The moment enough of us decide this has to change, it will.
Relink productivity and wages! 90% tax rate on all the cash you earn in a year after the first $10M Close corporate tax loopholes
We can solve this, we just need to decide.
Maybe a general strike is out and we should just start a quiet friday strike, and just start extending that back through the week. Productivity just keeps falling until the wealthy decide they don’t want to suffer with the rest of us and take the fucking haircut.
After the first $1MM. Ten million dollars in a single year would set me, and likely just about anyone else, up comfortably for life twice over.
Don’t tie it to a number.
Imagine if they did this back in the 60s, but using numbers.
“1 million??? Thats way too high! If I made 1 million in a year my grandkids could retire from that year. Better make it $100,000. 90% tax after $100,000.”
Today because of inflation I would say someone making $100,000 a year is comfortable in luxery, but still earning their pay.
Tie it to a percentage of the curve of what average americans make, and I think you deflate most of inflation. Because if their price for a good is $3.00, and it costs $1.25 worth of wages to make, they could raise that $3 to $5, and only give the workers $0.25 raise, which means now that item costs $1.50 to make, but sells for $5 instead of $3. This rewards ceo’s to raise prices disproportionally. Tie it to the curve, and if he raises the price to $5, now he has to pay workers $3.25. Suddenly it’s not the ceos getting rewarded for doing that. Suddenly random price hikes to please shareholders are GONE. Which means if you can’t stay profitable in a fair market, you cease to exist. You can’t just pull a short term band-aid fix to pop a stock price, and ignore consequences. Because now those consequences actually kill your company.
What we would be left with are CEOs who actually RUN their company, rather than just load the numbers. We’d have better products, better wages, and a better life.
But if we tie it to a number, our grandkids will be right back to where we are.
I like the cut of your jib.
Annual CoL adjustments. Done.
Judge fudge the CoL numbers. Easy.
You haven’t lost your mind at all. It is squarely atop your shoulders.
Fucking exactly!!
If I wasn’t bald I’d have been pulling my hair out of my head when I was seeing all this “fight for fifteen” when trying to argue for a minimum wage increase.
Ok we got that now, something like 10 years later so what is $15/hr now? It’s a joke…
Take your current yearly salary, multiply it by however many years you expect to live after retirement + let’s say… 10% on top for inflation, + another 10 for medical expenses. Is that number above, or below, $10M? Retirement is fucking expensive and only going up in cost.
I’ve modeled it a bit more precisely considering actual expenditures as well as social security income, projected inflation and investment returns, etc. $5MM in my pocket right now should set me up just fine.
You keeping it in a mattress or what?
Hahahaha
Oh wait you think I actually have money? Let me laugh harder
But 90% tax means that $10MM becomes $1MM.
Progressive tax brackets. This hypothetical tax is only on money earned over 10M/1M.
I was being as gracious as I could be to illustrate we could fix this if the wealthy in this country were not being SUCH FUCKERS.
You appear to have missed the word “after.”
Not in our current tax bracket world.
Why does anyone need more than $10 million?
Why does anyone need over $9 million?
They don’t. But at some point, you throw the rich people a bone and tell them they can be rich, just not obscenely rich. I think $10 million is a good cap.
Typically revolutions only occur when a significant number of elites defect from the current regime.
Large numbers of dissatisfied people need a Schelling Point to rally around and coordinate effectively.
Best bet for revolution right now seems to be for more elite colleges to start withholding degrees over this Israeli thing.
50% would be fine but it should apply to all income including investments, gifts, etc. maybe let inheritance be amoritized over 10 years or something.
100% death tax on all assets over $1m excluding a single house. That my final offer.
There’s no justification for a birth lottery that awards democracy-warping levels of wealth to whoever had the evilest parents.
I like this idea but it should be something like 5 to 40 million. Somewhere in there.
What unlinked productivity and wages in the first place?
If you answer this, you’ll probably win a prestigious prize in economics.
No I won’t.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
— Upton Sinclair
Alright. You make good points. I agree with you. However there is a problem. Alex jones is a nutjob with no redeeming qualities. He has a base, and called on his base to blockade his house to prevent law officials from repossesing his house, his infowars platform, and anything else worth any monetary currency. Notice, I didn’t say “value” because let’s face it. It’s alex jones. What value could there possibly be with him.
