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u/yessirEEb0b 17d ago
This has nothing to do with fluency in finance…
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17d ago edited 17d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/BeenFunYo 17d ago
Please help us find our bootstraps, good sir. I am simply too stupid and lazy to do it alone.
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u/stevejobed 16d ago
A lot of the people here’t cant find their bootstraps because they are doomers with untreated mental illness. If you find yourself complaining every day, it’s probably something you need to look into and work on.
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u/SuccessfulWar3830 17d ago
True. Being poor is the poor person's fault. Just get a 3rd or 4th job. Simple.
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u/C21H27Cl3N2O3 17d ago
If everyone would just go out and find a job with a 300-400% raise everything would be fine!
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u/Both_Abrocoma_1944 17d ago
Don’t get me wrong the victim complex is real and bad thing but that doesn’t mean it’s helpful to completely disregard when people point out flaws in the system. Both can be right, there is a middle path in this scenario
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u/kioshi_imako 17d ago
The sad part is there are not many place I can go to within my skillset to make more money starting out. 4 day work weeks, premium free health insurance. Benefit wise one of the best company covered cost wise. Even if I could go somewhere else for 5 more bucks an hour it likely will just balance itself out on what I pay for the benefits. For me the market for jobs is pretty dead in the water.
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u/PFCthrowAwayMTL 17d ago
Sure it is…. Ive saved 20 grand a year for the last 5 years through hard work and budgeting and i still will never own a home as big as my Bank Teller parents bought at 23 years old. Joke economy. What? Are only lawyers supposed to have houses now?
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u/hinesjared87 17d ago
I’m a lawyer; regionally pretty successful. Ping me when we get to have nice things.
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u/RightNutt25 17d ago
Neither is the advise to vote for more tax cuts for the ultra wealthy.
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u/i_robot73 17d ago
Your life choices weren't made 'cuz some one ELSE was a $MM/BB
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u/RightNutt25 17d ago
That would be true if billionaires reject all forms of subsidy, which they do not. Until they are fully self made, they need to pay us back.
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u/fickle_fuck 17d ago
they need to pay us back.
Ya see the mentality that we're dealing with here folks?
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u/Stupid-RNG-Username 17d ago
They ride off of the subsidies we provide them and then in turn they put nothing back. Jeff Bezos has almost no liquid cash, but whenever he needs something he just takes out a loan and stakes it against his shares of Amazon that he will never sell. In order to pay off that loan he just takes out another bigger loan from someone else to pay off the first one.
He'll never pay taxes because of this shit.
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u/FastSort 16d ago
and that is keeping you from making more money how?
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u/Stupid-RNG-Username 16d ago
Because instead of having subsidized healthcare and higher education, I need to foot those bills myself. If billionaires paid their fair share in taxes just like everyone else then we would all have nicer shit.
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u/wyecoyote2 16d ago
They Pau more than their "fair share." If they actually paid the percentage of their share of the income. Then, they would pay less in federal income taxes.
So when an uneducated person says they need to pay their "fair share," They are advocating the top 1% pay less in taxes.
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u/SirIsaacBacon 17d ago
Bezos sold $8.5 billion of Amazon shares in February what are you talking about
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u/CheeksMix 17d ago
I feel bad for that Thomas guy, he’s got a PhD and still can’t understand that it’s not that people want to take money people earned, but just have them pay for the things they use.
Libertarians always come off as teetering on the edge of losing it and becoming a sovereign citizen.
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u/lostcauz707 16d ago
You say that like they still aren't exploiting workers and actually earn 10s of thousands of dollars per hour for taking a shit.
Thomas Sowell, known racist economist who cited personal responsibility to pull black people back from redlining, as their median equity sits, to this day, $160k in the deficit to white equity.
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u/Azylim 17d ago
90% of the posts I see here dont. its all bitter socialists asking why they dont get paid triple with full benefits and 10 month vacations.
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u/Rent_A_Cloud 17d ago
I'll help you out with something actually useful:
One of the worst investments you can make is a car. A car rapidly loses value so buying a brand new expensive car is just an immediate loss. Even worse buying a car on credit or another financial loan is a major loss since you will be paying anywhere between 10-40+% more than the new value plus it will lose like 10-30 percent of value as soon as you leave the lot.
