Pretty sure I’m not a boomer just someone who lives where 200k puts you in the top ten percent.
Fantasyland is thinking we can have some nice orderly progress without embracing contentious politics such as class warfare. Nuance won’t save us.
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It’s not nuance to say class warfare is a bad idea.
Saying class warfare is a bad idea is a bad idea.
To avoid a derail, poll is here:
If being in the top 10% of earners in the richest country in the world doesn’t make you rich then the word has lost all meaning.
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Absolutely not true. The word rich connotes a grandiosity pretty far above this ages answer to the town blacksmith in the middle ages. Rich means rich like signs everyone else’s checks rich. Rich is about power not about material consumption.
Not only does the word not loses it’s meaning we’re living in a time of truly extreme rich people antics. People who make 200k a year in NYC aren’t the ones doing the antics, they’re often the ones having the antics done to them.
People who make $200k in NYC are a big part of why NYC is so unaffordable. That cohort is so absolutely determined to put every cent they have and can borrow into housing or preschool. They’ve done this to themselves. Same thing in California. The upper middle class or w/e you want to call it turns everything into a bidding war.
Eta: and when they give up on the expensive areas they go to Oregon or whatever and drive the prices up there.
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If 200k is not rich in nyc and the medium income is 60k something a year, are they poor? If they are do we need a new word for people making far less.
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There isn’t enough supply of either to go around which is why the bidding war is happening. The only reason they make 200k is because they need to live in that area to have that job. Yes they’re basically squeezing everyone else out, but again that’s because there isn’t enough supply to meet demand and the local employers driving that demand are just throwing money at it.
Blaming the employees for having jobs feels incorrect. The way to fix these issues is to build housing and infrastructure really fast.
The good news is that some of the pressure is probably about to come off. Unfortunately the bad news that goes with that is that the commercial real estate market is fucked for a generation and so is every business that depended on the traffic that came with it.
Non-voters?
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as a member of teh 1% you will have the option of boarding a boat before revolution/heads in baskets.
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NYC has a higher vacancy rate than Sacramento.
NYC’s rental market is in free fall.
Commercial real estate is one of the very few sectors that can be completely fucked and almost exclusively hurt actual rich people! The only people who give a fuck if rents fall in NYC are building owners and possibly their lenders, everyone else wins.
Well that turns the commercial real estate bailout into a mortal fucking lock.
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It is hard for most people to grasp how deeply the wealthiest people in this country have rigged the game, for a number of reasons.
First, there aren’t that many of them and they mostly know to shut the hell up. Alice Walton has a net worth of SEVENTY BILLION DOLLARS AND HAS NEVER WORKED A DAY IN HER LIFE. Meanwhile Wal Mart pays horribly, dumps employees onto medicaid and other government assistance and ravages small businesses nationwide. And Alice Walton pays NO TAXES AT ALL on the earnings, which are embedded in her stock holdings. And that wealth will probably not be taxed when she dies, either.
Second, the media has completely failed in this area. To the extent they spend any time on this issue, they focus on like CEO pay or whatever, which, while obscene is not the real problem. It is capital having completely taken over our political system, which benefits people who own, not people who work. Again, the biggest fortunes in this country are NEVER TAXED. Jeff Bezos probably pays less than a million dollars a year in taxes. Same for Warren Buffet. It is obscene and indefensible.
There is probably more to say about how bad people are at being rational about rich people, i.e. anyone with more money than you is rich, how hard it is to differentiate between 100 million and 100 billion dollars, and the absolute propaganda around entrepreneurs and business owners in this country. Regardless, the dynamic isn’t changing any time soon.
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Maddow reporting that Biden is considering Merrick Garland for AG. 
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