The American system is badly broken | Hacker News Reader

The American system is badly broken

theguardian.com

I think it’s true the American system is broken, but I think the two Americas narrative is a bit of an oversimplification. There’s definitely plenty of people (over represented on this site) that aren’t yacht wealthy, but also aren’t paycheck to paycheck broke. Well paid laborers (SWE, other engineers, consultants) that can afford most day to day good, but struggle a bit more on big purchases like housing. I think ideally we’d tax the wealthy enough to allow more people to fall into that bucket of doing well but not crazy multiple homes well.

I've met people in the 1%. There's plenty of likable individuals and benevolent capitalists. OTOH, not without its bad apples though, like anything else.

Well Bernie said Wednesday, the top 1% now owns more wealth than the bottom 93%. I don't know how accurate that is but I'll trust his figure for now. If any math comes up I'll leave it to volunteer statisticians to provide accurate error bands ;)

What if the top 1% "only" controlled 10% of the wealth & power?

That would still be an incredible bonanza for every one of them, 10:1 is living pretty large.

But when you think about it, what difference would that make to the other 99% after all? There's just so many of them.

It's probably pretty grim, let's see:

Right now the other 99% have got almost a full 7% of the wealth and I guess people have been getting by figuring they've been doing as good as they can.

People do call that a "rich" country :\

Now if the balance was "upset" or more fair like that, whichever way you want to look at it, those 99% would end up with a total of 90% of the wealth that the 1% didn't accumulate for themselves when they are at the 10% level.

So with the cards stacked only 10:1 in favor of the current 1%, they would all still be fabulously wealthy.

But not the poor 99% who didn't start out that great to begin with, they're just not near parity at this level.

With only 90% of the wealth, that's not quite up there by a long shot, but at least it's maybe about (90/7 =) 12x as much as they have now.

For 99% of the people. Would that even help anybody at all?

If you were one of the 99% you would have 12x as much under such nominal conditions yourself. Would that even move the needle anyway? I admit that 12x as much disposable income would result from a more attainable offset than 12x as much total income, but that could be significant anyway.

How would a mere 12x disposable income make you feel?

There's no way you'd be anywhere close to the 1%, no matter how you look at it :\

So it's a question worth asking.

Would anybody still say it was a rich country by comparison?

Do they say that any more? Or maybe something else entirely?

When you do the math?

I definitely think the tax system needs to be fixed so that the richest people are paying at least the same tax bracket as someone making $250k/year that can't use ridiculous loopholes.

THere is always a top 1%. Even if those with the top 1% of the wealth disappeared today there would just be a different top 1% replacing them. The problem is the 50% of the population that's being kept sleepwalking, too uneducated and uninformed to prevent the autocrats from getting stronger, and how the policies of those in power are making it worse each day. We may be the land of the free, but that includes being free to be taken advantage of. Fixing that is difficult.

“There are a handful of super rich people “

“There are a lot of people struggling to get by”

Now let’s all get angry.

Maybe we can skip these types of stories and go straight to causation.

Why is America becoming unaffordable. Housing, education, and healthcare seem to always outpace inflation, for example.

Well, try looking at the contents of shopping carts at the checkout lanes of your supermarket. A lot of folks in the bottom half buy a lot of pricey sugary drinks and ultraprocessed microwaveable frozen stuff. So they get hit in their wallets, their waistlines, even their teeth take a hit. Just saying: if they wanted to make better choices, they could. Starting with food choices. Maybe they don't know where to start.

You’re absolutely right. Poor frugality is why we should be ok with “22% of seniors trying to survive on an income of less than $15,000 a year.” They’ve only themselves to blame. It’s their own moral failing, not society’s, really.

All that is is for the best. If there is a volcano at Lisbon it cannot be elsewhere. It is impossible that things should be other than they are; for everything is right.

Make America Healthy Again could be simpler than we think. I would not call it a moral failing though. Just a susceptibilty for flashy packaging, supermarket product placement, even extremely effective prime time and targeted online advertisements. Okay, go ahead, shoot the messenger, downvote me, facebooky zero attention span types.

Not my downvote, but

Isn't the junk food situation exacerbated because the money paid for it directly and through poorer health goes to the 1% more so than it ever did?

I don't care about votes.

Sure, private equity in the health (actually disease) care system gets fattened and who pays? Medicaid, medicare... prevention is not profitable to the 1% ? sure

The pot is calling the kettle black. At least the US with it's billionaires has growth and thus decent prospects for the future. Where is the UK? The situation is increasingly dismal and politicians lack any ambition. The only pm who had any good ideas was Liz "lettuce" Truss!

That being said and i'm very pro capitalism in general the situation is becoming impossible to ignore. 15 years ago the richest billionaires had maybe 90 billion. I'm coming to the conclusion we are living in the second age of robber barons. I strongly believe the solution isn't to take away all their money. That's just stupid and doesn't work. We need a strong middle class. They are the basis of all successful societies.

The article is by Bernie Sanders, who's an American politician, no?

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