Trump did the same thing with J6. Gets his base in a frenzy to do his dirty work, and uses them to attempt a coup. I fully believe the vast majority actually there on J6 didn’t even know thats what it was. They didn’t know where were attempting a coup. But they were fully prepared to follow daddy oranges commands.
My point is, yes we CAN take this country back from the rich. But we will have to fight a second civil war to do so. This civil war won’t be about racism. It will be 100% a class war. And the rich will 100% throw every brainwashed moron they can find into the front lines to die to protect their wealth.
So if we want to take the country back, we’re going to need to fight. Quite frankly, I’m looking forward to it. Either I die and stop suffering in poverty, or I get a better life. When you push the public down to the point that they have nothing to lose, don’t be surprised when death doesn’t scare them.
If you’re a Russian trying to fuck with us, fuck off.
Assuming you’re a legit US citizen: try talking to your fucking neighbors before you start to talk about shooting.
Everyone on the Internet seems like they’re arguing with strawmen.
Violence only in response to violence. We want to solve this without bloodshed. Only those who wish our country harm wish for a civil war.
All rights are won through violence
All rights are won through diversity of tactics. Some of the most effective campaigns for gay rights came from our moms just talking to people about what it was like to have gay kids. Add that to violently forcing the state to stop being so brutal in their oppression of us and years-decades of working with and within the medical and legal establishments to hamper homophobia in those realms.
You get similar shit elsewhere. Eco-terrorism has had less explicit gains than environmental lawyers, but without the militants the assailants to our planet just do it mid lawsuit and pay the fine later. The black American civil rights movement had pacifists and militants.
Force alone doesn’t create a movement, just a war if you’re lucky enough to get the people to support you.
This rhetoric makes me sad.
History is filled to the brim with rights won NOT through violence. What you say is objectively wrong, though it caters to anyone suspectible to populism.
What rights are you talking about taking there? Shooting rich people for the “right” to their money?
What the fuck? These days it’s like nobody understands the Golden Rule anymore. Just hate, kill, and insult whatever offends you. Surely that will lead to good results?
The fuck do you think the US revolution was? You think the starving peasants gave a fuck about taxation without representation? Or tea in a fucking harbor?
All rights are won through violence.
Right so again, which rights are you lacking here?
Basic human rights as agreed to by the UN that plenty of US citizens lack access to:
Healthcare
Higher education
Housing
Internet Access
That battle has already been fought and won. It’s called US History. Are you this colossally stupid IRL or are you just pretending online?
Yeah yeah, go on. But in reality, if you really started your glorious class revolution or whatever, what would you do? Are you going to roll up to Warren Buffet’s house with an assault squad and kill and rob him? Are you going to take a group of your terrorist cell to Wall Street and start shooting the stock brokers? Do you have any ideas beyond violence and theft?
What do you think you’re really accomplishing here with all your inflammatory talk of violence? It leads to nothing but thoughts of hate and accomplishes only division among the citizens who have to live together in society. There will be no revolution, because most people would never risk their comforts to enter that world of danger. We are living in a world of opportunity and convenience, with a standard of living higher than has ever existed before, and most Americans do not even comprehend true hardship.
So what’s your political leaning? I assume you’re democrat?
I’m asking because I’m saving your comment to my list of “left wingers calling for violence” since nobody believes that exists.
But I want to confirm you’re a left winger first.
If you’re struggling financially, you’re not “middle class”.
If you read the article, it’s defined purely in terms of income:
The poll, commissioned by the National True Cost of Living Coalition, found that around 65 percent of Americans who are considered “middle class,” earning above 200 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL), are in a financial struggle.
In a way, it kind of proves the point that we need to reevaluate what the actual cost of living is in the modern age. For a family of 4 to be considered middle class by this metric, they would have an income of $62,400/year or higher. For a single individual, it’s just $30,120/year. I don’t know anywhere in the US where making $15 an hour means you’re in the middle class, yet the federal government wants to keep acting like it’s the 1980s and you can live it up to an extent on such a meager income.
That being said, financial struggle doesn’t necessarily mean they’re one step away from being destitute. It could just be a struggle to maintain their current standard of life, where is used to be taken as a given that this would improve over time.
