- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
19% would be the complacent middle class 🤮
You must log in or # to comment.
Complacent middle class here. I would gladly get taxed more if that meant improved health and education and welfare. Not super keen on keeping up the subsidies of oil and gas, and of spending 5% of GDP on American weapons. And yes, we need a wealth tax.
What we need is class solidarity. It isnt your fault rich jack asses are hoarding wealth, the middle class is the intermediary of power and they keep you happy for a reason.
The problem is the velocity of money; by raising taxes on the wealthy and giving it to the poor they increase inflation and thereby interest rates; which interferes with the housing bubble, which they say is boomers nest eggs, and is thereby important to maintain and grow.
Its a problem with a bubble economy built on cheap debt and ever lower interest rates, you lose the ability to direct your own money supply. Look at owner-occupied housing’s contribution to annual GDP growth, this bubble was fueling most of our economic growth.
Let’s tax wealth to fund quality universal basic services first. Healthcare, childcare, education, transportation, social security, elder care. Social non-market housing, public utilities for electricity, water, telecommunications/Internet. None of these are increasing inflation, because they are not part of the market.
The idea of “nest egg” is only important as a privatised form of elder care. I couldn’t care less about the value of my house if I had a publicly guaranteed quality of life as a pensioner. I wouldn’t even care to own a house if I had strong renter protections in non-market housing (basically if renting was not equivalent to someone holding power over my life decisions).
And of course, of course, the capture of capital in unproductive real estate is beyond stupid. Instead of feeding a real estate bubble, it should be ingested in productive sectors of the economy, like building up renewables and the green transition.
A social democracy is just common sense.
They can’t bring their money with them to hell
We should be dragging them from their homes and blessing them with the prayers of Saint Luigi. Nobody collects this much wealth in a fair or just system, one that also impoverishes workers so much it’s causing a silent genocide of the working class.
They enacted strict gun laws but expanded which law enforcement can carry firearms for this purpose.
They don’t care about any mass shooting victim. They claim to remember the 14 of polytechnique just to make it look like it is.
In reality gun laws in Canada were always about suppressing labor uprisings, sectarian uprisings (like the Irish in the 19th century, the Quebec bloc in the 1970s, and the Oka crisis in the 90s). Americans like to talk about taking up arms against the government but Canadians actually have.
But on a more realistic note I wish it was that easy to just get a mob of people to drag them out. But unlike times past when it was possible, they live so far apart from us and travel via helicopter and airplane as much as possible specifically to be as hard as possible to corner.
The system is progressing as expected. The US is further ahead on the timeline. If they collapse first, that may trigger a systemic reset here, before we’ve reached their stage of fascist dystopia. Get your demands ready and demand more than people did during the 1930s. Much more.
I believe the wealth inequality has clearly being caused by the Fed, cheap money, bailouts, which debased salaries and gatekept basic necessities like shelter. Occupy Wallstreet had it right, and all the other things are symptoms of currency debasement.
Imagine playing a game of monopoly where someone can just create new currency, would you sell your house for cash, or would you horde them and borrow as much as possible? Thats whats been playing out in the economy, and how an unprofitable company like Tesla can be a 1.5 trillion dollar company, tech oligarchs and AI bubbles are built on moral hazard.
That’s a common idea. It does not explain well what’s been happening though. The Fed has definitey done things to exacerbate inequality and accelerate it but the system creates inequality without the need for Fed intervention. The post-Depression to 80s period was out of the ordinary for inequality and for prosperity of the working class. Look at some wealth share graphs that span into the 19th century or earlier and you’ll see that the system creates these effects even on gold standards with no Fed.
This is what the US looks like:
Here’s one going further back in some countries:
And here’s a more detailed picture in the US and Canada going to the 1920. Note that given the first one, i equality didn’t explode in the 7-year period between the creatiom of the Fed and 1920. It was far high way earlier:
I believe this fits the rest of the story much much more neatly:
And I think the alternative explanations proposed by various economists that don’t lean on labour power are a distraction that enables continued inequality growth, while we chase geese. Oh let’s push that lever, it’s going to help, a decade passes, inequality worse. Oh let’s push that other lever. A decade passes, inequality grows. Oh let’s push that other … Meanwhile the only solution that has ever worked in creating prosperity for the many is staring us in the face.
BTW I did not downvote but I suspect a lot of people here know these things and just don’t have the energy to explain their view so they just hit the button. I’ve been there. I also used to believe the monetarist explanation.
Complacent middle class, or rapidly shrinking and struggling to not fall further middle class?
Yeah, the issue here isn’t the middle class, it’s as usual, the owner class that’s the problem
The middle class is their tool. They are incented to perpetuate this bullshit.
The middle class is like the personal carbon footprint - it’s a fabrication created by the ultra-wealthy to divert responsibility from themselves. There is only the owner class and the working class.
Except the middle class actually does own most stuff, and consumes the most. The ultra-rich are rich, but there’s just so few of them.
