You skipped my last sentence. It’s too late, was my point.
Look, the level of wealth concentration has become absolutely historic and beyond absurd. The problem with wealth aggregation is that you end up with dollar democracy. The level of dollars equals the democratic outcome, and no bajillionaire ever votes themselves a tax increase, a limit on lobby power, or a crackdown on all manner of once illegal, now legal financial practices.
Still, these type of visualizations always piss me off. The comparison really touted in this is median household income to vast wealth holdings. Why? You compare apples to apples, not oranges. Income isn’t wealth, it’s what you earn yearly, not your net worth.
Maybe median net worth is slightly higher, maybe it’s negative. I don’t know, but this comparison just invites criticism when a legit wealth to wealth comparison would probably show damn near the same thing.
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The visualization used median annual income ($63k). Yeah median net worth is the better comparison, but as has been said upthread that is $97k. So it would change that enormous graphic by exactly 34 pixels.
Agree completely. The supreme court has quite clearly stated that Government has no interest “in equalizing the relative ability of individuals and groups to influence the outcome of elections.” If I were to list the jobs of government, trying to equalize people’s power to elect officials would be damn near the top of the list
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Yes, so why confuse any issue and invite any criticism? Certainly not for 31 pixels. This sort of mixing income to wealth is very common in critiques and charts where income and/or wealth inequality are mentioned or shown, and lots of smarty pants point out how the authors are confused and have no idea what they’re talking because they mix the two (income, wealth). It lets people dismiss what should be a legitimate issue because of sloppiness.
It IS a legitimate issue! It ought to be the only issue at this point politically. You want to know why we can’t have nice things like clean energy, real universal healthcare, or free state college? It’s because the mentally ill people hailed as the one percent have negated any chance of these things becoming actual.
You obviously know this. I just hate that, at this point, there is still confusion when illustrating the ridiculous financial fever dream we all live in.
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