Think of it this way.
For decades, ‘middle class’ was defined as one income that could pay for a family of four. Up until the Nixon inflation of the 1970s anyone with a halfway decent job was ‘middle class.’ Back then $1 million was a giant fortune
Then Reagan came in with his tax cuts for the rich. By 1992, middle class was defined as two incomes and $1 million was what a rich guy paid for a party.
need to reevaluate
there will never be an administration that would sign off on adjusting the measurements such that millions of people would suddenly be categorized in a lower class than they are. that would make the people calling the shots look bad
Then you reclassify it day one and make a point of doing it retroactively, showing how the previous (Republican) administrations are to blame
This is it, folks
This is why the presidential administration should not be the source of these definitions.
Perhaps, but they could minimize the damage from that if it was paired with a comprehensive plan to improve living standards that people actually believed would get passed, and following through on that. Meanwhile, the longer they go on denying the reality voters are experiencing daily, the more they undermine their credibility. At best, they come across as out of touch or incompetent, at worst as outright malicious.
Nah it’s way easier to point the finger at minority groups and claim they are the cause of all our troubles. It’s been working great for years, why would the ruling class stop now?
Pretty sure “capitalism” is the whipping boy of the present day for people to blame for all their woes.
Believe it or not, there have been well-reasoned, aptly articulated arguments against capitalism delivered by earnest, enlightened people (and members of every class), delivered chiefly out of compassion for their fellow man, for over 200 years.
Anti-capitalism sentiment is in no way a transient sensation. It’s clear from your comments you aren’t well-read on the subject, and I don’t mean that as an insult; with some even-keeled reading of relevant works rather than knee-jerk dismissal of all criticism of capitalism as people looking for something to “blame for their woes,” you will undoubtedly have a better grasp on the world and your own position in it.
At this point, they’d like to convince you that you’re middle class when you share a place with two roommates.
The medias are trying to redefine having a second or third job as poly employment to make it sound like it’s a choice.
The rich fucks try to define a new normal so they can keep on making more money and fuck us over in the process.
But those same rich fucks will shit a cinderblock if you try to have a second job and aren’t focusing 130% of your life energy into their job.
Not necessarily. You can live outside your means at any income level.
Also, children are fucking expensive.
Untrue.
Technically you’re correct, as middle class is a loose definition, and at one point used to mean just owning “two cars”.
Times have changed though, and I think the OP’s definition is the more accepted one.
Middle class would be not struggling financially with basic necessities. You may struggle in other areas, but not in food, shelter, clothing sort of stuff.
Essentially, the OP is saying that if you’re struggling financially, you’re not middle class, in how middle class should be defined in the current economy.
It’s intentionally vague. Just about anyone you ask will tell you they’re middle class.
The fact is, there’s no such thing. It’s made up. It can be whatever you want it to be. The point of having everyone believe they’re middle class is so they always believe there’s someone lower than them, that things can get worse.
Most people are one missed paycheck away from not being able to pay for the roof over their head.
If you have to work to live, you’re working class. Same as the rest of us. There is no middle class.
Middle class to me is doing ok, but you still have to think about how your money is spent and utilized. Upper middle class is the threshold where money is not a concern anymore.
We really should use these metrics and not income bands, but we always fall into the trap that people are inconsistent and always measure up. I once read an interview where someone said they were “not doing great, but getting by,” and later mentioned they sold a home to buy a boat and take 6 months sailing.
They’re “getting by” living like our rich neighbors did when I was a kid. Compared to our “middle class” life 50 years ago, middle class now is a life style we could only dream about.
Wrong.
As the economy tightens and the quality of life degrades, more and more people who have ostensibly stable lives are running into the pitfalls of poverty.
There’s no such thing as “middle class” anyways.
I had to dig a bit, but I found out the source poll’s threshold for “middle class”: 200% or more past the poverty line.
The poverty line is about $15k for individuals. People making $30k a year are, clearly, not middle class. The current standard puts the beginning of middle class in the low $50k’s.
This is doomer clickbait bullshit.
