I'll admit up front that I'm the target of this particular essay. It reminds me of an old article I read that talks about how everyone has money problems. It's just that the problems that Warren...
I'll admit up front that I'm the target of this particular essay. It reminds me of an old article I read that talks about how everyone has money problems. It's just that the problems that Warren Buffett has (logistically how to move and manage so much) are a better kind of problem to have than the person living hand to mouth.
But I also feel that this essays line of reasoning runs the risk of creating a pointless class rift when there are bigger fish to fry. Why should I be upset at the doctor making $300k/year, possibly in a high cost of living area? They probably live pretty comfortably, but aren't wealthy. They don't have the ability to live off of dividends. They aren't stuffing super PACs with funds for political campaigns and lobbying.
They definitely have it better than the $60k/year teacher. But they aren't the ones stacking the deck. The author picks on zoning rules, and there is plenty of NIMBYISM in that regard. But I've seen zoning fear mongering in neighborhoods where the median income was $75k. That is a huge problem at all income brackets above the median.
The author also doesn't cite their sources, and doesn't appear quite right. As of 2021, the 80th percentile for household income was ~$149k. You don't even have to be in that high of a COLA for that to be mostly eaten by housing costs. That said, maybe I misread; I'm on my phone and small screens make for difficult fact checking.
I'd much rather focus our efforts on progressive tax structures increasing the top tax bracket past 37% as you make up into the millions, create brackets for capital gains taxes, and tighten up estate taxes to prevent generational hoarding. When folks like musk almost (lol, eat it muskrat) get a $56 BILLION incentive, going after folks in the 80%-95% seems like a distraction.
That said, if anyone in that $250k+ bracket doesn't at least recognize their privilege or whines, they need a reality check and to be called out for it. By all means, tell the whiners to check their privilege, fix zoning, and do it at the state level since the local politicians don't have the guts. But does that mean we should focus our policy reform efforts on that bracket? On tax advantaged college savings accounts? I don't think so.
But like I said at the beginning, that is me, so perhaps I'm biased. All I can say anecdotally is I've never voted against a tax increase that would affect me, even when I made 1/8th what I do now, and most of the people I know in my situation are the same. But I don't generally socialize with folks with regressive social views, so I am in a bit of a bubble.
I’m also likely among the biased, but the way I tend to do this grouping mentally is based on two questions: Do they need to work a full time job to continue to exist? If some disastrous chain of...
I’m also likely among the biased, but the way I tend to do this grouping mentally is based on two questions:
Do they need to work a full time job to continue to exist?
If some disastrous chain of events came through their life like a wrecking ball (say, development of some severe medical condition), how likely are they to end up bankrupt and/or on the street?
By no means am I broke. I’m doing well for someone my age and I’m very cognizant of that, but despite that I’m still extremely vulnerable and living well within my means doesn’t do much to change that. Should the worst come to pass I could hold out a little longer but ultimately my outcome would not differ all that much from that of someone earning much less.
Additionally, we all have our own unique circumstances. Coming from a poor background, I am by far the highest earner in my immediate family and as such feel a responsibility to try to provide what little safety net I can for siblings and parents (since the government isn’t going to) which only increases that vulnerability.
Am I privileged? Yes, very, but at the same time, the top brackets don’t have to worry about any of this. They could disappear to a private island and fund multiple future generations without anybody in their families working a day in their lives. There is effectively nothing that could possibly put them at risk of losing shelter, short of collapse of world governments. A bill that spells instant bankruptcy for me is not even a rounding error for them. They are on an entirely different plane of existence.
Those first two questions describe many retirees. Having enough money so you don’t need to work is what it takes to retire and many people think of this as a reasonable goal, though they may have...
Those first two questions describe many retirees. Having enough money so you don’t need to work is what it takes to retire and many people think of this as a reasonable goal, though they may have to save all their working lives to do it. In this sense, trying to become rich is a widespread aspiration.
(Social Security and Medicare help a lot to answer the second question.)
For sure, but it’s a notoriously difficult goal to achieve and as you note, unusual to reach on a short timescale. It’s usually paid for in several decades of full time work, which in my mind is a...
For sure, but it’s a notoriously difficult goal to achieve and as you note, unusual to reach on a short timescale. It’s usually paid for in several decades of full time work, which in my mind is a terribly unfair trade (years of life are worth far more than that) and so I don’t really include most retirees in the “wealthy” group. This is especially true because these individuals often have to trim down their lifestyles (often dramatically) to not need to work.
