News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
A friendly reminder that articles like this serve to create infighting among the worker class.
Someone earning $250,000 is definitely rich, but they’re nowhere even close to the level of rich that makes wealth distribution problematic. And they’re probably working for that income.
Check out Wealth Shown to Scale (Archive link here because apparently the page is down).
Everyone who isn’t a billionaire ought to be on the same side: against billionaires. But the WSJ publishes stuff like this to make you direct your ire at doctors and lawyers instead of at the people leeching from society.
They also intentionally frame a really bad thing as a "good" thing. The situation here is not that the "rich" run the economy - it's that everyone else is being priced out of the economy by wage stagnation and rising costs of living.
The alternate headline here is "wealth inequality surges, 90% of Americans now account for only 50% of consumer spending"
Or
"1 in 10 Americans spending as much as the other 9 combined, while 3 of them live paycheck to paycheck"
People earning 6 digits a year are still one bad accident or diagnosis away from losing their jobs and living in poverty. They're not the root problem or the solution to the economy, and this article is trying to paint them as both.
Instead we need to acknowledge that the people "earning" 8-10 digits per year are extracting and hoarding that money away from the 90% of Americans who would otherwise be spending it in ways that would actually improve the economy.
To expand further on what you're saying, the problem with the linked article's mathematical/statistical analysis is that it uses a slightly more sophisticated version of misleadingly using "average"/mean in a context where median would be more appropriate.
Specifically, they talk about the spending of the top 10% in the aggregate, and point to the threshold of when a household tips into that top decile. Well, that aggregated number is itself heavily skewed towards the higher end of that spectrum, where the people in the 99th percentile are contributing a lot more weight than those in the 90th.
Here are the cutoffs for income thresholds to hit each percentile at or above 90:
90: $235k
91: $246k
92: $260k
93: $275k
94: $295k
95: $316k
96: $348k
97: $391k
98: $461k
99: $632k
Note that this doesn't even get into the 0.5% or 0.1%, which skew things even further. Even without that level of granularity, you can see that the median in this group is about $305k while the mean is closer to $350k.
When you include the billionaires, the difference skews even further.
That's the math error at the center of this thesis. The facts reported might be true, but in a way that groups things together misleadingly.
Having earned that for several years (though not any longer), in the SF bay area where I lived, that was the lower end of the upper middle class. I've since retired, and have subsequently taken on a post-retirement job in public service, so my earnings aren't that high any more.
I'd categorize lipo specialists, many cosmetic surgeons and most non-criminal lawyers among the leeches, though your point holds. I'd add that there's a distinction between those doing real jobs and those pursuing the discretionary spending of the very rich. Sorry, yachtmakers, private-jet leasers, coke dealers and high-end escort agencies, you'll have to learn to do something else.
yup. I will admit though that as you get higher a larger percentage of folks think they are rich and support the wrong side. Had so many docotors complain about taxes and talk conservative politics wise and im like dudes you are just over the top tax bracket. the problem is there should be more brackets that go higher not that the top should be decreased. Heck your bracket can't be decreased till its not the top one.
Yep. They’re getting the same propaganda and falling for it too. The entire idea of the “middle class” is to get workers with something to think workers with nothing are the enemy, and get them to ignore the leeches with nearly everything.
still amazes me that the brackets end in the low six figure territory when we have billionaires. I remember a supposed quote from the head of the irs back in ww2 times about how his job was to figure out elvises taxes. Like because he was the highest paid guy. Man to have rich folks proud to pay taxes as a patriotic duty. Those were the days.
Feels like a symptom of the same disease, When the ultra wealthy don't pay taxes and even effectively get negative taxes in the form of massive refunds and bailouts how could anyone else possibly feel proud about paying taxes in such a system. I didn't even make enough to pay tax this past fiscal year but if I had I'd be hard pressed to be proud about it when I know how much of the money is going into the pockets of political cronies rather than actually bettering the country I live in.
Reminded me of this doublespeak class warfare article from November: Rich people are dominating holiday travel - Most hotel guests this season will be people making six-figure incomes, analysts say.
This was an example of pure psychological warfare to get people to spend more money at hotels. "Well, those 'rich' $100k earners are upgrading their stay, I will to!"
Corpo "news" is such shit.
People making 250k are largely on the side of the billionaires. They are reliable votes for the interests of the rich.
Because they are falling for the same propaganda, but on the other side of the coin. Don’t waste your time vilifying them for falling for the same line we all do. It serves no purpose except to make you angry.
But we don't all fall for that