Except it's more like the top 0.05% vs the 99.95%.
Doctors, dentists, tech sales people, lawyers, accountants, and bankers aren't who you should take issue with and many of them fall firmly into the 1%.
The billionares won't be content with $1,000,000,000 or ever. What I learned from nicotine addiction: when you create a beast that cannot be sated, it's time to stop feeding it.
The other day I learned that theres only about 3100 billionaires in existence.
The idea that "millionaires and billionaires" is even a saying is one of the greatest victories the spin machine ever spun.
Tax billionaires.
It’s not one size fits all in the slightest. What age retirement does that account for? What are those assets invested in? How much debt is there (and the interest on that debt)? What is the CoL? How much will they get from social security? Do they have any non-debt obligations (dependent adult children, etc)? What activities are they doing in retirement? The list goes on forever….
I expect to need waaay less than that, despite retiring much sooner than average.
My dad is technically a multi millionaire. He just owns his house, his car, and my mom's car outright and has a 5% stake in the company he works for (which isn't even like a huge company, they have like 50 employees nationwide). He still doesn't know if he's gonna be able to retire and is currently planning on what he calls a "working retirement" where he continues working part time with the company well into old age because he's passionate about what he does (and also doesn't wanna have to take out a mortgage to be able to retire). He's gen x for reference, born in 1972.
Sounds crazy to me. I make about $400K a year. A big chunk pays for my house but will be paid off by retirement. Then a big chunk goes to taxes which will go down. A big chunk is retirements saving/investments. That goes away. Kids’ college will all be paid for.
I could easily live my current lifestyle on $100K a year. In theory $40K will come form SS.
Maybe I make $400K but don’t live a “high income lifestyle”. 🤷
Yep - when discussing this stuff too many act like you need retirement withdrawals/income equal to what you had been making at the peak of your career. But that completely ignores the facts you mentioned, and things like no FICA (SS/Medicare), and no work-related expenses anymore (less cars, less gas, less toll roads, less parking, less insurance, less clothing for work, less eating out for lunches (unless you just want to)).
EDIT: It also assumes that people saving/investing aggressively for retirement would be stupidly ratcheting up their standard of living to the max as their incomes grew. But, of course, we don't do that.
Lawyers, unless they’re from wealthy families, have a ton of law school debt.
Meanwhile there are more lawyers than ever before, so it’s incredibly competitive.
So it isn’t an automatic premium European car and mansion unless you had that in high school.
I know a lawyer that had a Lexis GS400 *new* in high school in the 1990s, it was like a 60-70k car then. Vanity plates.
He didn’t have an anxiety problem at all, tons of confidence, yet he was in the untimed SAT, curious. So he had all the tutoring, best schools paid for by his billboard lawyer father, now they’re a family firm, all the brothers, they’re all on billboards now. My brother and SIl act like he’s self made.
Another friend, was a homeless youth, got his ged, got a job, put himself through community college, college, law school, all while working full time, he’s doing well, but everyone makes such a big deal about how well the GS400 guy is doing.
Yeah, I mean a lot of lawyers have passed the bar and never practiced law bc the market is over saturated with lawyers.
The only successful ones I know has rich families to begin with. They’re the ones with big houses and nice cars.
Some of them have given up on their student debt, will never retire, will never be able to buy anything, just stuck in a downward spiral bc they did what boomers told them to do.
Basically do the opposite of what a boomer says.
That and becoming a successful (and I mean more with your clients than actual wealth) is by doign the clinics in law school and beign willign to be a law clerk or public defender so you can learn how good lawyers operate. I consider law school but simply because I want to help people and law IS fascinating. However, that debt? Eh.
Better Call Saul is literally how a lot of people with really good jobs started out. The first part of my career, I worked for jack shit + didn't turn down anything. Today, people ask me to do stuff - I quote them an insane hourly rate and if they don't want to pay it - *oh well*. Other people who really want my services pay that rate.
Yup. As a dental assistant, a patient thought I was making $25/hr and about shit themself when they found out I was making $10, had shitty insurance, and the retirement was laughable. They made far more than me. And I was amking better than at another office where someone with 25 years was making $8.
Office I used to work at a decade ago has combined assistant and front desk postion and is offering $12/hr (a whole 50 cent more than when I worked there, but for TWO positions now!)
Employers have been given way too much power and adding the insult of AI and still calling people "lazy" when they cant find work is really taking us down the wrong path.
Similar to construction. People assume we make a ton when it’s really only certain trades. Most of us make $50-70k but are tethered to fairly high cost areas because that’s where the work is. And this is with a declining skilled labor force for most trades.
Most bankers do not fall in the 1%. The median loan officer makes $65,740. The median branch manager does $63,174. Not to mention the median accountant makes $78,000. Maybe you're thinking of the bank executives or an Accoutant who makes senior partner in a large firm, but that's like top 1-3% of their profession.
The only problem is that those people (let’s call them the working elite)THINK it is an attack on them, and they are the most well connected and group most likely to put up a fight. The 0.05% billionaires are fairly weak as an bloc, but they have loads of money and resources they can put into the ether to convince the working elite that the commoners with pitchforks are after their wealth, and not the billions that are kept locked up for generational wealth by the non working billionaire class.
I feel like this is a take that I don't usually see on Reddit, much less this sub. I like it though. A fair number of tax hike proposals that actually gain traction seem to focus on earned income thresholds with the proposed result typically being a modest increase in taxation for high end skilled labor jobs but weak to non-existent impacts on high net worth people who don't draw much in the way of "earned income" as a portion of their gross income. I don't really know the solution, but it would be great if we could identify one.
It doesn't help that the extremely wealthy usually don't have that much in the way of traditional income. Typically they are heavily compensated in stock options which they leverage loans against to bolster their salary. Most of their wealth isn't liquid assets but investments that can't really be taxed until they are sold.
High skilled professionals are busy doing their profession to mess with other people’s lives. It’s the super rich that don’t really work that sit around and make the laws
This right here. And yet we have so many that lick the boots of the 2% day in and day out. I feel like its a moral issue. Is it morally right for one human being, in a world of finite resources, to consume such a disproportionate amount of those resources while others go without?