For those who manage to retire while relatively young and have done so in a way that doesn’t involve compromise to lifestyle… well, yeah. They’ve “made it” and are among the wealthy (albeit likely in the lowest ranks) and have new social responsibilities.
I've got a metric for financial wellbeing: Unemployed Months to Homelessness. Right now I'm sitting somewhere on the order of 6 months, give or take how long bank will tolerate missed payments on...
I've got a metric for financial wellbeing: Unemployed Months to Homelessness.
Right now I'm sitting somewhere on the order of 6 months, give or take how long bank will tolerate missed payments on mortgage and my willingness to declare bankrupcy after running up credit card debit.
At the wealthiest part of my life, I was sitting more solidly around 9 months. For most of my adult life, it was less than 3.
Anybody who is measuring in years can more or less swallow their crocodile tears about increased taxation.
The tendency towards discontent with taxation as income increases has never made any sense to me. I get that the experience of being taxed kind of sucks, but I also get why taxes are necessary for...
The tendency towards discontent with taxation as income increases has never made any sense to me.
I get that the experience of being taxed kind of sucks, but I also get why taxes are necessary for a functioning society and I can only see myself being less bothered by them if my discretionary income were to increase dramatically for some reason. In that situation I’d have more than enough for myself and increased taxes wouldn’t be threatening that.
Being upset about inefficient or ineffective use of tax funds on the other hand is something I can understand but that’s another subject.
I agree, and very similar on all accounts. I'm paying for more than one family members utilities, because I do make so much more than the rest of my family. But if I suddenly couldn't work or had...
I agree, and very similar on all accounts. I'm paying for more than one family members utilities, because I do make so much more than the rest of my family. But if I suddenly couldn't work or had a six figure medical bill, I'm as sunk as anyone.
I think there’s probably another tier or two. Namely on how easily you can support your direct family/friends, in similar conditions and how immune you are to business/industry shifts. I’ve seen...
I think there’s probably another tier or two. Namely on how easily you can support your direct family/friends, in similar conditions and how immune you are to business/industry shifts. I’ve seen multi millionaires on paper wind up much much less, and not just because of major events like 08.
If you have a million you’re probably fine, but it’s also probably not liquid. It’s tied up in assets or possibly business, and those can sometimes wind up extremely voltage.
It’s somewhere in the 10-100 million range that you start becoming “immune” to failure for the most part. You’re set and your friends and family are set and it would take serious mismanagement to do otherwise
I keep seeing stories that pit groups of people against each other. Race is the most obvious division but lately I've seen a lot about age/generation. There were several headlines last week about...
I keep seeing stories that pit groups of people against each other. Race is the most obvious division but lately I've seen a lot about age/generation. There were several headlines last week about "Boomers are causing a problem by not moving out of their huge houses". Or "Gen X blames millennials for whatever". I find these types of articles infuriating and I think it's a contributor to why we have so much division in the country.
This article is at least mostly true. For sure the upper-middle class separates itself and tries to "pull up the ladder". And the meritocracy myth is one of the tools they use. But I agree with you, the billionaires are a much bigger problem and we should be focusing on that. In fact, I think the billionaires that own the media, including the New York Times, would rather keep all the rest of us fighting over the crumbs and reading these opinion pieces.
Yeah, to be blunt, I was expecting to be very annoyed by this article. This being another "aKtuAlLY we've never been as rich" which can be true in some metrics but ignore the issues individuals,...
I keep seeing stories that pit groups of people against each other. [...] This article is at least mostly true.
Yeah, to be blunt, I was expecting to be very annoyed by this article. This being another "aKtuAlLY we've never been as rich" which can be true in some metrics but ignore the issues individuals, households etc. have currently.
Not being American but having lived there for half a year I actually strongly agree with the conclusions the article presents, though the dynamics are often pretty complicated in how it arrives there. Another thing it reminds me off, though I don't have a source at hand, is that much of psychological research into class in America, and racism in Europe, actually started because they needed to compare data.... after which they were shocked to learn that yes, America is very classist and European countries are in fact racist.
In fact, I think the billionaires that own the media, including the New York Times, would rather keep all the rest of us fighting over the crumbs and reading these opinion pieces.
It's what separates a problem of inequality from a problem of oligarchy in my opinion. A defacto classist, political structure that prevents the countermeasures needed against it. In a weird way, the meritocracy the USA long benefitted from and is protective of created the very thing it was used to fight it with.
