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this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2024
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In terms of the world's wealth, if you own a million dollars US or more - you're one of the top 1%, richest people on the planet.
This means ALL of the people in Congress and the Senate are in the top 1%, or being very close to it.
America is ruled by a wealthy ruling class.
Always has been.
Huh, I was going to comment something about how the global top 1% has a lower threshold than that, but it really doesn't. $1M of wealth would put you in the top 0.7%.
And apparently the top 0.7% hold 45.9% of global wealth. The top 30% hold 97% of wealth.
A quick search shows that $5.8 million is the threshold to be in the top 1% net worth in the US.
You are comparing apples and oranges on purpose by comparing US lawmakers, making laws for the USA, against the world top 1% metric.
Except no. US laws often have global significance. Like wars and resource grabs and stuff. So we should absolutely be using the world as a standard.
The problem there is he said worldwide, not in the US. The searches I'm doing for amount of wealth needed to be in the top 1% worldwide does seem to be around a million dollars. And I mean since a lot of what the US does affects the rest of the world through US companies and the influence the US has you can definitely argue we are led by the 1% who are enacting laws to benefit themselves and the people in their class.
In the USA, the threshold for top 1% of net worth is $5.8 million.
Not saying that congress isn't disproportionately rich, but 1% absolutely does not start at $1 million.
The planet is bigger than the USA buddy
Yeah, but being richer on paper than some Sudanese warlord doesn't make it any easier for me to afford a house. Are you seriously gonna argue that we should just ignore the huge differences in the cost of living between countries?
It certainly is, but when we're talking about US leadership, global wealth comparisons are irrelevant when talking about the moneyed elites. It needs to be national comparisons.
If you only looked at global wealth metrics, you'd think the US was full of rich people who could afford everything, and it very clearly is not the case. There's plenty of Americans living in poverty and paycheck to paycheck, even though their wealth would be considered high globally. You have to normalize by cost of living. If someone makes $1m annually but they spend $975k to meet the bare minimum, are they rich?
You're conflating two things here. You're taking the top 1% of global wealth and equating that with America and saying it means they're a wealthy ruling class.
Which I don't necessarily disagree with in fact, but the premise of your argument is flawed. You need to look at what the top 1% in the US is. The US is heavily skewed towards the top of global wealth in general.
It would be like saying the US is mainly oligarchs and there aren't people suffering because Americans tend to have more wealth than others. You have to normalize it within the country -- or at least against a cost of living index.
one of the requirements of getting into congress or senate should be that when you are getting in AND out you should donate any sum of assets exceeding a couple millions. then anyone wanting to use government as a means of making money by licking the ass of powerful lobbies will mostly stay away. this will not completely eliminate the problem (there will still be people willing to work for lobbies for a couple mil) but will lessen the importance of wealth on politics greatly (along with not allowing donations to presidential candidates or organizations promoting them in anyway).
Is an American with a small house in some hyper-inflated corner of the California real estate market really wealthier than a guy out in Malaysia or Nigeria who owes property that's 1/10th the price but can pay $2/day for an army of laborers?
I think this puts too much faith in the value of the American dollar relative to the functional value of real estate and human labor trading at a fraction of the price thousands of miles away. Real wealth needs to have some degree of political power behind it. A guy with a $500 rifle who can command a hundred acres of turf and a thousand other people is - in my opinion - substantially wealthier than a guy with a $500,000 condo who owes his continued existence to some Madison Avenue ad agency.
All the people in Congress and the Senate command votes in one of the wealthiest political bodies on the planet. Having a 1/438 share in the $5T us appropriations budget is worth far more than a piddly million dollars in a savings account.