This cartoon from The Seattle Times illustrates how America’s economic pizza is actually sliced per capita, highlighting the massive disparity between the Top 1%, the merely wealthy, the upper middle class, and the lower 50%.
You must log in or # to comment.
I cannot stop seeing this idea overlaid on every thing that I see or do or hear about. Every action is filtered through the lens of it being extractive and manipulative.
I feel extremely stressed because I see the bars of the cage and no one else around me wants to acknowledge them.
I do not like this. I would like it to stop please.
Reject consumerism, make things instead.
We have friends coming over, instead of ordering food from a mega corporation I am going to make pizza and potato wedges.
Where do the ingredients come from? Are you growing your own grain and milling it into your own flower? Do you have your own cows or goats to make your own cheese? Did you build your own oven? Fired with wood you cut down yourself?
Not buying the very last link in the chain doesn’t matter. It only makes you feel like you’re doing something.
You’d be more effective buying the pizza from a locally owned place.
When making something nice I would buy the ingredients from local independents where I can. I can almost see the farm I get cheese and garlic from on a clear day but there is a hill in the way.
Its also risky though, they sell fucking massive slabs of halloumi style cheese. Its a lot of money but also a lot of cheese.
Can’t do it for every ingredient with every recipe, but I am fed up of the just give up attitude I often hear simply because something isn’t 100% perfect in every way and using that as a reason to not even try. So I do what I reasonably can.
Also, ingredients are cheaper than a fast food place. Better quality too.
Like I said, it makes you feel better, that’s fine.
But don’t pretend it’s fighting the fight. Though if you don’t pretend, it may not make you feel better.Other than refusing to consume, what do you suggest doing that will achieve more and is easy for most people to do?
Organizing, protesting, voting and voter registration drives, marketing and coms. Even starting a union owned business, or something similar. Those kinds of things make a difference. Individual purchasing decisions don’t.
Many of those are much more difficult for most people to do, are of questionable benefit or they already do.
Refuse to give them money, it is the only language they understand.
Even starting a union owned business
Hey everyone. You want to change society? Just start a business. Easy peesy! Don’t make small changes in your life, make massive financial overhauls.
Not buying the very last link in the chain doesn’t matter.
It absolutely does. You’re cutting out the part with highest markup. Skipping an entire manufacturing process.
You can get the ingredients for a fraction of the cost compared to a finished product.
Maybe. But price wasn’t the argument being made. That’s a non sequitur.
I’m sorry where do you think profit comes from? It’s not grown on profit trees, it’s baked into the price. Higher markup, higher price, higher profit.
Non sequitur my ass
The idea is capitalism. As in, buying from large corporations. Whatever the price or profit, the topic was about who and where you’re buying from, not for how much.
“You want to change society. Yet you participate in it. Curious…”
I buy the majority of my groceries from a local farmers market. Things I can’t get there I buy from Wal Mart. I buy pizza from a local mom and pop shop, where they live above their restaurant. I do everything I can to make buying from mega corps a last choice decision. My partner and I will be starting our garden next year and growing a lot of our own vegetables. We’ll be raising pork pigs so we don’t have to buy factory pork. There’s so many little things you can do as an individual to choke off the billionaires.
But if you want to keep bending over like you seem to be acting, more power to you. Just don’t blame others for society collapsing.
Don’t let perfect be in the way of better.
I’m not.
I’m asking people to not treat better as the solution; They way they do with rent controls and school loan forgiveness. Buying locally is fine to do, for you in your life, but it has no effect on the larger problem. Too many people pretend it does.
You’re right, guess I’m just gonna give everyone hand jobs or are you going to tell me I need to build my own sex robot from scratch?
Giving someone a hand job, is doing it from scratch.
What’s the sex bot for?No, because I was planning on using a water based lubricant
There are lots of recipes for home made lube online.
For hand jobs, simple olive oil will work fine. Don’t know if it’s water based, but it cleans up easy enough.
But still, what the bot for?
Take back power anyway you can.
Tenant unions, worker unions, worker cooperatives, community land trusts, tool libraries.
Work towards owning your business and your home and your community WITH your coworkers and your neighborhood and your community.
