“The bottom 60%” gives more detail than merely saying “the majority”.
The Media: “Work harder and no $7 lattés!”
Do people post reply’s, then screen cap it, and share their reply to everywhere?
$105411, a household income in the top 10th percentile globally, isn’t enough to afford minimal quality of life?
edit:
The Shared Economic Prosperity (SEP) Measure, a companion to the MQL, compares the income needed to achieve a minimal quality of life (as defined by the MQL) to actual income distribution, revealing a stark imbalance. In 2023, the bottom 60% of households earned just 22.1% of all disposable income but needed 39% to meet MQL. On average, these households earn $38,000 per year, falling more than $29,000 short of the MQL.
Why would you take an average out of the subset of the lowest 60% and make a statement about that entire 60% not being able to reach MQL, that’s some goofy math.
This reminded me of the guy who shared on his socials that he scored so high on his IQ test, he was the “top 90% of all participants”.
And now he even has his very own platform!
America is a country for only richwhitemen. Everyone else is just fodder.
Dont need to racialize it. Plenty of rich PoS PoC
It’s already racialized. About few hundred years too late to avoid that.
Jensen Huang up there repping Asians
So we can only assume that user I replied to thinks 1 is “plenty”.
Ghouls.
Targets.
Rich yes, white - hell no.
When we’re talking about a socialist politician “almost half don’t support”
When we’re talking about the working class “bottom 60% are struggling”
I see what’s going on here. What a world…
but hey… um… ok, nevermind, this just sucks
I suspect that 60% is gonna grow to a 90% rapidly in the coming years.
We only need to organize twelve million Americans to counter this.
Sadly, we’ll need to organize twelve million Americans to counter this.
Obviously, we aren’t giving billionaires enough wealth to create jobs.
Yeah, and besides that, they’re smarter and more innovative and creative than the rest of us. So, either way, they deserve it.
Without them we could end up with socialism where people might even have democratic control over their workplaces. And of course that would be much worse. For instance, cooperatives are only better in theory, wait, and in practice…
Hey, 'Murica?
How does all this “winning” feel?
Yours contemptuously,
The civilised world
Lol, as an European, don’t get too smug. Our leaders, media & billionaires are frothing at the mouth thinking following the US’ path.
Oh it’s worse than that. Once America’s billionaires plunder the US treasury and tank the bond market (so we can’t borrow any more), they’ll make good their escape and then do the same to the rest of the developed world.
They’re richer than any royalty or industrialist robber baron has in history by at least a factor of four, and can afford to buy all the elections and capture all of the governments.
Quarries and data centers as far as the eye can see.
Honestly, it hurts and we’re tired of it. Send help, or like a sniper or something.
How about you stand the fuck up and fight, you absolute cowards
“It hurts and we’re tired of it, forget that we’ve done fuck all to fix it.”
I’ll celebrate as much as anyone the day the dipshit is no longer with us, but he didn’t singlehandedly cause this, nor will getting rid of him magically fix everything.
And the fact is, not all Americans are tired of it. There are millions of Americans who are perfectly happy with things the way they are. There are millions more who would be perfectly content if all else were unchanged but we had a slightly less embarrassing commander in chief, as though that’s our only problem. It isn’t. Not by a long shot.
I’m an American emigrant, living in Germany, and it’s weird: there are so many layers of problems, that I can’t accurately express what it feels like to watch your home country burn itself and anyone it can take with it to the ground from afar. The closest I can come is “shameful,” when people ask, but I worry that comes off as though I just find trump embarrassing.
I absolutely do, but it’s more that I feel deep shame for ever having believed the propaganda I was raised with; every new, horrible thing this president does is a fucking disgrace; and the mask-off nature of the administration reveals other shameful aspects of American culture and history*, which were previously less known to Europeans.
Just cutting off USAID, NOAA, and American participation in the WHO have or will all contribute to preventable deaths of innocent people around the world (there are too many things to consider them all here). We were at one point well-organized, dedicated, and well-connected enough to have a net positive effect on the world (had we chosen to do so, which we continually did not). We had a robust social safety net for some of the population at one point which could have been expanded to cover everyone in the country. By not doing that, we’ve almost certainly forced people who could have been highly skilled doctors, gifted artists, or creative inventors into wage labor, prison, or an early grave.