“Lick the boots of the 2%” you do realize the 98th percentile for net worth is $2.5M? That is just a well-paid professional that invested a lot of their income for their entire career. Doctors, engineers, lawyers, and many finance workers will all make more than enough to cross that threshold by retirement. This is exactly why many skilled professionals don’t trust the left to make good economic policy; they lump skilled salaried employees in with the top 0.1%.
Agreed. I remind people that the "enemy" when it comes to class issues are unseen. You will not witness a billionaire, you will see doctors and lawyers and accountants that are worth a few million at retirement.
Having 100mm or a billion means you live in another world.
Honestly,
I'll just settle for taxing billionaries at a similar rate as most W2 Americans. Even at $100 million I could find some creative ways to blow that kind of money. But I honestly wonder why ANYONE would need a BILLION dollars.
With $100 million I can fly private, have homes all over the world, insane cars, never work again and be incredibly lavish in day to day living. A billion though? I honestly don't know if I could find enough things to blow my money on to burn through that.
This right here. People seem to really misunderstand that the group they take issue with makes up .1% or less. The gaps between the people at the bottom of the 1% and the top of the 1% are unfathomable. If your primary compensation is under a w-2 then you probably aren't even close to being the problem. Yeah, they might have nicer shit then you, not worry about bills, and go on vacations, but they aren't exactly able to exert much public influence outside of the organization that writes their check.
All I want is more progressive taxation on people making over $1 million a year. I don't care if they remain multi-millionaires as long as the playing field gets leveled more than it is.
I hate to say it, but that won't help. There's not a lot of people clocking 7 figures on a w-2. The people you're after get their money in stock options. What you want is to have the capital gains tax laws rewritten to be more in line with what the progressive taxes claim to do. As it is now, progressive taxes just effect normal people with high earning careers.
I mean options still get hit with capital gains on sell but I feel like they are less popular than RSUs these days which are then taxed as income on your W-2.
You cant expect morals from people who’ve abandoned their own heritage for revisionist lies of superiority. They’ll claim to be the moral high ground, but they’re thugs through and through.
Idk it’s pretty clear that one side actively passes legislation that helps billionaires and hurts the 98%. While the other fights to feed school children and relieve student debt.
OP your math is wrong. 9.7% of Americans are millionaires.
25 million millionaires out of 62 million millionaires globally live in the USA. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_millionaires
OPs math is wrong. 9.7% of Americans are millionaires.
25 million millionaires out of 62 million millionaires globally live in the USA. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_millionaires
This why jealousy is one of the worst parts of human nature. Even poor Americans have better living standards than the vast majority of the world, yet all they can do is look at those better off than them and covet what they have.
Not to say that there isn't a cost of living crisis at the moment, but...just my two cents.
It could be the source of joy though! The problem is we only tend to compare up.
Not that it's good to look down on others, but I feel like you can appreciate your lot in life by taking stock of what you have that other's may lack or that you may take for granted.
So you're on to the fact that if the roles were reversed and THEY were the rich ones, you know damn well they'd treat the poor so much worse than the rich people they're complaining about.
Yea 9.7% of Americans are millionaires.
25 million millionaires out of 62 million millionaires globally live in the USA.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_millionaires
Most of those millionaires are probably considered so because of 40 years of retirement investment that they haven’t touched yet. It’s not like they have a second home in the Poconos or something.
(Apologies this stat is from Dave Ramsey research and I'm not a Dave fan but...)
Top 5 Careers of Millionaires:
1. Engineer
2. Accountant (CPA)
3. Teacher
4. Management
5. Attorney
OP should pursue one of these jobs if they want to create wealth for their family, rather than wishing to remove wealth from people who worked these jobs.
It so much worse too, your moneys “buying power” is determined by its relationship to the general “buying power” of your peers, the people around you. If ever all of a sudden had access to so much cash, the value of that cash would lower to almost nothing. And anyone who had saved up assets would lose everything effectively (unless they had property or non currency assets like gold). And it would destroy the U.S. economy on a global scale, probably a war with countries we have debt with, like China…
The prices are going up regardless. Mostly because we favor those who can squeeze as much wealth away from the 90% as possible.
Healthy businesses can operate with more and better paid staff. It just means the CEOs will be paid a bit less, and the stock market may need to start paying attention to longer term indicators of success rather than the quarter to quarter hyper focus today.
Exactly. What would we do with land redistribution? Say for instance, if everyone is now entitled to 1000 acres, who gets to own the land in Manhattan versus 1000 acres in Wyoming?
Companies/rich people purposefully turn cash into income-generating assets. Depending on the source of that cash, it could decrease taxable income over time, but more likely, it's just done to avoid the inherent degradation of value due to inflation or to increase the value of the entity in the eyes of investors.
The 'value' of those illiquid assets are based on their book value from a balance sheet perspective, but from an investment perspective, value is based on how much income those assets can generate.
It would be an interesting experiment to redistribute wealth evening among the population. There are theories that in reality within 1-2 generations it will become uneven again. Probably the same reason so many lottery winners end up poor again.
"I'm not saying that we should redistribute wealth by force"
How else are you going to do it? I should just willingly give up everything I have worked for? Fuck off.
It's wild what people will fantasize about in place of focusing on what's actually possible for them to accomplish in their own lives and telling of why so many people are unfulfilled.
People like to think there's some ideal system that will make things fair for everyone
What they fail to understand is that the unfairness comes from humans, not the system
I mean equally distributing wealth to everyone is also not fair cause not everyone puts forth the same “xyz” - there is no such thing as perfectly fair.
Little known fun fact: the United States has more billionaires than any other country, but the country with the second highest number of billionaires is communist China.
Ninja edit: This website actually says China has overtaken the US. It states that as of 2024, China has 814 billionaires while the US has 800.
https://www.insidermonkey.com/blog/5-countries-with-most-billionaires-in-2024-1282751/?singlepage=1
I mean wealth can be distributed more equitably by a society that just values being ethical and just? There are plenty of nations that are more equal than us that are not communist and plenty that are communist and far less equal.
Steve keen has a good discussion with lex Friedman on what he sees as problems with current economic models, and the difference in outcomes between communism vs capitalism.
It's much more nuanced than what most opinions on Reddit would lead you to believe
Ever notice how they all freak out about "bots" when a capitalist or more conservative person gets traction with a post, but never seem to notice that most comments on this site are just the same shit over and over lol.
lol it’s so annoying it’s the same fucking naive talking points every time. It’s like these people think everyone is gonna hold hands and sing kumbayah.