We can overcome the tyrants if we work together. Federal elections are only one small piece of the puzzle and no one will save us but ourselves.
I do not like this. I would like it to stop please.
Then do something. Why does someone else need to rattle the cage for you to break free? Why are Americans, who masturbate to the 2nd amendment, so afraid of taking back their country? There’s 350 million of you, trillions of guns, and merely a few hundred of them. Start turning the streets red.
“All experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustimed.”
Because those who see what you see are in areas where they would be alone, considered a lone madman. Rest assured, people are gathering and talking.
Financial obesity is neurotoxic, an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but trillionaires should be forced to transition into billionaires, and billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
I may be willing to accept other more straightforward methods.
I’m not opposed to compounding remediation, but I want them to experience them as poorer vassals.
I don’t care what they experience, I want them gone. The class violence they commit actively causes the rest of us suffering.
As a top 1 percenter, I feel seriously offended by the suggestion that I’d sit anywhere close peasants, let alone at the same table.
/s obviously, because I wouldn’t be on lemmy if I was anywhere close the top 1%
Actually the top 1% in the US is ~600k per year. It’s a lot of cash but not entirely outside the realm of possibility for some extremely senior software architect/manager combo at some VC startup, which is also within the lemmy target audience.
~600k per year
Why are you using income? It’s wealth that matters and that’s a ~$16M cutoff.
To reach that you’d need to be earning ~600k per year for 2-3 decades, to invest the majority of it, and to get absurd stock returns on top of that.
Which is still, just insane to think about.
Like holy crap I can hardly imagine seeing 4 dollar-digits of liquidity in my account. In my lifetime, and I think I work hard in a role in society like anybody else.
Something like that would require the most unlikely of windfalls. To think there’s people out there, somewhat “commonly”, going “Hmmm yerrs, let’s put $20k into these stonks. Indeeed…”
…and then they reap returns, and go on and start businesses with “risk” (but not much, proportionally) and then publish books about “quitting the rat race and following your dreams.”
And they might be a few zip codes away from me. It’s nuts to me. Incomprehensible, really. Just…damn.
I don’t wanna be rich, that sounds awful. I just wanna stop forever bracing against the next inevitable-but-untimeable calamity that threatens to throw us all out on the street.
Like holy crap I can hardly imagine seeing 4 dollar-digits of liquidity in my account. In my lifetime, and I think I work hard in a role in society like anybody else.
What do you mean by 4 dollar-digits of liquidity? Like $1000? That feels a bit low unless you’re in a country where the yearly income is 1-2K.
…and then they reap returns, and go on and start businesses with “risk” (but not much, proportionally) and then publish books about “quitting the rat race and following your dreams.”
It’s even lower than you’d think. The cutoff for basically never needing to work again in your life is around $1M so top 18% of the US. At that point as long as you’re willing to live off 30-40K and invest in index funds statistically you’ll only ever get wealthier. (at least historically for the last several decades)
Haha yeah sorry I was struggling to convey that properly. US American here.
Like, after the paycheck comes in, and we pay all the bills, yeah having some 1000’s just left over to decide what to do with would be quite cushy.
We’re a couple that both work decently paying part times. Living with family makes that possible, but unavoidable debts (and climbing insurance rates) the last few years balanced it out.
So I mean, we live comfortably and we’re materially content. But also times are really scary where another 2008 could hit us real bad.
So it’s still weird imagining people just having lots of padding floating around. Lol
Yeah but they would never admit to being a 1%er here if they know what’s good for them.
And besides, nowadays the real oligarchs are 0.1%ers or even 0.01%ers.
1%ers at this point are literally just the higher end of the upper-middle class…
Yeah, in terms of the wealth distribution the 1% are closer to the 99% than to the 0.1%. It’s borderline incomprehensible how wealthy the 0.1% is compared to the rest of us.
I gather this is roughly true wrt income (other estimates place this closer to 750k per household), but not wealth (which i believe is ~14 million to be in the top 1% in the US). Note that this income estimate does not include unrealized capital gains and that a 10% return on a 14 million portfolio is 1.4 million per year in passive income.