I always found the class consciousness of Britain depressing... So imagine my horror at discovering that the United States is more calcified by class than Britain, especially toward the top. The big difference is that most of the people on the highest rung in America are in denial about their privilege. The American myth of meritocracy allows them to attribute their position to their brilliance and diligence, rather than to luck or a rigged system. At least posh people in England have the decency to feel guilty.
Class conciousness is awesome, the USA suffers a lot more without it. We've got even more entrenched classes than most, but it's all masked under all the blurred lines of propaganda and an...
Class conciousness is awesome, the USA suffers a lot more without it.
We've got even more entrenched classes than most, but it's all masked under all the blurred lines of propaganda and an unwillingness to call it how it is.
I've noticed that a lot of Americans don't like British humour, in part because British humour tends to have a good bit of introspective self-deprecation in it. And nothing makes an American squirm quite like a poke at the self-centered ego.
Complete tangent about Cloudflare, cause I'm starting to agree with Archive.is. I've noticed that companies have started redirecting me to Cloudflare's "Are you human" when I spoof Chrome or...
Complete tangent about Cloudflare, cause I'm starting to agree with Archive.is.
I've noticed that companies have started redirecting me to Cloudflare's "Are you human" when I spoof Chrome or Windows UA strings on Firefox/Linux. I do this because it fixes several UI issues because people are increasingly only testing Chrome.... and idiots are still relying on UserAgent to gate functionality. Google's continues to work acceptably.
But anyway, it often doesn't work.... either cloudflare isn't accepting the click when i'm spoofing UA, or the idiot website is ignoring the response and redirecting me back to cloudflare.
Yeah, same. I genuinely do respect Cloudflare's stance on user privacy, but them stripping EDNS client subnet info from HTTP requests causes far more problems than it solves, since that is the...
Yeah, same. I genuinely do respect Cloudflare's stance on user privacy, but them stripping EDNS client subnet info from HTTP requests causes far more problems than it solves, since that is the standard for DNS-based geolocation load balancing. And with the amount of sites that use CDNs and load balancing nowadays, breaking from that standard messes a lot of things up for every user of sites that actually obey the standard, even if those users don't notice it. E.g. The site may just be slower for them since the server they're being connected to could be on the opposite side of the world rather than a closer one. And it's made worse because the way it messes things up is often unpredictable (like your user-agent issue), and many sites treat EDNS subnet stripped requests as being potentially spoofed or malformed, so will outright reject them, or demand CAPTCHA verification over and over again. And to top if off, most users experiencing issues related to what Cloudflare is doing will have no idea that Cloudflare is the culprit, and blame the site they're trying in vain to connect to instead.
Cloudflare's "solution" to this of publishing the records of where their servers are located, which sites can then look up and base their load balancing on instead, is also total BS. It doesn't solve all the issues Cloudflare is causing that are unrelated to load balancing, and Cloudflare is trying to force everyone else in the world to accommodate them for disapproving of the standard, which is selfish AF. And besides that, anyone genuinely concerned about nation-states tracking them via potential EDNS subnet leaks shouldn't be just relying on a "privacy focused" DNS to hide themselves and their IP address in the first place, they should be using VPNs which totally eliminates the potential EDNS subnet leak concern.
If you're curious about what's happening, archive.is blocks Cloudflare traffic due to a bit of a pissing match between them over Cloudflare stripping EDNS client subnet info from HTTP requests....
If you're curious about what's happening, archive.is blocks Cloudflare traffic due to a bit of a pissing match between them over Cloudflare stripping EDNS client subnet info from HTTP requests.
I'll admit up front that I'm the target of this particular essay. It reminds me of an old article I read that talks about how everyone has money problems. It's just that the problems that Warren Buffett has (logistically how to move and manage so much) are a better kind of problem to have than the person living hand to mouth.
But I also feel that this essays line of reasoning runs the risk of creating a pointless class rift when there are bigger fish to fry. Why should I be upset at the doctor making $300k/year, possibly in a high cost of living area? They probably live pretty comfortably, but aren't wealthy. They don't have the ability to live off of dividends. They aren't stuffing super PACs with funds for political campaigns and lobbying.
They definitely have it better than the $60k/year teacher. But they aren't the ones stacking the deck. The author picks on zoning rules, and there is plenty of NIMBYISM in that regard. But I've seen zoning fear mongering in neighborhoods where the median income was $75k. That is a huge problem at all income brackets above the median.
The author also doesn't cite their sources, and doesn't appear quite right. As of 2021, the 80th percentile for household income was ~$149k. You don't even have to be in that high of a COLA for that to be mostly eaten by housing costs. That said, maybe I misread; I'm on my phone and small screens make for difficult fact checking.