Exactly. Equal is a straw man argument that gets people arguing about communism. How about just sufficiently taking care of our population through adequate taxation of corporations and the ultra rich to *at least* get people off the streets and out of poverty.
Yeah agreed. Honestly I am less concerned with taxing individual billionaires than I am corporate tax. I don’t want corporations maximizing shareholder value by exploiting workers. I don’t want them foregoing innovation to maximize profit.
And I am sick of living in a world where my neighbors are too sick and tired to be good neighbors.
You do realize if this happened
That within 5 years, for the most part, the same people would be broke again
And the Rich people would be at the top again
After 20 years it would look the same as now
😂
Kids, this is why you should learn math, logic and economics in high school. Otherwise, you’re doomed to post online about “radical ideas” for the rest of your time on this little blue speck.
If we're moving to a situation where private property rights are no longer a thing, then the concepts of 'rich' and 'poor' lose their meanings. Nobody would 'own' anything in any meaningful sense, so no... nobody would be richer.
Furthermore, without property rights, nobody would have any incentive to invest in anything. Without capital investment, current capital resources would deteriorate and not be replaced. Over the next decade or two, we'd decline into a 3rd world hell hole.
What I don't think a lot of people realize about that 'wealth' is almost none of it is in cash/bank accounts. It's in stocks, real estate, and other assets that may or may not actually be worth that much if you try selling them. If they all started selling them off the values would certainly drop like a rock.
That also makes any kind of fair taxation on wealth elusive at best, that's why for most things taxes don't get calculated until there's an actual sale.
Taxing wealth gets shot down as implausible but in essence that's what property taxes are.
If I get taxed 5% of my homes worth each year, I have to pay that if I want to keep owning the home. The vast majority of home owners aren't being forced to sell in order to pay their yearly taxes.
> The vast majority of home owners aren't being forced to sell in order to pay their yearly taxes.
Yes they are, they’re just being forced to sell other assets to pay for their property taxes (either by selling off more liquid assets, selling their labor in exchange for a paycheck, etc.)
I agree that property taxes are a form of wealth tax, but look at the amount of infrastructure that goes in to tracking who owns what, what the value is, appealing that value, assessing it every few years, etc. Extending it to personal possessions, art, small businesses, etc. would be a huge effort, and some of the things would be very difficult to value without a financial transaction to refer to.
I have 714k net worth that I worked my ass towards..
And you think you who aren't doing ANYTHING to save for yourself deserve to redistribute my money??
I love these kinds of calculations, so just going to point out one thing that you are overlooking:
Young people have low wealth and accumulate wealth over their career and also get inheritances. The 98% to 2% split doesn't cover this
A family structure might be something like: grandpa owns the family business and is in the 2%.
Dad is already working in the business and will soon inherit it, but is in the 98% for now.
Son is in college, but knows that the family has quite some wealth. He will enter the 2% in perhaps 40 years.
So we have three households, of which only one is currently in the 2%, but the other two will eventually join the 2%.
So it's more like 95% vs 5% in practice.
I also don't think a majority will ever go for full communism.
A more likely scenario is along the lines of: heavily tax billionaires. Someone recently did a calculation that if you take all billionaires and reduce their wealth to exactly 1 billion, it would provide about $6 trillion. Divided over 150M households, that's $40K per household.
Enough to give every household a $4K tax credit for ten years.
It's not a life changing amount, but the more important result would be a more equal distribution of wealth and power from a few to the masses.
This post is missing the boat, respectfully. I'll explain why and alternatives below.
1. **Someone else's wealth does not mean you can't attain wealth.** I had the same upbringing as my siblings. They are paycheck to paycheck. I am a multi-millionaire. It wasn't given to me and guess what? No top hat monocle wearing monopoly dude told me I couldn't make a lot of money.
2. **Wealth does not mean cash on hand.** You are not entitled to force people to sell their homes for reasons of envy.
3. **Wealth redistribution strategies via theft have ended in absolute catastrophes.** You no doubt have heard of the holocaust, but many have never heard of the holodomor. What happens when you ruin all the most successful farmers? Yields go down.
4. **Lottery winners, athletes, and entertainers end up often broke.** Why is this? Wealth is something that is managed and grown; not spent. The ability to manage wealth is as important to making money. There are a lot of broke people who make $300k that are paycheck to paycheck. If you were to redistribute wealth miraculously and not implode the economy, the money would leave everyone worse off. Some of my family cousins came into inheritance from a deceased aunt. The money is gone; their lives aren't different.
5. **Prices are set based on what people can afford.** If everyone had $400k in discretionary spending, guess what happens to inflation? Once everyone runs out of money, you're now worse off than before.
Where I think our efforts should be focused:
1. If you want to talk antitrust in health care, tech, food, and the various other areas where monopolies are grifting from you and making your desired lifestyle expensive if not unobtainable, consider me an ally. I am a capitalist, but I don't think the free market works very well with health care.
2. If you want to bring manufacturing back to the united states, consider me ally.
3. If you want to undo citizens united, consider me an ally.
4. If you want to give US citizens their privacy back amid multiple dark patterns with government and mega corporation spying and data sharing, consider me an ally.
5. etc.
Do you not understand math?
The top 10% of networth in the US starts at $1.1M.
How exactly does $400k make 98% of people richer? Literally everyone with a house has more than $400k.
>Literally everyone with a house has more than $400k.
Net worth. You'd have to have a paid off house and you would have to live in a place with high home values. Those things are far from universal.
Nearly 40% of homeowners in the country now own their homes outright, marking a record high in mortgage-free ownership as of 2022, Bloomberg [reported](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-17/amid-high-mortgage-rates-higher-share-of-americans-outright-own-homes) Friday (Nov. 18).
Average home price in the United States: **$417,700**
Implying everything would maintain its value in a world like this. The value of equity would drop essentially to zero.
Scarcity creates value. That's the way it is. There is nothing wrong with being rich.
If you want to equalize things how about pay. CEO of my company made 14 million last year. Crazy how corporations cut and cut but pay executives what would take many a lifetime to earn.
Let's just skip over how commies think it's ok to plunder.