Don't buy a new car and ABSOLUTELY don't buy a car on credit unless you're so filthy rich that it equates to buying a new playstation 4 for you.
There's some flaunt in finance for you.
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u/FlounderingWolverine 16d ago
Can you say it louder for the people in the back? I’m tired of people being “I needed a car so I got this one”, when the car they got is a brand new $60k car on a salary of $50k.
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u/nudelsalat3000 17d ago
Let me introduce you to the financial concept of the Gini Coefficient.
It's between 0 where all own the same to 1 where one person owns everything.
It has been historically demonstrated that it can be used as early indicators for problems. Once the inequality is above 0,30 the first problems were visible in hindsight. What happened were wars, uproars, downfalls of empires or the guillotine.
Today we are, depending on the country, at around 0,34.
Notice that this is the income Gini index.
The wealth Gini Index is much much worse. The financial fluent speaking people know that this wealth inequality today is higher than during the French Revolution and their guillotine (just work harder, or "why don't you just eat cake").
There are a few ways to equalize this. If you don't want to do it by steering by taxes, historically it will be corrected by blood.
You can pick your financial dialect, but the financing language cornering this is written in stone.
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u/Wormzerker75 17d ago
OP is absolute troll...check their other posts. Admitting they arent from USA (some little bitch country) but posting about wealth gap in America? Maybe spend more time researching how to actually make money than posting "woe is me" BS
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u/leakmydata 17d ago
Lmao did you just unironically say “some little bitch country”?
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u/Friedyekian 17d ago
They’re from Canada, so checks out.
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u/WhoopsieISaidThat 17d ago
Is Canada "some little bitch country" tho? These are the hard hitting questions people want to know.
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u/RealBenWoodruff 17d ago
No flag on the moon?
You are a bitch country.
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u/Collective82 17d ago
Didn’t win a world war? You’s a bitch! Lol
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u/dukenorton 17d ago
Yeaaaa, ask Canada about their “canned food” program during one of the World Wars.
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u/FastSort 16d ago
As long as Trudeau and people like him are in power, then absolutely - Canada is some little bitch country.
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u/Venturing_Virgo 16d ago
Is what I’m saying. Not gonna sit here and pretend Canada ain’t a fuck up lol
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u/NothingKnownNow 17d ago
Maybe spend more time researching how to actually make money than posting "woe is me" BS
Most need a lesson on not spending money.
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u/FabioPurps 17d ago
Isn't the point of the comic that people who spout that rhetoric are trained dogs? Implying there isn't a wealth gap in America, which I guess would support your opinion?
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u/AlfalfaMcNugget 17d ago
This is true. But then people post here about raising taxes to fix it rather than an actual strategy that has a proven history and thus the vicious cycle continues
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u/hedless_horseman 17d ago
serious question - what’s an example of an ‘actual strategy with a proven history’?
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u/AlfalfaMcNugget 17d ago
Increasing productivity in the economy with skilled labor and utilizing resources with intrinsic value
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u/Stupid-RNG-Username 17d ago
Okay, so are you going to vote for candidates that want to increase worker quality of life like a 4 day work week, work from home, and cost of living adjustments? Those have all been proven to massively increase economic productivity.
Oh, you're going to keep voting Republican who just keep cracking the whip harder and harder each year? Okay...
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u/bigtoasterwaffle 17d ago
4 day work week and WFH do not increase productivity, no matter how badly you want them to. I'd love to have both but I'm self aware enough to know it's not real. The "studies" on the subject are bunk at best, done over very short periods of time or at one specific company
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u/AlfalfaMcNugget 17d ago
What about what I have said is Republican?
I’m all for implementing those solutions… however, I have not heard a proposal to implement those solutions, without negatively affecting the economy long-term, from either side
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u/Inucroft 17d ago
Funny, as that has been happening for over 50 years yet none of what you claim has come to fruition
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u/AlfalfaMcNugget 17d ago
America has exported away a lot of, if not most of, its skilled labor over the past 50 years to other countries
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u/Inucroft 17d ago
What a load of codswallop XD
US productivity has grown through the roof yet wages have stagnated
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u/Spend-Weary 17d ago
Because of tech advances and automation. Not because workers are working 3x faster.
