This cartoon from The Seattle Times illustrates how America's economic pizza is actually sliced per capita, highlighting the massive disparity between the Top 1%, the merely wealthy, the upper middle class, and the lower 50%.
Conservatives insist this is the only way. As long as conservatives exist, the normal people will never be permitted to regulate capitalism or charge billionaires with crimes.
We must delete the foot-soldiers to defeat the billionaire class.
Very funny to see this at the top of my feed when the poster is banned.
The people with crumbs STILL doing nothing despite having nothing to lose will allow America to be destroyed.
I just want a new season of Reacher where he goes undercover as a gay prostitute.
Capitalism is just feudalism with more math.
Trickle down feudalism yeah.
I cannot stop seeing this idea overlaid on every thing that I see or do or hear about. Every action is filtered through the lens of it being extractive and manipulative.
I feel extremely stressed because I see the bars of the cage and no one else around me wants to acknowledge them.
I do not like this. I would like it to stop please.
Reject consumerism, make things instead.
We have friends coming over, instead of ordering food from a mega corporation I am going to make pizza and potato wedges.
Yes and the middle class who think they have money keep voting for this.
In my experience the difference in voting is really between the educated class and the uneducated class. Educated people are tend to be left wing. Uneducated people tend to be right wing. I'm pretty sure the data bears that out.
This is well studied in "capital and ideology". Over the last 40 years in usa, euorpe educated tend to vote left, wealth votes right, which is a switch from how it used to be.
However it seems like at least in usa there isn't that much difference between left and right when it comes to taxing wealth. Hence the steep rise in inequity since regan
During the Reagan era, lobbyists were allowed back into Washington, and officials on both sides (or non-partisan) were quickly captured.
Paul Krugman has a great comment about it. Paraphrased, politicians tend to listen more to well-dressed, well spoken lobbyists than they do nerdy economists.
why a ban?
Lemmy.world, that's why.
He can post on other instances like Lemmy.today but it doesn't get the same amount of viewers.
When the largest instance is ban happy (I guess Americans?), it's going to be controlling the entire Lemmy network.
This sort of thing is not even banned on reddit.
Looked through this sub-Lemmy's front page.
#Unban_sanitation
I like "this is not a joke". I really appreciate anybody trying to put into perspective how insanely unequal things are by using real numbers where possible.
The problem is that things are so unequal that it's just about impossible to illustrate. For example, the "Top 1%" label is perfectly accurate, but doesn't illustrate both how small and also how large the top 1% is. 1% is still 3.5 million people, which is large. It isn't just Bezos and Musk. It's also guys who own car dealerships.
OTOH, it's also small. There are 4 people in that illustration, and the "top 1%" should really be 1 guy in a room of 100.
It's also hard to remember that the "lower 50%" isn't just "the poors". It's literally half the people in the country. It's not 1 guy at a table with 4 people who is only getting crumbs, it's half the people at that table getting crumbs. I would bet that at least 80% of Americans think they're richer than the bottom 50%.
That's also without trying to deal with the issue of "1 billion dollars", which just isn't a number that people have much ability to picture. 1 billion feels like it's similar to "1 million", but it's not.
As a top 1 percenter, I feel seriously offended by the suggestion that I'd sit anywhere close peasants, let alone at the same table.
/s obviously, because I wouldn't be on lemmy if I was anywhere close the top 1%
Actually the top 1% in the US is ~600k per year. It's a lot of cash but not entirely outside the realm of possibility for some extremely senior software architect/manager combo at some VC startup, which is also within the lemmy target audience.
~600k per year
Why are you using income? It's wealth that matters and that's a ~$16M cutoff.
To reach that you'd need to be earning ~600k per year for 2-3 decades, to invest the majority of it, and to get absurd stock returns on top of that.
Yeah but they would never admit to being a 1%er here if they know what's good for them.
And besides, nowadays the real oligarchs are 0.1%ers or even 0.01%ers.
1%ers at this point are literally just the higher end of the upper-middle class...
How about a different kinda slicing?
Financial obesity is neurotoxic, an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but trillionaires should be forced to transition into billionaires, and billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
The due date for the Epstein class’s execution is way overdue
Little bit of data for you:
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/chart/#range:1989.4,2026.2
Yep. It’s is the (nearly) end game of pure capitalism.
Which is why you see lately the attack on anything that is given or provided by government.
Because they want more of the pizza. They want it ALL.
And yet they are meat sacks like the rest of humanity. With all the strengths and weaknesses everyone called a human has.
Why are they special? Why are they allowed to hog ALL the wealth?
Because we let them.
Old but still true. “But there’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education SUCKS, and it’s the same reason it will never, ever, EVER be fixed. It’s never going to get any better, don’t look for it, be happy with what you’ve got. Because the owners, the owners of this country don’t want that. I’m talking about the real owners now, the BIG owners! The Wealthy… the REAL owners! The big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. They are irrelevant. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice! You have OWNERS! They OWN YOU. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want: They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. That’s right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that! You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shitty jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later cause they own this fucking place! It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it! You, and I, are not in the big club. By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table has tilted folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care! Good honest hard-working people; white collar, blue collar it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard-working people continue, these are people of modest means, continue to elect these rich cock suckers who don’t give a fuck about you…. they don’t give a fuck about you… they don’t give a FUCK about you. They don’t care about you at all… at all… AT ALL. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. That’s what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that’s being jammed up their assholes everyday, because the owners of this country know the truth. IT’S CALLED THE AMERICAN DREAM, BECAUSE YOU HAVE TO BE ASLEEP TO BELIEVE IT.” George Carlin
I don't think 1% share a piece, more like crumbs for anyone else than a piece. While the lesser get image or just vague idea of a crumb.
It's exponential by design. It doesn't have to be, but slowly the rich have made it this way as they tried to gain more and more, and lobby for more and more.
Maybe what MAGA could realize is that america was great when income inequality was more in-check.
A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
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