In Pikettys Capital in the 21st Century the breakdown for US wealth distribution was something like: top 1% has ~30%, top 10% has ~50% (that includes the 1%), the next top 40% have almost all the rest so like ~49%, and the bottom 50% of the economic ladder has that 1%. That was a decade ago, and its gotten worse since then
Here’s the fed’s up-to-date numbers. So yeah, that’s a decent summary.
Doesn’t it show exactly what I said? Lemmy has a whole lot of top 10% people - I wouldn’t be shocked if it’s the majority. Nobody here is thinking of them when they say “ruling class”. The top 1% also contains a lot of kinda-rich people, who maybe own a couple of car dealerships, but could never afford a jet. If they do something in IT instead of cars, they again might be on Lemmy.
The total is about 170 trillion. For reference, Forbes billionaires, including the non-American ones, add up to 16.1 trillion.
Agreed - the data does show that the middle 40% own ~50%, and that since this bloc consists of more people they therefore have more consumption (probably…maybe? that seems like something that might need more research to quantify, and probably has easily skewable results in either direction). These facts should not absolve the wealthiest of their detrimental hoarding, but us living in the ‘core’ are the 1% of the world so yea I also agree that it does not absolve us of our extreme consumption relative to most people of the world. I am reminded of a comic(or a tweet or something) where some guy is complaining about the traffic and someone else responds with ‘brother YOU are the traffic’.
Land hoarding is the problem.
According to the World Inequality Index, between 1999 and 2024, the top-1% in Canada grew their wealth from 26% to 29%.
In the same period in other countries, the top-1% changed their wealth:
- in Australia and New Zealand, more or less unchanged at around 23%
- in Europe, more or less unchanged around 25%
- in the USA, grew from 31% to 35%
- in China, grew from 19% to 30%
- in Russia, grew from 40% to 49%
- in Latin America, unchanged at around 36%
- Oceania, grew from 24% to 27%
- Sub-Saharan Africa, shrank from 38% to 34%
Worldwide, the top-1% share was stable at around 37%.
In the same period 1999-2024, the wealth of the bottom-50% in Canada slightly shrank from 15% to 14%. In other countries:
- in Australia and New Zealand, more or less unchanged at around 5%
- in Europe, more or less unchanged around 3%
- in the USA, grew from 0.6% to 1%
- in China, shrank from 14% to 6%
- in Russia, shrank from almost 7% to less than 3%
- in Latin America, unchanged at 2%
- Oceania, decreased from 3% to 2%
- Sub-Saharan Africa, slightly increased from below 2% to 2.1%
Worldwide, the bottom-50% grew their share of the total wealth slightly from 7% to 8%.
Source for the top 1%, here for the bottom 50%.
You can play around in the linked diagrams for other countries and regions.
Geez China. So much for lifting a billion out of poverty.
I mean, conditions have gotten better, but clearly there’s gaps.
yah china lie about its numbers a lot, im beginning to wonder about its population count as well
There is ample evidence that inequality is on the rise in China.
19% would be the complacent middle class 🤮
Hot tip - that’s most Lemmy users. I’m guessing there’s also people in the top 0.9 kicking around.
Edit: Aaaand yup, there’s cope in the comments.
Socialists are mostly the champaign kind now, although that doesn’t make them wrong, neccesarily. Honestly, I have trouble picturing the old days when the kind of people I live around would have voted left.
What qualifies as “middle class” these days? Roughly 24% of Ontario public sector workers are on the sunshine list. While this doesn’t give us a ton of insight into the private sector, this would still suggest that if we say the 19% is the middle class that to be middle class you have to be making more than $100k/year…
Not trying to argue, just trying to understand where the goalposts are.
The problem with the sunshine list is that it never changes with inflation. It’s basically become a tool for morons to hate on the “overpaid” public sector instead of calling out their own underpaying employers.
Oh, absolutely. I’m just trying to use it as a marker to try to figure out where the goal posts should be for what we are calling “middle class.”
I have a friend who works in central Ontario for a fortune 500 and they take home ~80k/year, and I’ve considered them and their family middle class for a while, but they also were telling me that they’re overextended and struggling to keep up on interest payments…while also being denied a consolidation loan. So maybe they are not really middle class…?
Ever moving, right? People in the top 0.9% all call themselves middle class, maybe “upper middle class” to shut down any contradictions. That’s because there’s a stigma to being a rich fatcat. For more complicated reasons, politicians like to sweep up most of the bottom 50% that owns basically nothing, as well. The only people who consistently get stuck into the lower class are basically people so powerless they might as well be a thing.
That being said, do be careful that income distribution is quite different from wealth distribution.
Lemmy tends rich and educated. So it would be my guess more than 50% are in the top 19%. Probably by both, since it seems to tend older than Reddit did. What you call that is another matter entirely; wealth and income levels all flow together smoothly in the raw data.
People really don’t like feeling responsible for the things we’re all responsible
No raindrop feels responsible for the flood.
No inheritance tax will do that.