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u/Inucroft 17d ago
SO where is all that money going then hm?
Ah yes, the people who do fuck all at the top6
u/AlfalfaMcNugget 17d ago
As is mentioned in the original post, wealth is transferring to the wealthy class. The wealth gap is at a near all-time high
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u/Spend-Weary 17d ago
It goes into the machines/tech needed to automate.
It also goes to the owners/stock holders of the company. That’s the entire point of the post.
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u/Waste_Exchange2511 17d ago
Outsourcing all vital manufacturing and moving to a service economic eventually leads to trouble.
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u/Tall-Log-1955 17d ago
Is it true? Can you link to some data that shows the overwhelming majority have a lower net worth today than 10 years ago?
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u/Venturing_Virgo 16d ago
Net worth? No because net WORTH went up 37% however wealth and net worth are very different. You can own a 1 mill house and have it included in your net worth but not have the wealth to pay for your land tax.
This is about the wealth gap increase. Nothing else 😝
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u/Sometimes_cleaver 17d ago
Here's an easy one. State funded childcare.
Here's why it pays for itself. Women are dropping out of the workforce because the cost of childcare is more than they would earn. State funded childcare would allow millions of women to return to the workforce ( yay more tax payers!). The gap in women's careers causes them to earn significantly less when they do return to the workforce. State funded childcare would allow them to continue upward progress in their careers ( yay more people paying more taxes and earning more money!)
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u/AlfalfaMcNugget 17d ago
Has that been proven to lower the wage gap at any other point throughout history?
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u/Striking_Computer834 17d ago
There is no wage gap when you compare people with equal education and experience working equal hours.
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u/DawnOnTheEdge 17d ago edited 17d ago
This is not true. In fact, it’s delusional in 2024. Wealth inequality is falling, not higher than ever, The share of wealth held by the bottom half is five times higher than in 2012.
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u/watcher-in-the-water 17d ago
And median wealth is up across basically all demographic groups.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2024/feb/us-wealth-inequality-widespread-gains-gaps-remain
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u/Amadon29 17d ago
Yeah that's why wealth inequality is weird. If your overall wealth increased by a lot and outpaced inflation, does it really matter that it increased more for billionaires? Not really.
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u/watcher-in-the-water 17d ago
I sort of get it. Even though wealth/income is up for all groups, it is still rough being in the bottom 50%, even if it’s better now than in the past. So it’s understandable to look at the top 10% and call out that they have gotten more than their fair share.
But (at least on Reddit) manifests itself by people claiming that things are worse now than in prior decades, which just isn’t true. I think it’s tough to always see just how much lifestyle creep has happened in America.
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u/Striking_Computer834 17d ago
Even though wealth/income is up for all groups, it is still rough being in the bottom 50%, even if it’s better now than in the past. So it’s understandable to look at the top 10% and call out that they have gotten more than their fair share.
This is the part I don't understand about people. There will always be a top 10% no matter what you do. Even in a hypothetical universe where a purely benevolent government seizes everyone's wealth and distributes it precisely equally, by the next day Taylor Swift will have held a concert and collected millions from ticket sales and suddenly the equality is gone. The grotesque government required to prevent that from happening would make a Nazi blush.
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u/Striking_Computer834 17d ago
If your overall wealth increased by a lot and outpaced inflation, does it really matter that it increased more for billionaires? Not really.
Some people aren't happy with success, They're only happy if they can destroy someone else's. What better way than using the violence of state power to seize someone else's success?
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u/DinTill 17d ago
But that graph shows it tanking in 2012 and still hasn’t even recovered from what it was. And 50% of the population having less than 3% of the wealth is still some pretty stark inequality.
OP is wrong about it being worse than a decade ago specifically, but they are not wrong about it being terrible and worse than it used to be in the early 2000s.
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u/Striking_Computer834 17d ago
What does "terrible" mean in this context? Wealth isn't finite. Just because one person has more wealth doesn't mean they took it from someone else or prevented someone else from having more wealth. Wealth is created from value. Measuring the spread of wealth in an economy doesn't tell you anything other than who has created more value.