I'd much rather focus our efforts on progressive tax structures increasing the top tax bracket past 37% as you make up into the millions, create brackets for capital gains taxes, and tighten up estate taxes to prevent generational hoarding. When folks like musk almost (lol, eat it muskrat) get a $56 BILLION incentive, going after folks in the 80%-95% seems like a distraction.
That said, if anyone in that $250k+ bracket doesn't at least recognize their privilege or whines, they need a reality check and to be called out for it. By all means, tell the whiners to check their privilege, fix zoning, and do it at the state level since the local politicians don't have the guts. But does that mean we should focus our policy reform efforts on that bracket? On tax advantaged college savings accounts? I don't think so.
But like I said at the beginning, that is me, so perhaps I'm biased. All I can say anecdotally is I've never voted against a tax increase that would affect me, even when I made 1/8th what I do now, and most of the people I know in my situation are the same. But I don't generally socialize with folks with regressive social views, so I am in a bit of a bubble.
I’m also likely among the biased, but the way I tend to do this grouping mentally is based on two questions:
By no means am I broke. I’m doing well for someone my age and I’m very cognizant of that, but despite that I’m still extremely vulnerable and living well within my means doesn’t do much to change that. Should the worst come to pass I could hold out a little longer but ultimately my outcome would not differ all that much from that of someone earning much less.
Additionally, we all have our own unique circumstances. Coming from a poor background, I am by far the highest earner in my immediate family and as such feel a responsibility to try to provide what little safety net I can for siblings and parents (since the government isn’t going to) which only increases that vulnerability.
Am I privileged? Yes, very, but at the same time, the top brackets don’t have to worry about any of this. They could disappear to a private island and fund multiple future generations without anybody in their families working a day in their lives. There is effectively nothing that could possibly put them at risk of losing shelter, short of collapse of world governments. A bill that spells instant bankruptcy for me is not even a rounding error for them. They are on an entirely different plane of existence.
Those first two questions describe many retirees. Having enough money so you don’t need to work is what it takes to retire and many people think of this as a reasonable goal, though they may have to save all their working lives to do it. In this sense, trying to become rich is a widespread aspiration.
(Social Security and Medicare help a lot to answer the second question.)
For sure, but it’s a notoriously difficult goal to achieve and as you note, unusual to reach on a short timescale. It’s usually paid for in several decades of full time work, which in my mind is a terribly unfair trade (years of life are worth far more than that) and so I don’t really include most retirees in the “wealthy” group. This is especially true because these individuals often have to trim down their lifestyles (often dramatically) to not need to work.
For those who manage to retire while relatively young and have done so in a way that doesn’t involve compromise to lifestyle… well, yeah. They’ve “made it” and are among the wealthy (albeit likely in the lowest ranks) and have new social responsibilities.
I've got a metric for financial wellbeing: Unemployed Months to Homelessness.
Right now I'm sitting somewhere on the order of 6 months, give or take how long bank will tolerate missed payments on mortgage and my willingness to declare bankrupcy after running up credit card debit.
At the wealthiest part of my life, I was sitting more solidly around 9 months. For most of my adult life, it was less than 3.
Anybody who is measuring in years can more or less swallow their crocodile tears about increased taxation.
The tendency towards discontent with taxation as income increases has never made any sense to me.
I get that the experience of being taxed kind of sucks, but I also get why taxes are necessary for a functioning society and I can only see myself being less bothered by them if my discretionary income were to increase dramatically for some reason. In that situation I’d have more than enough for myself and increased taxes wouldn’t be threatening that.
Being upset about inefficient or ineffective use of tax funds on the other hand is something I can understand but that’s another subject.
I agree, and very similar on all accounts. I'm paying for more than one family members utilities, because I do make so much more than the rest of my family. But if I suddenly couldn't work or had a six figure medical bill, I'm as sunk as anyone.
I think there’s probably another tier or two. Namely on how easily you can support your direct family/friends, in similar conditions and how immune you are to business/industry shifts. I’ve seen multi millionaires on paper wind up much much less, and not just because of major events like 08.
If you have a million you’re probably fine, but it’s also probably not liquid. It’s tied up in assets or possibly business, and those can sometimes wind up extremely voltage.