Most people in the lower 50% believe that anyone that has any money, especially $1M+ is part of the 1%. The complete lack of understanding of income and wealth escalation in the last couple decades is what keeps many people voting against their own interests. Many $1M-aires believe that with the right government policy and lower taxes, always lower taxes, they would quickly become part of the 1% and be “just like Musk”. They believe that the system that aides and abets billionaires would equally benefit themselves and cannot see that they are part of the riff raff, the same as a homeless person, in the eyes of the billionaire class.
I like “this is not a joke”. I really appreciate anybody trying to put into perspective how insanely unequal things are by using real numbers where possible.
The problem is that things are so unequal that it’s just about impossible to illustrate. For example, the “Top 1%” label is perfectly accurate, but doesn’t illustrate both how small and also how large the top 1% is. 1% is still 3.5 million people, which is large. It isn’t just Bezos and Musk. It’s also guys who own car dealerships.
OTOH, it’s also small. There are 4 people in that illustration, and the “top 1%” should really be 1 guy in a room of 100.
It’s also hard to remember that the “lower 50%” isn’t just “the poors”. It’s literally half the people in the country. It’s not 1 guy at a table with 4 people who is only getting crumbs, it’s half the people at that table getting crumbs. I would bet that at least 80% of Americans think they’re richer than the bottom 50%.
That’s also without trying to deal with the issue of “1 billion dollars”, which just isn’t a number that people have much ability to picture. 1 billion feels like it’s similar to “1 million”, but it’s not.
It also doesn’t do anything to show the scale in the top 1%. There is more difference from the top and bottom of that single percentage than there is in the entire pizza and crumbs.
Yeah. The difference between the net worth of Elon Musk and of Gary Tharaldson is basically Elon Musk’s entire net worth. And, Gary Tharaldson is a billionaire and the richest person in North Dakota.
The “merely multi-millionaires” are still a problem. Their wealth corrupts the democratic system. But, it isn’t as dangerous as Musk’s or Bezos’s power.
How about a different kinda slicing?
Americans let children die in schools to gun violence for decades just so they can uphold the 2nd amendment which by definition doesn’t even guarantee access to guns to common civilians, but hide in the corner when their way of life is being taken away from them day by day because “They have guns too and I’m a pussy”.
The USA is 350 million fucking cowards, and they deserve what is happening.
…says someone who laments gun violence while encouraging gun violence.
If America actually had a civil war this person would write off everyone involved as “toxic and obsessed with violence.” I’ve dealt with folks like this before; they just want to differentiate themselves from Americans so that they can feel safe from what’s happening in America, and like it won’t happen to them. Really not too different from any other kind of victim blaming
It’s easy for people like me to differentiate myself from other Americans, considering that I am not American.
Obvious point being: lawful gun owners do not support gun violence.
Nothing they said advocated gun violence.
They might have meant a peaceful shutdown.
They said the population is cowed, to put it more nicely. They’re correct.
I’ll paraphrase what I see: “Americans have guns but are too afraid to use them.” That certainly reads to me like inciting violence.
Your rephrase is incorrect
Nice job homogenizing 350 million people. Every single one the same and deserving of ridicule. Sure.
Little bit of data for you:
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/chart/#range:1989.4,2026.2
That graph makes me sick
And Americans still refuse to do anything about it.
Yes and the middle class who think they have money keep voting for this.
In my experience the difference in voting is really between the educated class and the uneducated class. Educated people are tend to be left wing. Uneducated people tend to be right wing. I’m pretty sure the data bears that out.
This is well studied in “capital and ideology”. Over the last 40 years in usa, euorpe educated tend to vote left, wealth votes right, which is a switch from how it used to be.
However it seems like at least in usa there isn’t that much difference between left and right when it comes to taxing wealth. Hence the steep rise in inequity since regan
During the Reagan era, lobbyists were allowed back into Washington, and officials on both sides (or non-partisan) were quickly captured.
Paul Krugman has a great comment about it. Paraphrased, politicians tend to listen more to well-dressed, well spoken lobbyists than they do nerdy economists.
He cut taxes for the wealthy by enormous amounts
I assume by he you mean Reagan and not Krugman.
Krugman is a dyed-in-the-wool Keynesian.
