More Venting About The 1%

The NY Times has a nice fluff piece on the 1% here which includes lots of completely irrelevant and rather stupid bits of information. The worst offender is the note that being in the local 1% is different in different places. No shit, because people with shit-tons of wealth tend to live in wealthy places just like poor people tend to live in poor places. Because where we live is a reflection of our wealth/income/status not the other fucking way around!

Someone living in Nassau can't cry about being poor because they only make $400k and then proceed to bitch that it doesn't go far because the cheap houses in Nassau are $500k, and private schools are expensive, and...STFU! Where you live has zero effect on whether you are rich or not, because--and this seems really hard for lots of the 1% to grasp--you can fucking move! You can even move and live in the same area. There are plenty of New York City residents that make way under $100k/year, so it's possible. It isn't even that fucking hard.

So, no, $500k, $400k, even the paltry sum of $250k is not poor, or middle class. So while a just starting out MD with $100k in loan debt making $150k/year can't afford to take a helicopter to work, or to spend a week on a private island, or to own a 40' yacht (at least not yet), they don't have any financial hardship that should merit any sympathy from anyone else on the planet.

Moreover, and this is another gripe, but it isn't even that they don't deserve or didn't earn the money (though for lots of the top 0.1% that may be true, especially when it comes to wealth not income), it's that they aren't some put-upon, downtrodden, schlemiel trying to make ends meet.

Rich people, particularly the hardworking, well educated variety, are not hated in this country. Not even close. The inequality (of opportunity) is. If you are born to poor, uneducated parents today, you're kind of screwed. Very, very few work their way up from that, and many of those that have did so more than 20 years ago when the playing field was more even than today. The past 10 years has seen such dramatic shift in government encouraged inequality that no one who really pulled his/herself up by the bootstraps can really speak to what that means unless they are under 40, and even then it's iffy. This country is that much different.

Pretty much all Americans dream of being rich someday. A majority of Americans consider that to be ~$150k/year. That's a lot of money, even in New York.