It’s somewhere in the 10-100 million range that you start becoming “immune” to failure for the most part. You’re set and your friends and family are set and it would take serious mismanagement to do otherwise
I keep seeing stories that pit groups of people against each other. Race is the most obvious division but lately I've seen a lot about age/generation. There were several headlines last week about "Boomers are causing a problem by not moving out of their huge houses". Or "Gen X blames millennials for whatever". I find these types of articles infuriating and I think it's a contributor to why we have so much division in the country.
This article is at least mostly true. For sure the upper-middle class separates itself and tries to "pull up the ladder". And the meritocracy myth is one of the tools they use. But I agree with you, the billionaires are a much bigger problem and we should be focusing on that. In fact, I think the billionaires that own the media, including the New York Times, would rather keep all the rest of us fighting over the crumbs and reading these opinion pieces.
Yeah, to be blunt, I was expecting to be very annoyed by this article. This being another "aKtuAlLY we've never been as rich" which can be true in some metrics but ignore the issues individuals, households etc. have currently.
Not being American but having lived there for half a year I actually strongly agree with the conclusions the article presents, though the dynamics are often pretty complicated in how it arrives there. Another thing it reminds me off, though I don't have a source at hand, is that much of psychological research into class in America, and racism in Europe, actually started because they needed to compare data.... after which they were shocked to learn that yes, America is very classist and European countries are in fact racist.
It's what separates a problem of inequality from a problem of oligarchy in my opinion. A defacto classist, political structure that prevents the countermeasures needed against it. In a weird way, the meritocracy the USA long benefitted from and is protective of created the very thing it was used to fight it with.
TL;DR
Class conciousness is awesome, the USA suffers a lot more without it.
We've got even more entrenched classes than most, but it's all masked under all the blurred lines of propaganda and an unwillingness to call it how it is.
I've noticed that a lot of Americans don't like British humour, in part because British humour tends to have a good bit of introspective self-deprecation in it. And nothing makes an American squirm quite like a poke at the self-centered ego.
Mirror, for those hit by the paywall:
https://archive.is/rc1kf
Complete tangent about Cloudflare, cause I'm starting to agree with Archive.is.
I've noticed that companies have started redirecting me to Cloudflare's "Are you human" when I spoof Chrome or Windows UA strings on Firefox/Linux. I do this because it fixes several UI issues because people are increasingly only testing Chrome.... and idiots are still relying on UserAgent to gate functionality. Google's continues to work acceptably.
But anyway, it often doesn't work.... either cloudflare isn't accepting the click when i'm spoofing UA, or the idiot website is ignoring the response and redirecting me back to cloudflare.
Yeah, same. I genuinely do respect Cloudflare's stance on user privacy, but them stripping EDNS client subnet info from HTTP requests causes far more problems than it solves, since that is the standard for DNS-based geolocation load balancing. And with the amount of sites that use CDNs and load balancing nowadays, breaking from that standard messes a lot of things up for every user of sites that actually obey the standard, even if those users don't notice it. E.g. The site may just be slower for them since the server they're being connected to could be on the opposite side of the world rather than a closer one. And it's made worse because the way it messes things up is often unpredictable (like your user-agent issue), and many sites treat EDNS subnet stripped requests as being potentially spoofed or malformed, so will outright reject them, or demand CAPTCHA verification over and over again. And to top if off, most users experiencing issues related to what Cloudflare is doing will have no idea that Cloudflare is the culprit, and blame the site they're trying in vain to connect to instead.
Cloudflare's "solution" to this of publishing the records of where their servers are located, which sites can then look up and base their load balancing on instead, is also total BS. It doesn't solve all the issues Cloudflare is causing that are unrelated to load balancing, and Cloudflare is trying to force everyone else in the world to accommodate them for disapproving of the standard, which is selfish AF. And besides that, anyone genuinely concerned about nation-states tracking them via potential EDNS subnet leaks shouldn't be just relying on a "privacy focused" DNS to hide themselves and their IP address in the first place, they should be using VPNs which totally eliminates the potential EDNS subnet leak concern.
I'm getting infinite captchas when trying to access this.
Are you using Cloudflare DNS?
I don't know what that is, so probably no.
Are you using Firefox? They use Cloudflare DNS over HTTPS by default.
Turning it off or switching providers to say Quad9 will resolve.
I am actually. Although I tried again and now it opens up without any captcha. Odd.
If you're curious about what's happening, archive.is blocks Cloudflare traffic due to a bit of a pissing match between them over Cloudflare stripping EDNS client subnet info from HTTP requests.
Cloudflare's stance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828702
Archive.is's stance: https://twitter.com/archiveis/status/1018691421182791680
See above for my own opinion on the subject.