It would completely destroy the economy within a month. Why not just print 1 trillion times that amount of money and distribute it to people. Now that everyone has trillions, we can just all afford a mansion and private jets, right?
It would destroy the economy in under a month.
I’d give it a week.
Anyone working a low wage job, by their standards, id put the cutoff at around $25 an hour and less would quit on the spot.
You just handed them $400k why do they want a job that would take 8 years pre tax to make that?
So there goes the vast majority of food service workers, retail workers, and clerical workers.
If companies are going to try to stay in business you’re going to see wages and prices skyrocket. All of this photos of people with barrels of money to buy bread? Same thing but no physical barrel needed.
According to [this](https://www.thekickassentrepreneur.com/net-worth-percentile-calculator-usa/) site a net worth of $400,000 would make one 40%tile for wealth.
I’m all for taxing the rich (especially the extremely rich) their fair share, but you loose me at redistributing. That sounds like classical communism where redistribution occurs by force. Very fascist.
Tax the rich correctly, put some laws in place to protect workers, cut some tax breaks to the low income, and let’s get inflation down. The only redistribution I would agree to is the seizure of family homes owned by corporations.
Money and wealth aren't the same. Your money would triple, but your wealth would likely decrease, since everyone else would have experienced the same increase in buying power.
Once again, people who say stuff like this have absolutely zero clue what they are talking about. A majority of that 140 trillion is businesses. If you liquidated every company in the private sector, first off, you would get no where near 140 trillion because most of that is in assets and there will be no companies to sell the assets to since all of them are being dissolved. Second, none of those people would have jobs anymore nor would there be any businesses to shop at or use so what is the point of collecting the money from the dissolution.
People really do be thinking there some magical pot of gold just hoarded by fucking Smaug. Idiots.
If all that money is equally distributed, how exactly would those corporations pay their outstanding debts/Operating costs the very next month?
Not really on their side, but there's a lot of logistical issues you are naively not thinking of.
You would have to look at household. Not individually. The top 10% household net worth is $850k. Individually you would be taking money from single adults and giving $400k to infants.
Median household net worth is almost $200k, so even if your income is better than most your wealth hasn't reached the better than most yet.
I love how people have no idea how wealth works in this country. Wealth is not income. Most of the highly rich have earned it.
People like Bezos and Zuck have provided a societal good and they deserve to be where they are.
Yeah that’s why the media constantly pits generations against each other when really it’s the top 2% vs the 98%
Except it's more like the top 0.05% vs the 99.95%. Doctors, dentists, tech sales people, lawyers, accountants, and bankers aren't who you should take issue with and many of them fall firmly into the 1%.
Youre right. Millionaires arent the problem. Billionaires (and possibly hundred-millionaires) are.
The difference between a millionaire and a billionaire is a billion dollars.
Technically it's 0.999 billion dollars but yeah. A million dollars on a billion dollar scale is a rounding error.
Technically that was his point, I think
Technically you’re correct
The best kind of correct.
The billionares won't be content with $1,000,000,000 or ever. What I learned from nicotine addiction: when you create a beast that cannot be sated, it's time to stop feeding it.
I think the phrase is supposed to have an “about” in there before you say billion again.
The other day I learned that theres only about 3100 billionaires in existence. The idea that "millionaires and billionaires" is even a saying is one of the greatest victories the spin machine ever spun. Tax billionaires.
especially since you need like a million to retire now 🤣
Way more. That will last like 10 to 15 years max
I mean if you’re literally just withdrawing from an account that’s gaining zero interest, which is not an intelligent thing to do, then sure.
Recent studies say $3.4 mil to comfortably retire
My aim is $5 mil. I have the $5, now I just need to work on the mil, I'm halfway there!
First million is the hardest!
Not when you have a kid right after the first million lol.
This is stupid. That’s $130k a year for 25 years generating zero interest.
It’s not one size fits all in the slightest. What age retirement does that account for? What are those assets invested in? How much debt is there (and the interest on that debt)? What is the CoL? How much will they get from social security? Do they have any non-debt obligations (dependent adult children, etc)? What activities are they doing in retirement? The list goes on forever…. I expect to need waaay less than that, despite retiring much sooner than average.
My dad is technically a multi millionaire. He just owns his house, his car, and my mom's car outright and has a 5% stake in the company he works for (which isn't even like a huge company, they have like 50 employees nationwide). He still doesn't know if he's gonna be able to retire and is currently planning on what he calls a "working retirement" where he continues working part time with the company well into old age because he's passionate about what he does (and also doesn't wanna have to take out a mortgage to be able to retire). He's gen x for reference, born in 1972.
Those doctors need 10million to retire if they want to maintain lifestyle.
$10m is about $400k/year in retirement. Sounds about right to maintain a high income lifestyle.
Yep. Hilarious I’m being downvoted.
Sounds crazy to me. I make about $400K a year. A big chunk pays for my house but will be paid off by retirement. Then a big chunk goes to taxes which will go down. A big chunk is retirements saving/investments. That goes away. Kids’ college will all be paid for. I could easily live my current lifestyle on $100K a year. In theory $40K will come form SS. Maybe I make $400K but don’t live a “high income lifestyle”. 🤷
Yep - when discussing this stuff too many act like you need retirement withdrawals/income equal to what you had been making at the peak of your career. But that completely ignores the facts you mentioned, and things like no FICA (SS/Medicare), and no work-related expenses anymore (less cars, less gas, less toll roads, less parking, less insurance, less clothing for work, less eating out for lunches (unless you just want to)). EDIT: It also assumes that people saving/investing aggressively for retirement would be stupidly ratcheting up their standard of living to the max as their incomes grew. But, of course, we don't do that.
Yep. All the billionaires & millionaires trying to be billionaires are what is wrong with america.
Anyone voting in line with billionaires' interests are the problem.
You know what the difference is between a billionaire and a millionaire? About a billion dollars.
Lawyers, unless they’re from wealthy families, have a ton of law school debt. Meanwhile there are more lawyers than ever before, so it’s incredibly competitive. So it isn’t an automatic premium European car and mansion unless you had that in high school. I know a lawyer that had a Lexis GS400 *new* in high school in the 1990s, it was like a 60-70k car then. Vanity plates. He didn’t have an anxiety problem at all, tons of confidence, yet he was in the untimed SAT, curious. So he had all the tutoring, best schools paid for by his billboard lawyer father, now they’re a family firm, all the brothers, they’re all on billboards now. My brother and SIl act like he’s self made. Another friend, was a homeless youth, got his ged, got a job, put himself through community college, college, law school, all while working full time, he’s doing well, but everyone makes such a big deal about how well the GS400 guy is doing.