Because of what?
Racism?
That weird little fantasy about how the details of a person’s phenotype affect their personality or ability? It’s just a malignant, bizarro-world version of astrology! Race isn’t based in genetic science, and even if they try to suggest that there are differences based on race that are transmitted through culture, it quickly leads to the realization that perhaps treating some people as an underclass is not a good thing for society, actually, so they’re clearly not going about it that way.
It’s repeated a lot, but the cruelty really seems to be the point.
That’s a terrible shame.
*it also revealed a level of solidarity shown by people protesting ICE that I was really happily surprised by, to be clear. It’s not all bad, but there are many ways that could have been revealed which would have been infinitely better.
Firstly, racism is always a thing. Xenophobia is how humans kept infectious diseases at bay for most of human existence. But then we did the agriculture thing and decided to try out larger societies. Throughout history, though societies have always had to contend with half the population hating the other half enough to get violent.
The whole point of post-enlightenment civilizations is to treat everyone equally. But the US’ economy depended on slavery, and we weren’t ready to give rights to women, and those left cracks fit for social wedges.
Secondly, racism is a tool and always has been. The owner class has always resented the working class, and now they can live so far removed from us that they don’t even pretend or develop empathy by sharing the street with us. Heck Thiel wants to make his own Rapture in which everything is automated.
Racism is the hook by which the massive, oligarch-owned, far-right, propaganda machine draws in its viewership before feeding them the MAGA ideology and encouraging them to isolate themselves from all other information sources (and the libs). It turns out in the last century we’ve developed a lot of psychology. It’s just not used as much to heal minds.
But the owner class hates us all. It may hate non-white non-Christians slightly more, but the thing that disgusts them the most about us, by far, is that we are poor. And they’re just as eager to deny us a means to survive as working-class white men would to black men.
Firstly, racism is always a thing. Xenophobia is how humans kept infectious diseases at bay for most of human existence. But then we did the agriculture thing and decided to try out larger societies. Throughout history, though societies have always had to contend with half the population hating the other half enough to get violent.
You’ve got that backwards. It’s the smaller insular groups that tend to get wiped out by communicable diseases. Larger intermixing populations means better immune systems.
Smaller insular groups get wiped out by infectious diseases, but they don’t communicate them to other insular groups. And that is the going hypothesis of why we really like to organize in small bands about the size of our Facebook friends list, and want to throw rocks at people from other tribes.
Larger intermixing populations gain their immunity by first having a lot of them die off. This is one of the benefits(?) of ranching livestock, since they’re a vector for diseases that commonly get transmitted to their human owners. The epidemics happen, and then the survivors have the antibodies, and even pass them on to their kin.
Nowadays, we have centralized disease control. It may be failing in the US but the rest of the developed world still have a robust system. But human beings haven’t had time to evolve (very much) towards large pluralistic societies that combat disease through science and proactive prevention.
Given enough time, I’d think we might, since large pluralistic societies also develop science, technology and arts much faster in general, often much to the chagrin of moral guardians like religious ministries.
How’d you escape?
I majored in German in college (and honestly probably only got to a high B2 or so, which is not very advanced), so I signed up flyor six months of intensive online classes from 3-7:30 am every weekday before work, then applied to a bunch of masters programs in German language instruction. I was accepted on a provisional basis for a normal teaching degree, and given a year to take more intensive German classes before starting the degree. Nearing the end of that year, I had advanced my German enough to qualify for the masters in German education. To qualify for the student visa, I had to prove my student status and have €10k that I could put into a bank account to be withdrawn in steady increments throughout the year. The intensive classes cost about €5k for the whole 18 months, and university tuition is around €400 per semester.
I do have a talent for languages, but I also think that if anyone spends 18 months doing 20 hours of language instruction per week, they’ll be able to at least get a high enough level to study a non language related degree in most countries. I’ve seen dedicated illiterate adults begin learning both German and how to read and get a language level high enough to meet university admission requirements here within three years, so a person starting out knowing their letters can do it in half the time. It’s not easy, but if you can focus on it, it’s doable.