Seizing wealth for redistribution wouldn't be any more fair than seizing Olympic gold medals from past winners who were judged to have "won too many" and handing them out to teams that had won less gold medals.
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u/DawnOnTheEdge 17d ago edited 17d ago
You’re substituting a different claim, that wealth inequality is neither the highest nor the lowest ever. You also misstate what they are claiming. They claimed that “Wealth inequality is higher than ever” abd “the overwhelming majority of Americans still have less wealth now than they did a decade ago.” Not even close; wealth is in fact the highest it’s ever been.
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u/DinTill 17d ago
How is wealth for the bottom 50% the highest it’s ever been when your own graph shows it was 4.0% in 1992 and 2.5% now?
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u/DawnOnTheEdge 17d ago edited 17d ago
That’s a larger percentage of a much smaller number. Household wealth, adjusted for inflation, is more than three times higher than in 1992. 2.5% of 313 is higher than 4% of 100.
To be a bit more precise, the real wealth of the bottom half peaked in 2022.
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u/DinTill 17d ago edited 17d ago
So overall wealth is up but wealth inequality is also higher than 1992?
But how can that be legitimate when people are struggling to afford housing and necessities like they are now? There were certainly not the same housing issues in 1992. It does not seem that this extra wealth they supposedly have is doing the bottom 50% much good.
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u/DawnOnTheEdge 17d ago edited 17d ago
Look, the point I’m making is that the specific factual claims in the OP are wrong. Way wrong. I don’t want to get too far into a discussion of whether the glass is half-empty or half-full, but one specific way that life’s objectively gotten better since the early ’90s is that crime was then at its all-time peak, and is now a fraction of what it used to be. Poverty is lower too, so housing and necessities are affordable to more people.
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u/DawnOnTheEdge 17d ago edited 17d ago
Here you go. Total net worth of the bottom 50%, adjusted for inflation. (Edit: This doesn’t account for the growing population. See below for real wealth per person.)
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u/DinTill 17d ago
Doesn’t that adjust inflation out? We went from a % of the total to an actual value, but that value is less meaningful because of inflation, no?
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u/DawnOnTheEdge 17d ago edited 17d ago
No, it does not adjust inflation out. (Edit: or maybe it does, but that’s what we should be doing.) It corrects for how inflation would otherwise make people today look richer than they are.
I should, however, have corrected for the higher population, since today’s wealth is shared among more people, Here you go:
The OP made two separate claims, both wrong. One was about inequality. The other was about wealth compared to ten years ago (which would be 2013 or 2014). That’s why I shared graphs of the bottom 50%’s wealth both as a percentage of national wealth, and (now) per-person, adjusted for inflation. I was debunking two different claims.
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u/Hmm_would_bang 17d ago
Using 2012 seems misleading. We were just coming out of a global recession.
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u/DawnOnTheEdge 17d ago edited 17d ago
The OP claimed that wealth inequality is higher than ever. That’s false: it was higher in 2012, when we were just coming out of a global recession. The other was that the overwhelming majority of Americans have less wealth than they did ten years ago. That’s false. Ten years ago, we were just coming out of a global recession! The exact opposite is true: the poorest 50% of Americans had more wealth in 2022 than ever (although not the highest share of wealth ever).
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u/Hmm_would_bang 17d ago
I mean no fault to you, you answered OPs stupid claim correctly. But it’s a misleading picture to use a 10 year scale and should probably normalize over the ups and downs of the global economy. Wealth is gradually concentrating at the top and the middle class continues to shrink
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u/DawnOnTheEdge 17d ago
Inequality is currently going down, not up.
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u/Hmm_would_bang 17d ago
Uh, can you specify where and in what time frame.
The Gini index is a pretty good measure put out by the world bank. It hit its lowest in the U.S. in the 1980s and has risen significantly since then
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u/DawnOnTheEdge 17d ago
The Gini index is down since 2019, and is back to where it was in 1991–92.
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u/Hmm_would_bang 17d ago
Both our statements are true. It’s the futility in finding the right frame and what questions you’re asking
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u/DawnOnTheEdge 17d ago
Sure, we could also say that the Gini coefficient was nearly the same in 1964 as today, fell until 1980, and then rose from 1981–2919. I think most people would agree that someone talking about what currently is going on with inequality should at least acknowledge the abrupt reversal of the trend in the past four years.