I certainly don’t expect things to turn around in my lifetime. The future I want would require radical, systemic changes, but most Americans don’t want anything to radically change. That doesn’t mean a majority of Americans are happy with things the way they are, not at all, but they don’t want to radically change anything, despite their unhappiness. The majority of Americans want things to get better without anything fundamentally changing. I believe that’s one of the definitions of insanity.
Not wanting to fight a civil war =/= not wanting radical change
I guarantee we’d have a very different nation if individual issues and policies were put to a vote, as they are in some European nations.
Given how your party system works in America I’m wondering what you think a realistic non violent alternative would be?
I’m simply saying the desire is there for most, just not enough to take up arms.
1/3 of humanity would kill another 1/3, while a 1/3 watches.
Thanks Werner Hertzog
As if Americans have any control over the change. Even if they/we did want it our capitalist overlords would never allow it to happen. They only want the illusion of freedom.
I’m certainly not suggesting that wanting change is all that’s required for change to happen, but it is a very necessary first step.
If we’re not expecting anything to ever get better, there’s a solution to that too; rather the opposite of “business as usual.”
There are many more ways to make things worse than ways to make things better
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I believe wholeheartedly that we’ll have all our shit straightened out in about 3 generations or so, or at least we will have new problems different than our current ones. Assuming we survive the climate catastrophe that is.
But the next 100-200 years are about to be real fucking bad for a lot of people.
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That’s not middle class…
I don’t know if it has its own name, but it’s like the Overton window in politics.
Average people assume that they’re average and middle class means average, so they’re “middle class” despite having three figures in saving, no home equity, and a retirement account that will never be enough to retire.
Prior generations at least built up home equity over a lifetime.
As one of these middle class fucks I don’t know how to refer to myself. I’m supporting myself and a dependent adult on barely six figures a year (plus some disability money).
I know I have it way fucking better than folks working in a warehouse or migrant agricultural workers so I don’t want to falsely describe myself as lower class when I’ve clearly got it better… but I’m also being fucking squeezed and each month I eat into my savings. I will say that I am not carrying debt because I aggressively saved early in my career but I am slowly whittling down what should be my retirement savings.
So, what the fuck am I?
So, what the fuck am I?
Scrapping by
People focus on income, income ain’t the whole picture, it’s wealth that’s important.
It used to be owning a home built wealth passively, as you lived and paid your mortgage, you gained equity.
If people cant afford to buy a home, it’s almost impossible to build wealth. You just flush more money away on rent as you earn more money.
It’s what happens when they charge as much as people can pay for something we all need.
Towards the end, Medicare/medicaid/whatever takes the house too if you don’t plan ahead, and no doubt they’ll close the “loopholes” for planning ahead too.
Look up filial laws that states are passing. There will be no great transfer of wealth except from boomers to corporations.
Fucked.
If you are struggling and you are not living above your means then you are not middle class you are lower class.
You’re lower class. (No offense)
No offense taken, certainly… that’s even true if I’m in the 97th percentile of earners (by age range) nationally?
Well, it’s hard to put you in a class without knowing your income. But if you don’t have a good chunk at the end of the month, you’re not in that stable middle area.
That’s extremely fair, I guess my point is less a question of what precisely am I and more about the fact that as someone in the top 3% of earners if I’m not in the middle class who the fuck is - is it the .3%-1.5% slice? I know I personally have some awful extenuating circumstances, but the past half a decade have felt like a game you can’t win no matter how lucky you get. (I also might clarify that I am Canadian and our CoL is really high atm).
Oh for sure. It feels impossible. We had a retirement savings person come into my office and they were doing math based on today. Saying that by the time I’m ready I would have “This much” Money. But if we adjust for inflation in the future, based on inflation in the past, that amount would actually be worth about a third of what it is today. I can’t survive on that at all. With the prices of everything going up across the board, it feels like most of the people I know have a lot less spending power than they did when they were making even less than today. I guess I just missed that sweet-spot for retirement (the boomer).
My retirement plan is a bullet. 🤷♂️
The “middle class” is currently defined by arbitrary income levels, not purchasing power. Considering the cost of living disparity across the US it’s an absolutely useless measure.
To be in the middle class 50 years ago, you were able to buy a reasonable family house on one income. To do that today if you’re in an area where the cost of living isn’t absolutely bottom of the barrel you’ve got to make what is currently considered “upper middle class” income or slightly above.