He didn’t cause this. But he sure as hell isn’t helping.
And the fact is, not all Americans are tired of it. There are millions of Americans who are perfectly happy with things the way they are.
There will always be a minority that are content with status quo. Though virtually everyone is not happy with how things are. There is just a disagreement on the solution. Dipshit was elected because he was different, and they thought he would fix the problems that plagues the US. And many still think he is helping, somehow…
Our president said we are going to win so much, that we will say “no more winning sir, we are winning too much we can’t win anymore”
That’s where we are. All this winning is destroying our country.
I think he meant whining, not winning
“our country”, you’re such a romantic.
❤️💛💚💙🧡🩵🩷
Yeah, ours have all sucked so far.
i wanna die thanks for asking
Maybe try doing something about it?
Such as?
To fix this we need to organize twelve million Americans. We could seize Washington by force. Occupying Washington with six million supported by the other six would likely be enough. Or we could stage a general strike and support those workers not earning a living.
But we need to create a larger organized revolt than has ever been done before. And we’ll need a manifesto that everyone can agree on.
It turns out that’s actually quite difficult.
Oh, it’s DIFFICULT? My apologies. I didn’t realize you were looking for easy solutions that wouldn’t create any discomfort for any of you.
And you’re absolutely misrepresenting what would be necessary. 20 or so high profile Charlie Kirks and a couple dozen people ready to take down ICE patrols in every neighborhood would get you a great deal of the way there. Broken noses and missing teeth are the proper response to Nazi taking points. On paper, no population in history has had better odds of successfully putting down a fascist takeover of their government- Americans either don’t care or are sinply unwilling to put their comfort at risk.
You’re engaging in violence fantasy. If you were here and tried to carry it out, you’d be dead and countless innocents piled on top of you.
You’re also totally underestimating the size of the response necessary.
Additionally, far-right Charlie Kirks are sponsored by the oligarchs, while far left ones are labeled as terrorists and hunted down by regime paramilitaries. We’ve seen this both during the German Reich and during the US civil rights movement. Why do you think the entire developed world is determined to strip anonymity from social media access?
We’re not fighting against a unite-the-right rally. We’re fighting the entirety of the federal government, and cooperating state governments.
You’re also asking some of us to sacrifice ourselves, which is a huge ask on its own. But the least we need to do is make sure those sacrifices aren’t in vein.
Something tells me you’ve never been in a society under attack by a captured government. Something tells me that you’d cow in your own dwelling if the circumstances rapidly developed around you. But do feel free to tell specific tales if I’m wrong. I’ll read them.
Coward. Keep responding and get blocked, I’m not here to hear excuses from do-nothing Americans.
I am not surprised, nor am I impressed.
Don’t bother blocking me. I’ll do it for you.
Think of how dumb the average person is, half of them are dumber than that. And they voted this rotten mango into office. We are sick of him and watching our country crumble around him.
The original line is that we would get tired of winning. So that’s what this is. We’re tired of winning so we have opted for losing. Lots of losing.
The 100 billionaires:
I think this is the press release for the new analysis they are referring to. It’s titled Majority of Americans Can’t Achieve a Minimal Quality of Life, According to New Ludwig Institute Research. You can find “bottom 60%” in the fourth paragraph
In 2023, the bottom 60% of households earned just 22.1% of all disposable income but needed 39% to meet MQL.
If you accept that society is pyramid-shaped, it’s easy to accept ideas such as a “bottom 80%” (the hideous peasants who do all the jobs you wouldn’t touch) and to imagine oneself as in the “top 20%” if you have a comfortable home, don’t go hungry and have enough to treat yourself to discretionary luxuries like a Netflix subscription. Yes, the private-jet class may be far above you, but your little perch on the side of the pyramid keeps you out of most of the muck.
inverted pyramid? ready to tumble?
Unfortunately, the US, and some other Western democracies, operate based on capital. Bottom 60% owns nothing, so it’s the minority. Top 0.1% owns everything, so it’s the majority.