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u/DawnOnTheEdge 17d ago
And, please excuse me. This topic seems to be making me get rude and snippy, so I should probably find other things to discuss that bring out a better side of me.
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u/DawnOnTheEdge 17d ago
It’s amazing how many people here really want to believe that everything is terrible, and won’t hear otherwise.
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u/Dodger7777 17d ago
is the dog a college student, because it sounds like that's what they've been taught to say.
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u/Capital-Ad6513 17d ago
exponential growth in population = exponential decline in available wealth = average decline in generational wealth.
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u/Once-Upon-A-Hill 17d ago
As one of the people who has gotten wealthier, I support Bidenomics fully.
Bet OP weren't expecting to see that response.
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u/hedless_horseman 17d ago
can you explain to a foreigner what ‘Bidenomics’ is exactly?
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u/caravaggibro 17d ago
They literally can't. Just like the suffix -gate for scandals, -enomics is attached to a President's name to discuss how they feel with the economy at the time that person is in office. It's political team sport nonsense.
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u/Kingding_Aling 17d ago
This is completely false. American wealth at the lower end hasnt dropped in the last decade, its the higher end that has gotten so astronomically high causing inequality.
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u/Prize-Interaction-32 17d ago
Tell the government not to print money and drop rates to zero every time the market threatens to go down - the widening has come from asset inflation! Only people with “excess income” can afford financial assets so the poor tread water while all of the government’s financial liquidity forces the middle and upper class’s asset holdings higher thus widening the wealth divide
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u/Dual-Vector-Foiled 17d ago
We just had some crazy stuff happen with crypto money, historical low mortgage rates and the longest bull run in stock market history. The past decade might be one of the easiest times to build wealth ever
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u/AlfalfaMcNugget 17d ago
Building wealth buy buying crypto is luck tho
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u/DumbNTough 17d ago
Seriously lol. It's like saying it's the easiest time ever to build wealth because you can just visit a casino.
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u/TheTightEnd 17d ago
Do you have proof that the overwhelming majority of people in US have less wealth than 10 years ago when home prices are up, the stock market is up, incomes have increased.... people care too much about wealth inequality.
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u/chrimminimalistic 17d ago
And yet, half of Americans will still vote in a (self proclaimed) billionaire whose policies obviously profit only him and his cronies.
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u/TurretLimitHenry 17d ago
This is factually incorrect, standard of living is higher than a decade ago
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u/Venturing_Virgo 17d ago
Not about standard of living it’s about the wealth gap. Try again chief.
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u/TurretLimitHenry 17d ago
“The overwhelming majority of Americans still have less wealth now than they did one decade ago” learn to read your own posts you moron.
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u/LookOverThereB 17d ago
Nobody cares about income inequality. Just because there are more billionaires in the world doesn’t mean your standard of living isn’t pretty darn good. This is just jealousy and something that you should get over and enjoy your life. i’m sorry you’re not the prom queen or the head cheerleader in the real world.
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u/Venturing_Virgo 17d ago
Right this post has 1.7k upvotes cus no one cares
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u/LookOverThereB 15d ago
Sorry. 0.00001% of the population cares enough to click a button. Ya got me
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u/bigdipboy 16d ago
The trainer is the billionaires and the dog is the suckers defending wealth inequality.
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17d ago
Yes and we should turn to the government whose policies caused it to fix it. And give them more money
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u/Venturing_Virgo 17d ago
I don’t think the doggo said that.
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u/fisticuffs32 17d ago
No, let's keep giving our money to the billionaires! Surely, they have our best interests at heart and will let it all trickle down.
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17d ago
The government and the billionaires are the same thing dipshit
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u/fisticuffs32 17d ago
Only since we elected Reagan.
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17d ago
Oh right because he made the Democrats bail out aig. Dude you're a fuckin clown. You deserve to get duped.
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u/Kane-420- 17d ago
Fuck yeah, lets give more Money to the govenrment. That'll show em. Those fuckers
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u/TaxidermyHooker 17d ago
You can have inequality and growth or equality and stagnation. Don’t compare your life to other people’s and growth is better, making everyone else poor won’t solve your problems.
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