Yeah,regan
It’s hurt America more then we’ll ever know. Trickle down economics isn’t it when your top 1% is super greedy
In elementary school history, I learned supply-side (trickle down) economics came from Taft, and they failed spectacularly then. I think the only reason it comes back is because it gets resurrected by the owner class, as a justification to break the 3conomy in their favor.
Seriously, the only reason to not have a dictatorship it to make societies more public serving. We really need to start recognizing government capture efforts and capitulation are nothing short ot treason, aiding and giving comfort to enemies of the people and state.
Perhaps the survivors will figure it out.
Most of the world has been damaged by it. The us is putting no taxes on wealth, many other country followed suit
Capitalism is just feudalism with more math.
Trickle down feudalism yeah.
Maybe what MAGA could realize is that america was great when income inequality was more in-check.
Bringing angry MAGA folks to this conclusion would be a huge win for pretty much everyone.
We need blue collar union solidarity to come back, and bring with it safe reasonable high quality work on worthwhile things for our neighbors, compensated fairly.
Defunded education, 24-hour Fox “news” coverage, and literal armies of sock puppet accounts are what you’re up against.
The billionaires have taken over social media so they can fabricate their own reality using millions of fake voices and thousands of hours of emotional response conditioning.
What’s your plan to fight against that?
I’m going to use a sharpie to write some words on a piece of poster board and then get lost in a crowd. Maybe something like, “Make America Fair Again. Tax the Ultra-Wealthy.”
In the words of Ian MacKaye, “at least I’m fucking trying”
Yeah. This is exactly why education is constantly attacked. Gotta keep the serfs dumb and docile.
Getting MAGAts to even THINK is a huge endeavor.
remember - there is no such thing as stratification within the working class. there is no “upper middle class” - it’s all just propaganda to get us distracted by a better house, greener lawn, culdesac, suit wearing folks…
There is an “upper middle class.”
If you point to the average doctor or lawyer, and tell poor people “those guys are working class, same as you,” half of them are going to tell you to get bent. Cause when they see them with their mcmansions that somebody else cleans, and their giant lawns that somebody else mows, and driving their mercedes and corvettes, the average poor person is not going to believe you when you tell them they’re the same class.
Maybe if everyone was educated and enlightened you could pull that off, but expecting all or even most people to be like that is idealistic and naïve at best. Perhaps even callous and out-of-touch.
The grain of truth is that we are indeed all “working class,” and that class conflict
isshould be about working class versus owner class; and that the owner class actively pits upper-middle class against middle- and lower-class, and middle-class against lower class.But telling everyone “there’s no such thing as/no distinction between upper-middle, middle, and lower classes” is not the remedy. You need to remind them that even though there is stratification within the working class, we’re all on the same team and need to work together.
Telling them otherwise comes off as gaslighting and is not going to convince the majority of working class people, because it directly contradicts the evidence of their eyes and ears.
And besides, upper-middle class people will hear that and think “so you want to reduce me to poverty just to level the playing field!”, middle-class people will think “so you want to eliminate the middle class and make us all poor?,” and lower-class people will think “so you’re erasing my struggles and pretending I have it just as easy as the middle- and upper-middle classes?”
Denying the reality isn’t helpful. That’s like using “colorblindness” as an argument against racism. We need to acknowledge our differences in order to accept them. Pretending there’s no difference will never work, and only advantages the owner-class attempting to maintain the status quo.
could not agree with you more.
I am one of those people that has had circumstances improve. I grew up in a trailer that honestly should have been condemned rather than allowed to have someone live in it. I’ve gotten used to sleep for dinner when I was younger having my only good food be the fact that one of my friends mom’s was our lunch lady and she took pity on me pretty regularly.
over the last 15 or 20 years I’ve somehow worked my way into a good paying job and when I read your first paragraph it was a little bit of a wake up for me since a lot of those things apply now.
I would say the main difference that I have between now and then is that I have more control over my life personally, if I were to lose my job I could probably find another one and even if I couldn’t I could sell my house and be okay for a while. homelessness is not right around the corner like it was when I was a kid and we got evicted three or four times.
The real difference between classes though is not that I can afford my electricity bill every month or make sure that my kids have probably too many toys, as far as I’m concerned the primary difference is whether you have control of how other people live their lives.
