. Isn't the goal here to destroy a lot of wealth? Wealth is a relative term - someone with $1B is not rich because 1B is an inherently big number, they are rich because $1B is orders of magnitudes greater than what most people will make in their lifetimes. Making people all have about the same in the bank other would destroy wealth.

He means that by trying to redistribute wealth, we end up with less overall to go around. Something like a smaller GDP, though I don't know if that's the metric the parent has in mind. I also don't know how true this argument is; I'm just the messenger.

[deleted]

Re: How America's Top 20 Percent Perpetuates Inequality

#99

Post by droithomme »

maxerickson wrote: post #78
droithomme wrote: post #26

> the top fifth of the income distribution—broadly, households with incomes above the $112,000 These are not rich oligarch industrialists at all. If your total household income, husband and wife together, is $112k, you're middle class in most of the country. In some areas like the Bay and Manhattan, you're lower middle class. You generally don't have access to subsidized rent and you don't get subsidies for health ca…

Have you properly accounted for households vs people in your final calculation and comparison?

Yes I did and that was clear in my post. Much more interesting is "a third of the income rise went to the top 1 percent alone". Don't you think that is relevant? These folks received vastly more earned income raise than the rate of inflation. Should we consider unearned income as well?

Re: How America's Top 20 Percent Perpetuates Inequality

#100

Post by jacquesm »

crusso wrote: post #90
jacquesm wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would beg you to try to understand that the whole 'Conservative/Democrat' divide as far as I can see from some distance is utterly ridiculous in the eyes of a good chunk of the world. If gays/guns/racism and abortion were not hot political buttons in the United States the Republicans would likely never win an election. Libertarians have to all practical intents and purposes no representation in congress that is abl…

utterly ridiculous in the eyes of a good chunk of the world I normally find that people outside of the US are not so nearly informed as they think they are about the driving dynamics of US politics, especially when it comes to things like "why do people vote the way they do". For the most part, people outside of the US start with their non-American cultural biases which makes them extraordinarily susceptible to what…

> I normally find that people outside of the US are not so nearly informed as they think they are about the driving dynamics of US politics, especially when it comes to things like "why do people vote the way they do".

I'd be more than happy to bet that they are typically a lot better informed than you'd guess and that the reverse (Americans being informed about the dynamics of politics in other countries) would be dramatic.

Keep in mind that whatever the US does the world is affected so American presidential and mid-term elections are followed the world over by people who have absolutely no way to influence (well, that's the theory at least) but who will very much be on the receiving side of whatever the outcome is.

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