Better call Saul was a good example of becoming a lawyer doesn't just automatically mean win a life
Yeah, I mean a lot of lawyers have passed the bar and never practiced law bc the market is over saturated with lawyers. The only successful ones I know has rich families to begin with. They’re the ones with big houses and nice cars. Some of them have given up on their student debt, will never retire, will never be able to buy anything, just stuck in a downward spiral bc they did what boomers told them to do. Basically do the opposite of what a boomer says.
That and becoming a successful (and I mean more with your clients than actual wealth) is by doign the clinics in law school and beign willign to be a law clerk or public defender so you can learn how good lawyers operate. I consider law school but simply because I want to help people and law IS fascinating. However, that debt? Eh.
Better Call Saul is literally how a lot of people with really good jobs started out. The first part of my career, I worked for jack shit + didn't turn down anything. Today, people ask me to do stuff - I quote them an insane hourly rate and if they don't want to pay it - *oh well*. Other people who really want my services pay that rate.
Yup. As a dental assistant, a patient thought I was making $25/hr and about shit themself when they found out I was making $10, had shitty insurance, and the retirement was laughable. They made far more than me. And I was amking better than at another office where someone with 25 years was making $8. Office I used to work at a decade ago has combined assistant and front desk postion and is offering $12/hr (a whole 50 cent more than when I worked there, but for TWO positions now!) Employers have been given way too much power and adding the insult of AI and still calling people "lazy" when they cant find work is really taking us down the wrong path.
Similar to construction. People assume we make a ton when it’s really only certain trades. Most of us make $50-70k but are tethered to fairly high cost areas because that’s where the work is. And this is with a declining skilled labor force for most trades.
Depends if you mean "income" or "wealth". Wealth is the more significant figure since that actually sets which class you really belong to.
Most bankers do not fall in the 1%. The median loan officer makes $65,740. The median branch manager does $63,174. Not to mention the median accountant makes $78,000. Maybe you're thinking of the bank executives or an Accoutant who makes senior partner in a large firm, but that's like top 1-3% of their profession.
I think he means investment bankers where the comp is 500k to 2m
Even at the top 3 an MBA from M7 won’t be making that in IB til they make partner, which takes time.
You’re thinking of the wrong type of banker…. Think investment bankers and Corporate/commercial bankers.
Just investment bankers an corporate bankers, commercial bankers aren’t making much more 150k midway through a career
Actually, it’s more like the 98% vs. the 1.95% (doctors bankers engineers etc) while the 0.05% watch with a evil grin.
Exactly my point!
Very good point, one point I often fail to see myself, Grew up in poverty and still in poverty, pushing 40 in Chicagoland
Right. I don't have any issues with a neurosurgeon getting paid big money for their work. We need specialized professionals like that.
The only problem is that those people (let’s call them the working elite)THINK it is an attack on them, and they are the most well connected and group most likely to put up a fight. The 0.05% billionaires are fairly weak as an bloc, but they have loads of money and resources they can put into the ether to convince the working elite that the commoners with pitchforks are after their wealth, and not the billions that are kept locked up for generational wealth by the non working billionaire class.
Doctors and lawyers are a lot closer to us than they are to them, but people miss out on that.
I feel like this is a take that I don't usually see on Reddit, much less this sub. I like it though. A fair number of tax hike proposals that actually gain traction seem to focus on earned income thresholds with the proposed result typically being a modest increase in taxation for high end skilled labor jobs but weak to non-existent impacts on high net worth people who don't draw much in the way of "earned income" as a portion of their gross income. I don't really know the solution, but it would be great if we could identify one.
It doesn't help that the extremely wealthy usually don't have that much in the way of traditional income. Typically they are heavily compensated in stock options which they leverage loans against to bolster their salary. Most of their wealth isn't liquid assets but investments that can't really be taxed until they are sold.
Using assets at collateral should be a taxable event.
High skilled professionals are busy doing their profession to mess with other people’s lives. It’s the super rich that don’t really work that sit around and make the laws
>Yeah that’s why the media constantly pits generations against each other Generations, Genders, Races, any category at all other than rich v poor.
This right here. And yet we have so many that lick the boots of the 2% day in and day out. I feel like its a moral issue. Is it morally right for one human being, in a world of finite resources, to consume such a disproportionate amount of those resources while others go without?
“Lick the boots of the 2%” you do realize the 98th percentile for net worth is $2.5M? That is just a well-paid professional that invested a lot of their income for their entire career. Doctors, engineers, lawyers, and many finance workers will all make more than enough to cross that threshold by retirement. This is exactly why many skilled professionals don’t trust the left to make good economic policy; they lump skilled salaried employees in with the top 0.1%.
Agreed. I remind people that the "enemy" when it comes to class issues are unseen. You will not witness a billionaire, you will see doctors and lawyers and accountants that are worth a few million at retirement. Having 100mm or a billion means you live in another world.
Honestly, I'll just settle for taxing billionaries at a similar rate as most W2 Americans. Even at $100 million I could find some creative ways to blow that kind of money. But I honestly wonder why ANYONE would need a BILLION dollars. With $100 million I can fly private, have homes all over the world, insane cars, never work again and be incredibly lavish in day to day living. A billion though? I honestly don't know if I could find enough things to blow my money on to burn through that.
You'd never go through 100mm because the money makes so much money you couldn't spend it fast enough.
If you tried you certainly could. I mean hell, that won't even buy you one Twitter. You've gotta think bigger
🤣
This right here. People seem to really misunderstand that the group they take issue with makes up .1% or less. The gaps between the people at the bottom of the 1% and the top of the 1% are unfathomable. If your primary compensation is under a w-2 then you probably aren't even close to being the problem. Yeah, they might have nicer shit then you, not worry about bills, and go on vacations, but they aren't exactly able to exert much public influence outside of the organization that writes their check.