The owner class has propaganda machines, owns government officials, can collaborate with each other to ensure that wages are suppressed and to ensure that the right people make the right business calls and make a bunch of money at the rest of our expense.
it’s insane to me that the life that I have used to be common in America and I feel so lucky and grateful that I have it at all today. all I have is a house a job two cars and two kids and a cat I guess.
that should not be too much to ask for for the regular person. everyone should get to have that kind of stability in their life.
I vote and believe the way I do not because I think it will drastically change my own life but because I think that others deserve what I have, it should not be extraordinary for people to be able to survive on one job and build a family if that’s what they want to do.
half of them are going to tell you to get bent.
I don’t disagree, I just think that this response is a function of a lack of class consciousness and is really an exercise for you, to teach your audience, that “sells labor and limited lifespan” means working class. (eliding the details here…)
In short: it’s audience specific. My reply here was meant for the audience here. I might not say it the same way to my neighbor, or a friend, etc.
i guess i don’t disagree that in the interest of time and energy we do consider there to be multiple middle classes, etc, but i consider it harmful to our unification as one working class.
Except for cops. Remember: they’re not working class, just trash class.
deleted by creator
That changes nothing about what I said.
At least make a modicum of effort to base your commentary in reality.
You should take your own advice…
Conservatives insist this is the only way. As long as conservatives exist, the normal people will never be permitted to regulate capitalism or charge billionaires with crimes.
We must delete the foot-soldiers to defeat the billionaire class.
TRUTH NUKE
Missed opportunity to have the lower %50 portrayed as extremely obese. That is how we are taught I feel, that the poor are actually lazy moochers taking instead of contributing.
Which isn’t true to be clear
There is in fact a problem with the lower income families having food deserts, having not enough money for fresh produce, and having to rely on mostly hyper processed foods which fuck with your insulin levels, have tons of sugar, fats and salts to make them tasty, and that leads to irregular fat storage even when you’re taking a normal or sub normal level of calories. It’s one of the reasons the “fat American” body type is showing up in other nations, particularly in Europe, where they’re also becoming more reliant on ultra processed foods. Being poor is more expensive in many ways, and one is that you can’t afford a good diet and it makes you sicker faster while you lack the healthcare to manage it or find education on the matter via a primary care provider.
There has to be more to it than that. I was watching something about an area near me being one of the fattest in the country. Its moderately deprived which I am sure is a contributing factor, but then less than 100 miles away another town which is far more deprived is around 10% lower for obesity.
They interviewed people too, asking them where they get food from. So many said the same answer, a shop which is entirely stocked with processed crap. Yes, if you go shopping there you are coming home with crap. But next door there were 2 other shops which sell fresh vegetables and for less than the ultra processed crap. It takes less than 10 seconds to walk between the doors of each shop.
Its not a food desert, fresh food is available here and cheaper than processed food. I spend less on food for the week than many people do on a single takeaway, of which they have several a week.
The other component is time. When someone works multiple jobs, the thought of going home and spending an hour cooking and half an hour cleaning up just to eat in ten minutes is very unappealing when there’s so much else to be done. Simply having the food available for cheap doesn’t do any good when you don’t have time to cook it and don’t want salad.
I was going to mention that although it was getting long already. This is in the UK with one of the best minimum wages on the planet. If you work so much that you lack time, you will have quite a lot of money. Maybe not rich, but plenty to be comfortable.
Especially for a fairly deprived and lower than average cost of housing area.
When you’re working two jobs to survive, you do not have time to cook from scratch.
When education fails to educate, you do not have knowledge how to cook, nor understanding of the reason why one might want to.
UK minimum wage is pretty good, if you are working 2 jobs you should have quite a lot of money.
Microbiome differences will absolutely account for that. I’d be testing for soil and water issue differences and checking if one has more time spent in third spaces that help foster more healthy and diverse microbiomes. Just having more park time would do it, but absolutely having more gardening in one vs the other would do that, even with the exact same diet
Well I know the water here has as much agricultural fertiliser in it as they are legally allowed to leave in.
The due date for the Epstein class’s execution is way overdue
Aside from the imagery of the share of the pizza, I appreciate the detail of the lower 50% not even having “a seat at the table” :/
Yes although it could be a whole family out in the cold for greater realism.
