Oh boo hoo. Try making about half that, like me and my wife do (combined). It isn’t fun.
Dude. Get a grip. These people are far closer to you in wealth than the people who fund SuperPACs or own news organizations. You have much more in common with someone who makes $150k/year than you do with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, George Soros, Warren Buffet, Rupert Murdoch, or whoever the fuck else has obscene amounts of money. Those people, the billionaire class, the 0.01%, are the people using their larges to influence politics and media.
These people making $150k/year are overextending themselves, I get it, but if I actually spent the money I wanted to spend on improving my life, especially in relation to things like my health, I would be looking at needing to spend that kind of money each year. My teeth are falling out of my god damned head and I’ve gotten the cost of such things shared with me and it’s out of fucking control. I’m talking like $10k for one of the many problems I have in my mouth. The others aren’t cheaper. All it means is that we are so poor that we’re literally putting off life-saving medical care because it’s fucking unaffordable. All people making $150k a year are doing is just barely scraping by while actually getting that care.
Oh no, they own a single super shitty, hollowed out house that is busted as hell and needs massive repairs constantly. Yeah, man, they’re doing so much better than us just because they have a house. /s Like maybe take a minute and understand a lot of those people just bought their house, and it’s not like they were buying it in their 20’s.
People making this much are not your enemy, they are the people you have to convince that the system is broken and get them on your side.
People whose entire wealth and income comes from investments are the people who are your real fucking enemy.
Because guess what, these $150k/year stiffs still work for a fucking living.
Because I get it, it feels like they have so much more when they’re making over $100k a year more than you, but like, they’re still treading water, just like us, just like this article points out. Trust me, if you were making that money, you’d still be pretty broke unless you didn’t have kids.
Source: my broke ass sister, a lawyer who lives in a fucking hovel that needs tons of repair and is being bled dry by medical bills, child care, a psychopathic narcissist of an ex-husband (who literally lives off of credit cars and spends like Paris Hilton) and housing costs. She didn’t buy her home until she was over 50, she’s Gen X. She’s on thin ice just like me, even though she’s doing better by a lot of measures. The only “investments” she has is her fucking 401K to try to have a halfway decent retirement (ha, as if).
EDIT: Second Source: Just remembered a conversation I had with a friend years ago when I worked at a local mexican restaurant. He was upset at the owner, because he had like a million dollars in the bank. I explained that a lot of that was because he had been in business a long time, and frankly, you need that kind of money to keep a restaurant running (thin margins). I told him at the time that any huge disruptive thing could eat into that million and make a lot of it go away fast. COVID hit, and that restaurant nearly bit the dust, but only JUST scraped through the other side. I bet they don’t have a million in the bank now, they had to shut down to satellite stores where they sold their tortillas.
they’re still treading water, just like us
I currently have 1200 dollars and live in my mother’s basement, because I’m her full time carer while she recovers from cancer. My current retirement plan is a rope. I have a master’s degree in STEM, but you’d be surprised how many homeless people have those too.
Someone earning 150k would have to work thousands of years to become a billionaire, true.
The ultra rich are the true enemy, true.
But Jesus Christ, people earning 150k are not ‘just scraping by’.
Seriously. Get a grip. How out of touch do you have to be to think that? No concept of what true poverty looks like.
As a 40-something guy who literally has cancer and no retirement savings and is wondering how he can even stay alive and has had a year of nothing but suicidal ideation, I still have the capacity to have compassion and not blame other working stiffs for how bad things are for me. I have a degree and I work at a fucking pizza place.
Out of touch my ass, I’m literally living a similar experience. Sorry I have the ability to consider other people’s situations instead of just my own. It’s called empathy, motherfucker. Have you heard of it??
You might have heard of student loans. They can get rather high. You might have also heard about high cost of living areas. Houses can be pretty expensive. Another thing you might have heard about is high mortgage rates.
A new veterinarian with a specialist cert (which requires an undergrad degree, graduate degree, a shitty pay internship, and a shitty pay residency for a long time) will be sitting on $200,000 in loans and make about $200k. Now, if that person lives in Los Angeles and wants to buy a home they are going to have a loan for a million at 7%. Take-home pay on $200k after retirement/insurance/taxes is around $10k/month. Mortgage on a million is $7k/mo. Loan payments on $200k is around $1000/mo. Taxes on that house are about $1000/mo. Right there the take-home pay comes down to $1000/mo to pay for food ($600), utilities ($100), cell phone ($70), car ($300), car insurance ($100), gas ($100) internet ($100), etc. You might notice that those numbers add up to more than $1000.