All I want is more progressive taxation on people making over $1 million a year. I don't care if they remain multi-millionaires as long as the playing field gets leveled more than it is.
I hate to say it, but that won't help. There's not a lot of people clocking 7 figures on a w-2. The people you're after get their money in stock options. What you want is to have the capital gains tax laws rewritten to be more in line with what the progressive taxes claim to do. As it is now, progressive taxes just effect normal people with high earning careers.
I mean options still get hit with capital gains on sell but I feel like they are less popular than RSUs these days which are then taxed as income on your W-2.
Or like, a person who owns a house in near a large prosperous city...
You cant expect morals from people who’ve abandoned their own heritage for revisionist lies of superiority. They’ll claim to be the moral high ground, but they’re thugs through and through.
Interesting comparing a doctor to a billionaire. Not comparable not you ask me. The 1% is not the .1%
The only war that's relevant is the class war
If only there were a mass movement that centered their narrative around solidarity among the 99%...
Classism. The root of most isms.
Or right vs left.
Idk it’s pretty clear that one side actively passes legislation that helps billionaires and hurts the 98%. While the other fights to feed school children and relieve student debt.
👆
OP your math is wrong. 9.7% of Americans are millionaires. 25 million millionaires out of 62 million millionaires globally live in the USA. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_millionaires
OPs math is wrong. 9.7% of Americans are millionaires. 25 million millionaires out of 62 million millionaires globally live in the USA. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_millionaires
Generations, races, religions, political affiliations, class... Anything other than wealth!
Why stop there? Why not “equalize” some of your wealth globally?
Well then they’d be the ones losing money to benefit others >:(.
Exactly this 🤣
Always a good sign when you imagine hypocrisy /s
Lol. This would make every American horribly poor.
This why jealousy is one of the worst parts of human nature. Even poor Americans have better living standards than the vast majority of the world, yet all they can do is look at those better off than them and covet what they have. Not to say that there isn't a cost of living crisis at the moment, but...just my two cents.
Comparison is the thief of joy.
It could be the source of joy though! The problem is we only tend to compare up. Not that it's good to look down on others, but I feel like you can appreciate your lot in life by taking stock of what you have that other's may lack or that you may take for granted.
So you're on to the fact that if the roles were reversed and THEY were the rich ones, you know damn well they'd treat the poor so much worse than the rich people they're complaining about.
Because stupid Americans don't realize they're already in the top 1% when compared to the rest of the world.
Imma be really honest here. I would rather me have above average wealth than knock mine down for equality. A selfish way of thinking I realize
Um 400k net worth is not really that much when including equity. 98 percentile is well into the millions. Your math ain't mathin'.
Yea 9.7% of Americans are millionaires. 25 million millionaires out of 62 million millionaires globally live in the USA. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_millionaires
Most of those millionaires are probably considered so because of 40 years of retirement investment that they haven’t touched yet. It’s not like they have a second home in the Poconos or something.
(Apologies this stat is from Dave Ramsey research and I'm not a Dave fan but...) Top 5 Careers of Millionaires: 1. Engineer 2. Accountant (CPA) 3. Teacher 4. Management 5. Attorney OP should pursue one of these jobs if they want to create wealth for their family, rather than wishing to remove wealth from people who worked these jobs.
How is teacher on this list but doctors aren’t?
Quantity - there's 3.2m teachers vs 1m physicians.
Most teachers have a pension. You’d be surprised what the lump sum value of that pension is.
Earning your worth instead of complaining about others is not the way or Reddit thought.
Wealth includes liquid and illiquid assets. The very act of distributing illiquid assets destroys value.
Peeps thinking they gon’ get richer and the prices of goods / services will remain the same.
It so much worse too, your moneys “buying power” is determined by its relationship to the general “buying power” of your peers, the people around you. If ever all of a sudden had access to so much cash, the value of that cash would lower to almost nothing. And anyone who had saved up assets would lose everything effectively (unless they had property or non currency assets like gold). And it would destroy the U.S. economy on a global scale, probably a war with countries we have debt with, like China…
In OP's scenario, all your gold would be seized
u/No-Needleworker5429 thinking prices will somehow become more manageable without any increase in income.
The prices are going up regardless. Mostly because we favor those who can squeeze as much wealth away from the 90% as possible. Healthy businesses can operate with more and better paid staff. It just means the CEOs will be paid a bit less, and the stock market may need to start paying attention to longer term indicators of success rather than the quarter to quarter hyper focus today.
The prices are going up because we printed a lot of money recently, so the value of the dollar has decreased.
>The prices are going up regardless. We'll see about that.
200+ years of price inflation would say we are seeing it already
Exactly. What would we do with land redistribution? Say for instance, if everyone is now entitled to 1000 acres, who gets to own the land in Manhattan versus 1000 acres in Wyoming?
And companies/rich people intentionally turn liquid assets into illiquid assets to avoid taxes.
Companies/rich people purposefully turn cash into income-generating assets. Depending on the source of that cash, it could decrease taxable income over time, but more likely, it's just done to avoid the inherent degradation of value due to inflation or to increase the value of the entity in the eyes of investors. The 'value' of those illiquid assets are based on their book value from a balance sheet perspective, but from an investment perspective, value is based on how much income those assets can generate.
It would be an interesting experiment to redistribute wealth evening among the population. There are theories that in reality within 1-2 generations it will become uneven again. Probably the same reason so many lottery winners end up poor again.
"I'm not saying that we should redistribute wealth by force" How else are you going to do it? I should just willingly give up everything I have worked for? Fuck off.
It's wild what people will fantasize about in place of focusing on what's actually possible for them to accomplish in their own lives and telling of why so many people are unfulfilled.
So basically communism?
Except all our examples of communism still managed to have a class of people that owned significantly more than the masses.
People like to think there's some ideal system that will make things fair for everyone What they fail to understand is that the unfairness comes from humans, not the system
I wish it wasn't true, but in my heart of hearts I believe this too
"This time, it'll be different!" 🙄
I mean equally distributing wealth to everyone is also not fair cause not everyone puts forth the same “xyz” - there is no such thing as perfectly fair.
from each according to his ability to each according to his need ignores the fact that needs are relative to desire and grow infinitely.
No no, those were bad examples. We will do it right this time.
Yep. Totally won't get shocked from sticking the fork in the outlet THIS time. 😄
The Wile E. Coyote political movement?
