[amrocha]

Being “stuck” at a job for a decade, living a life with zero financial worries, does not compare to the average worker who has to work for 40+ years, cannot afford to purchase property, and has to rely on social security in old age when they can’t work anymore.

Claiming these are anywhere comparable is an incredibly lack of perspective.

[mcdeltat]

Yall are missing the point and reading what you want to read. I am quite aware of the perspective. There are people on the streets in my city because the median income is $70k and the median house is $1.5M. They are thoroughly screwed by the system. My point is not to garner sympathy for the top earners. My point is that almost all of us are earning far below what we should when you look at the grand scheme of things. The war is not between the average man on the street and the average man at a tech company. It's deeper than that.

[amrocha]

I think I see what you’re saying, and I agree with you that the wealth inequality between the ultra rich and everyone else is the real challenge. The tech worker with a Google salary is a lot closer to a homeless man on the street than he is to the true 1% in the US, and that’s a real problem.

[rswail]

The top 1% are closer to a homeless person on the street than they are to the top 0.1%.

The wealth inequality in the US is the underlying fracture in the social compact that is driving the populist politics that are at play.

[epicureanideal]

Although wealth inequality would not be such a big deal if there were sufficient merit based social mobility and plentiful opportunity to develop merit.

[amrocha]

There is no merit that warrants more than 10 million dollars. At that point money is just power, not consumption.

[dataflow]

> does not compare to the average worker who has to work for 40+ years, cannot afford to purchase property, and has to rely on social security in old age when they can’t work anymore. Claiming these are anywhere comparable is an incredibly lack of perspective.

The parent was talking about their country, not the USA.

[amrocha]

I’m not familiar with any country where this pattern is untrue. From Canada and USA, to Brazil, France, and Japan.