Sure, that veterinarian who is already 35 years old now after all that schooling can just rent instead of buy a tiny house, but rent still costs $3000/mo in a big city for a small apartment.
Hey, re your teeth, if you can afford this, and it hasn’t changed since then, my dad had to get something like $25,000 in dental work, so they took a trip to Costa Rica, spent about $3000 on the trip, and got the dental work for free. It sucks that people have to resort to things like that, but if you think you could afford that, I would definitely recommend looking into it.
Boo hoo? I make a bit over half of half of that, and I’m getting by just fine. Maybe cut back on the avocado toast if you make 4x what I make and can’t manage to live within those means.
You can pick just about any city in the U.S. and you’ll find insane housing prices.
Famine, disease, collapse, or war. Those are historically the only ways inequality of anywhere near this level has been rectified.
We came close with COVID, but literally the businesses of the world fucking rejoiced that we avoided a Black Plague scenario where enough people died that workers were able to demand better wages. They were so happy it mostly affected old people, because that meant they could just pile those old non-money-makers into wood chippers while they would lean on the able bodied workers dwindling health’s.
You can see it in how it went from “essential workers are heroes!” back to “you should be happy to have a job, I could replace you with anybody in an instant!” pretty much overnight in early 2023.
As fucked up as it is, if more young, able bodied people would have died, the people that were left would have been in a better bargaining position.
On the plus side, millennials aren’t having fucking babies so we’re killing this fucking sick system one way or another by showing how it’s a fucking pyramid scheme that benefits the already-wealthy at the expense of everyone else.
When they won’t have enough workers to keep pushing exponential “growth” each year, this whole fucking kit and caboodle will fall apart. Especially when the workers start actually demanding to have their real human lives back.
Even worse, climate change will probably kick all of our asses far before that’s even possible.
As sad as it is, the last thing that could change things will be the thing that changes them so far for the worse that forward movement will be nearly impossible and society as we know it will likely fail.
Capitalism (depending on how you define it) is coming up on 600 years soon. That’s usually the point at which systems start to break and new ones emerge. Unfortunately, if you’re a fan of Marx you’ll be aware of his theory that cycles of power relations and exploitation tend to reproduce themselves within these new systems - unless that cycle is broken.
I don’t see how that’s possible unless you have a huge family, you have some sort of chronic disease that insurance doesn’t cover, or you’re wildly irresponsible. Even in a high cost-of-living area, a normal family of four could live quite comfortably on that much money and still save some of it.
(I don’t think that many high-earning people are wildly irresponsible. I suspect that this statistic isn’t right.)
I live in a one-bedroom in midtown Manhattan. It costs me about a hundred dollars a day and I’m still saving money on my software developer salary.
That’s pretty steep for a 1 bedroom apartment, 3000ish I assume based on what you said, and I’m guessing it’s not that big. I meanwhile live in a college town in the middle of nowhere and my 3 bedroom house with a garage and basement is 2100 a month.
You’re software developer tho. So you’re a rich person anyways. You don’t understand the struggle
I continually rotate debt through 0% interest deals on credit cards, it’s how I’ve paid for a lot of my home improvements.
Paid for a new roof and awning on the house that way, currently paying for solar panels and a large electrical project.
If a credit card offers me 0% interest for a year, why WOULDN’T I do that instead of paying cash?
I have three different cards now that every time I pay them off they’re like “Heyyyy… here’s some balance transfer checks… 0% until January '25…”
A few additional things to consider:
- Accrued debt
- Areas with highest cost of living tend to also be areas with relatively high population density (San Francisco is usually the go-to example for this)
- Inflexibility of living in austerity
- Intuit benefits from scaring people in the lower and middle economic classes
When people hear “living paycheck to paycheck” they automatically assume it means barely making enough money for essentials. It for sure can mean that, but often people living paycheck to paycheck make good money, they just don’t live within their means. It’s not hard to buy a nicer house and a nicer car than your can really afford, and run up credit card debt, and find yourself in a situation where you can’t pay your bills because you’re overextended, even with a good salary.