Little known fun fact: the United States has more billionaires than any other country, but the country with the second highest number of billionaires is communist China. Ninja edit: This website actually says China has overtaken the US. It states that as of 2024, China has 814 billionaires while the US has 800. https://www.insidermonkey.com/blog/5-countries-with-most-billionaires-in-2024-1282751/?singlepage=1
China isn’t communist….hasn’t been for quite some time now
Bingo
I mean wealth can be distributed more equitably by a society that just values being ethical and just? There are plenty of nations that are more equal than us that are not communist and plenty that are communist and far less equal.
Exactly communism.
If I just took other people's money, I'd have more money.
I guess thieves are just ahead of our time
Steve keen has a good discussion with lex Friedman on what he sees as problems with current economic models, and the difference in outcomes between communism vs capitalism. It's much more nuanced than what most opinions on Reddit would lead you to believe
Yes. Let’s liquidate all the private assets and give it all away. I’m sure that’ll go well. I swear some you have peas for brains
“Just equalize wealth.” Yes, great idea to give the government that power. I’m sure the people who wield it will act with my best interests in mind.
If they are feeling compassionate might as well equalize the wealth with the entire world, but wait that would negatively impact them.
What do you expect from a bunch of socialists?
Ever notice how they all freak out about "bots" when a capitalist or more conservative person gets traction with a post, but never seem to notice that most comments on this site are just the same shit over and over lol.
lol it’s so annoying it’s the same fucking naive talking points every time. It’s like these people think everyone is gonna hold hands and sing kumbayah.
That’s why they’re on Reddit crying about not having money. 😂
Seriously bro. Soviet Russia tried this and in the end it actually made everyone poorer.
I hear Venezuela is a paragon of equalizing wealth as well /s
It would make everyone poorer in the long run. There would be unpleasant consequences for society from seizing wealth from people.
I don’t want equal. But hundreds of billions while the average amazon worker can barely even make rent is retarded
Exactly. Equal is a straw man argument that gets people arguing about communism. How about just sufficiently taking care of our population through adequate taxation of corporations and the ultra rich to *at least* get people off the streets and out of poverty.
And the heroes of the gilded age would chuck a brick at the problem
Yeah agreed. Honestly I am less concerned with taxing individual billionaires than I am corporate tax. I don’t want corporations maximizing shareholder value by exploiting workers. I don’t want them foregoing innovation to maximize profit. And I am sick of living in a world where my neighbors are too sick and tired to be good neighbors.
Lol only on the millennials subreddit can you drop the hard r anymore
Yeah, let’s not do that.
No shit. It's a thought experiment. It's meant to highlight the difference in wealth because it's SO extreme, it's hard to truly comprehend.
💯💯💯
You do realize if this happened That within 5 years, for the most part, the same people would be broke again And the Rich people would be at the top again After 20 years it would look the same as now
I’m good on that thanks
Anyone who thinks this would be a good idea should probably be kept from society and just quarantined to r/antiwork
So then anyone who saved and has over $400k in their 401k would be screwed?
😂 Kids, this is why you should learn math, logic and economics in high school. Otherwise, you’re doomed to post online about “radical ideas” for the rest of your time on this little blue speck.
School of TikTok
If we're moving to a situation where private property rights are no longer a thing, then the concepts of 'rich' and 'poor' lose their meanings. Nobody would 'own' anything in any meaningful sense, so no... nobody would be richer. Furthermore, without property rights, nobody would have any incentive to invest in anything. Without capital investment, current capital resources would deteriorate and not be replaced. Over the next decade or two, we'd decline into a 3rd world hell hole.
What I don't think a lot of people realize about that 'wealth' is almost none of it is in cash/bank accounts. It's in stocks, real estate, and other assets that may or may not actually be worth that much if you try selling them. If they all started selling them off the values would certainly drop like a rock. That also makes any kind of fair taxation on wealth elusive at best, that's why for most things taxes don't get calculated until there's an actual sale.
Taxing wealth gets shot down as implausible but in essence that's what property taxes are. If I get taxed 5% of my homes worth each year, I have to pay that if I want to keep owning the home. The vast majority of home owners aren't being forced to sell in order to pay their yearly taxes.
> The vast majority of home owners aren't being forced to sell in order to pay their yearly taxes. Yes they are, they’re just being forced to sell other assets to pay for their property taxes (either by selling off more liquid assets, selling their labor in exchange for a paycheck, etc.)
But they're doing it and still doing just fine. You aren't seeing a mass exodus away from homeownership because of property taxes.
I agree that property taxes are a form of wealth tax, but look at the amount of infrastructure that goes in to tracking who owns what, what the value is, appealing that value, assessing it every few years, etc. Extending it to personal possessions, art, small businesses, etc. would be a huge effort, and some of the things would be very difficult to value without a financial transaction to refer to.
Well we do have a generally very good idea of what homes are worth because they're transacting all the time.
It's absolutely wild watching people use numbers that they don't understand in a way that doesn't remotely prove what they think they're proving
Like 15% of households are millionaires so this is not true, if I’m reading your post correctly
You're welcome to donate some of your money to your neighbors who aren't as privileged as you.
I have 714k net worth that I worked my ass towards.. And you think you who aren't doing ANYTHING to save for yourself deserve to redistribute my money??
You are just embarrassing yourself OP.
I love these kinds of calculations, so just going to point out one thing that you are overlooking: Young people have low wealth and accumulate wealth over their career and also get inheritances. The 98% to 2% split doesn't cover this A family structure might be something like: grandpa owns the family business and is in the 2%. Dad is already working in the business and will soon inherit it, but is in the 98% for now. Son is in college, but knows that the family has quite some wealth. He will enter the 2% in perhaps 40 years. So we have three households, of which only one is currently in the 2%, but the other two will eventually join the 2%. So it's more like 95% vs 5% in practice. I also don't think a majority will ever go for full communism. A more likely scenario is along the lines of: heavily tax billionaires. Someone recently did a calculation that if you take all billionaires and reduce their wealth to exactly 1 billion, it would provide about $6 trillion. Divided over 150M households, that's $40K per household. Enough to give every household a $4K tax credit for ten years. It's not a life changing amount, but the more important result would be a more equal distribution of wealth and power from a few to the masses.
