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OpenAI’s Sam Altman is becoming one of the most powerful people on Earth. We should be very afraid
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2024
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No you are not upper class if you are a married couple of teachers, that is exactly the point you made before about people overestimating their place in society. If you have to work to earn money you are not upper class, the upper classes already have so much wealth that they can live off the passive proceeds of that wealth.
Yes your dual income might but you in the top 15% of incomes, but wealth is the defining characteristic of the truly rich not income.
According to the official definition, upper class means being in the top 10% of earners. And for a couple without kids that's somewhere about 6k, and a teacher makes easily 3k.
That's the thing is, the average employee is pretty poor, so even such moderate incomes are well within the highest percentiles.
You simply have a different understanding of upper class, that is in my opinion too narrow, since this means a finance bro making half a million a year is not upper class.
The top 10% of income is not upper class. The error that people make, including you, is to focus on income.
People like Elon Musk have incomes smaller than $100K.
Upper class are the people who do not need to work and who live off of capital.
We need to shift our focus on wealth equality.
Look, the economy needs capital. If we want to be less dependent on the capital of rich people, then middle class people need to take over that role.
The people making $100-300K per year are key, because they can provide an alternative source of capital if their tax burden is lowered.
The people making $50K will not be able to provide large amounts of capital.
It's not my mistake, it's literally the official definition...
Then you'll need to educate yourself beyond what the government tells you.
Look up the ProPublica leaks. Someone is serving a very long jail time for leaking that out. It clearly shows how billionaires have very low taxable income, probably lower than yours.
To then say that you are upper class and Jeff Bezos is middle class is... Absurd.