Middle class living is relegated to upper middle class incomes while middle and lower middle class have to rent that lifestyle.
upper middle class incomes
The middle class died the day they had to make the “upper middle class” a thing…
That’s the wealth distribution middle class was supposed to be. But it shrank down so much they had to make new class distinctions up.
In pre-revolution France, the bourgeois were the middle class.
99% in poverty.
O.99% bourgeois
0.01%, the aristocrats!
That distribution wasn’t sustainable back then, it’s not sustainable now.
As wealth concentrates at the top, there’s less for everyone else, and we’re all poor.
Yup. The traditional American middle class is essentially an endangered species
"65 percent of Americans who are considered “middle class,” earning above 200 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL), are in a financial struggle. "
That sounds more like a problem with the definition of the federal poverty level than it is a problem with the middle class.
If you’re struggling, you aren’t middle class.
Federal Poverty Level for 2024 is dependent on household size:
https://www.medicaidplanningassistance.org/federal-poverty-guidelines/
Oh, man, now I have to see if Lemmy can do tables… Hmmm nope!
Size - 100% - 200%
1 - $15,060 - $30,120
2 - $20,440 - $40,880
3 - $25,820 - $51,640
4 - $31,200 - $62,400
5 - $36,580 - $73,160
6 - $41,960 - $83,920
7 - $47,340 - $94,680
8 - $52,720 - $105,440
Each person over 8, add $5,380 - $10,760So let’s take the prototypical nuclear family, 2 parents, 2 kids.
$62,400 is 200% poverty. I could see that being a struggle. I think maybe what we need is to re-define the poverty level.
Size - 100% - 200%
1 - $31,200 - $62,400
2 - $36,580 - $73,160
3 - $41,960 - $83,920
4 - $47,340 - $94,680
5 - $52,720 - $105,440
6 - $58,100 - $116,200
7 - $63,480 - $126,960
8 - $68,860 - $137,720
Each person over 8, add $5,380 - $10,760Yeah, and consider how bad it is for the class below the middle class. We’re literally fucking drowning in debt.
I had to dig a bit, but I found out the source poll’s threshold for “middle class”: 200% or more past the poverty line.
The poverty line is about $15k for individuals. People making $30k a year are, clearly, not middle class. The current standard puts the beginning of middle class in the low $50k’s.
This is doomer clickbait bullshit.
Americans have been deceived into thinking themselves middle class for longer than either of us have been alive
I make about 55 in a low COL area and it is absolutely not middle anything. I rent and i can’t afford to fix my teeth even with dental.
But debt is good! Inflation has encouraged everyone to take out loans where they previously couldn’t. Hooray!
/s
A small amount (obviously less than we’ve had recently) of inflation is actually ideal. Deflation incentivizes literal hoarding of cash, instead of spending it on things, which is a very reliable way to bring an economy to a screeching halt.
No offense but this is exactly the belief I was being sarcastic about. The economy wasn’t halted before Nixon introduced inflation as we know it today. And “the economy” at this point is practically a euphemism for rich people getting nearly the entire surplus while destroying the environment.
Please stop spreading this dangerous misconception.
Oh sweeties, you were never middle class. You were always working class and they gave you a special name so you could feel better than Dave the Binman.
America, where you can achieve the appearance of wealth while working yourself to death with no time to enjoy anything and still have a significant chance of dying alone in an alleyway even if you did everything right in life.
A feature, not a bug of an oligarchy and an economy run by effective monopolies.
You will own nothing and be happy.
Have they tried investing in GME? and Hodling?
To hell with the middle class, what about the working class? You know, the ones that get all the physical labor done so you can get your next day Amazon order before hitting the Starbucks.
We’ve really bastardized the terms middle class and working class. It’s feeding into the class warfare that is being used against us.
If you have to physically work for a living, you are working class. Let’s point our ire at the correct people here.
If your income is primarily from your labor (physical or not) and not from the capital that you own, you are working class.
Speaking of class only contributed to class warfare only insofar as you see class warfare as the inevitable outcome of class distinctions.
the working class is the middle class.
unless you mean people who are in poverty.
The middle class doesn’t exist. Everyone thinks they’re middle class.
It’s not a “who is suffering more” contest. Bad things are bad things because they’re bad.