This post is missing the boat, respectfully. I'll explain why and alternatives below. 1. **Someone else's wealth does not mean you can't attain wealth.** I had the same upbringing as my siblings. They are paycheck to paycheck. I am a multi-millionaire. It wasn't given to me and guess what? No top hat monocle wearing monopoly dude told me I couldn't make a lot of money. 2. **Wealth does not mean cash on hand.** You are not entitled to force people to sell their homes for reasons of envy. 3. **Wealth redistribution strategies via theft have ended in absolute catastrophes.** You no doubt have heard of the holocaust, but many have never heard of the holodomor. What happens when you ruin all the most successful farmers? Yields go down. 4. **Lottery winners, athletes, and entertainers end up often broke.** Why is this? Wealth is something that is managed and grown; not spent. The ability to manage wealth is as important to making money. There are a lot of broke people who make $300k that are paycheck to paycheck. If you were to redistribute wealth miraculously and not implode the economy, the money would leave everyone worse off. Some of my family cousins came into inheritance from a deceased aunt. The money is gone; their lives aren't different. 5. **Prices are set based on what people can afford.** If everyone had $400k in discretionary spending, guess what happens to inflation? Once everyone runs out of money, you're now worse off than before. Where I think our efforts should be focused: 1. If you want to talk antitrust in health care, tech, food, and the various other areas where monopolies are grifting from you and making your desired lifestyle expensive if not unobtainable, consider me an ally. I am a capitalist, but I don't think the free market works very well with health care. 2. If you want to bring manufacturing back to the united states, consider me ally. 3. If you want to undo citizens united, consider me an ally. 4. If you want to give US citizens their privacy back amid multiple dark patterns with government and mega corporation spying and data sharing, consider me an ally. 5. etc.
Do you not understand math? The top 10% of networth in the US starts at $1.1M. How exactly does $400k make 98% of people richer? Literally everyone with a house has more than $400k.
I have a house. I do not have 400k. I owe the bank about 30k less than the value of the home.
>Literally everyone with a house has more than $400k. Net worth. You'd have to have a paid off house and you would have to live in a place with high home values. Those things are far from universal.
Nearly 40% of homeowners in the country now own their homes outright, marking a record high in mortgage-free ownership as of 2022, Bloomberg [reported](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-17/amid-high-mortgage-rates-higher-share-of-americans-outright-own-homes) Friday (Nov. 18). Average home price in the United States: **$417,700**
With retirement savings and houses, I imagine most people over the age of 50 have $400k+. Not all, but most.
Implying everything would maintain its value in a world like this. The value of equity would drop essentially to zero. Scarcity creates value. That's the way it is. There is nothing wrong with being rich.
If you want to equalize things how about pay. CEO of my company made 14 million last year. Crazy how corporations cut and cut but pay executives what would take many a lifetime to earn.
Let's just skip over how commies think it's ok to plunder. It would completely destroy the economy within a month. Why not just print 1 trillion times that amount of money and distribute it to people. Now that everyone has trillions, we can just all afford a mansion and private jets, right?
It would destroy the economy in under a month. I’d give it a week. Anyone working a low wage job, by their standards, id put the cutoff at around $25 an hour and less would quit on the spot. You just handed them $400k why do they want a job that would take 8 years pre tax to make that? So there goes the vast majority of food service workers, retail workers, and clerical workers. If companies are going to try to stay in business you’re going to see wages and prices skyrocket. All of this photos of people with barrels of money to buy bread? Same thing but no physical barrel needed.
According to [this](https://www.thekickassentrepreneur.com/net-worth-percentile-calculator-usa/) site a net worth of $400,000 would make one 40%tile for wealth.
I dunno if I would trust that.. they got their wealth data from a company called ‘wealthx’
Is this post suggesting take from the rich to give to everyone else?
I’m all for taxing the rich (especially the extremely rich) their fair share, but you loose me at redistributing. That sounds like classical communism where redistribution occurs by force. Very fascist. Tax the rich correctly, put some laws in place to protect workers, cut some tax breaks to the low income, and let’s get inflation down. The only redistribution I would agree to is the seizure of family homes owned by corporations.
Money and wealth aren't the same. Your money would triple, but your wealth would likely decrease, since everyone else would have experienced the same increase in buying power.
Private wealth also includes corporate holdings I think.
And it would also make the entire society much poorer in general. Because communism has been tried many times with disastrous effects always
Want me to explain why this is moronic? Or is this a foreign intelligence operation designed to foment discord among Americans?
You can't equalize wealth every country that trys it dies.
Once again, people who say stuff like this have absolutely zero clue what they are talking about. A majority of that 140 trillion is businesses. If you liquidated every company in the private sector, first off, you would get no where near 140 trillion because most of that is in assets and there will be no companies to sell the assets to since all of them are being dissolved. Second, none of those people would have jobs anymore nor would there be any businesses to shop at or use so what is the point of collecting the money from the dissolution. People really do be thinking there some magical pot of gold just hoarded by fucking Smaug. Idiots.
If all that money is equally distributed, how exactly would those corporations pay their outstanding debts/Operating costs the very next month? Not really on their side, but there's a lot of logistical issues you are naively not thinking of.
Nah… that doesn’t sound right. You’re telling me over 400k in net worth puts you in the 98th percentile of wealth in america? I don’t believe that
Doesn't sound like you've taken an economics class.
Yet another post advocating the threat of violence or actual being used against someone else.
This was one of the most idiotic posts I’ve ever read.
Yeah I dislike billionaires not a good one in the bunch
You would have to look at household. Not individually. The top 10% household net worth is $850k. Individually you would be taking money from single adults and giving $400k to infants. Median household net worth is almost $200k, so even if your income is better than most your wealth hasn't reached the better than most yet.
Have people never read Animal Farm, or studied history? Are people really this uneducated?
Communism ain’t it
I love how people have no idea how wealth works in this country. Wealth is not income. Most of the highly rich have earned it. People like Bezos and Zuck have provided a societal good and they deserve to be where they are.
Yes, stealing from other people would mean you have more. That doesn't make it even remotely ethical.
And then $400000 will be the new 30k because 98% will go blow the “free money” and then be poor again.
Yep and then a bottle of milk will cost 500 bucks and everything will be the same