this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2024
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United States | News & Politics
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Despite the current wealth inequality a good number of people are still living decently enough.
I'm waiting to see what happens when Trump starts putting his taxes in place. When people are miserable enough they'll take to the streets and protest. If we reach a breaking point where living conditions completely break down and there still aren't protests then it may as well be over for democracy.
As if the US is currently a Democracy
Never has been
As if there is really a democracy left anywhere. We're going back to fiefdom baby!
America is a frog getting slowly heated in a pot of water. The only hope is to turn up the heat fast enough and high enough that the frog jumps out of the pot before it gets cooked
Yeah there is no single explanation for revolution. Looking strictly to wealth distribution is reductionistic at best. I mean, wealth distribution was arguably better in the U.S. in the 1860s than it was in the prelude to Revolutionary France and yet we had a Civil War lmfao. There are endless examples that disprove this rule. The reality is: popular unrest is extremely complicated, and the factors that lead up to it are varied with fluctuating levels of influence at different stages of development. Sure, perception of wealth is a key component... but its hardly an explainer.
It's not "despite" the gap, because the gap itself does not cause poverty. If the poorest person in the US made $75k/year (in other words, poverty completely eradicated), the size of the gap would still be pretty much exactly the same (after all, the difference between zero and 75k is nothing compared to the difference between 75k and hundreds of billions, which is the current net worth of those with the most wealth).
After all, 50 years ago, the gap was significantly smaller, but the overall incidence of poverty was much higher.
Someone's always going to have the most. And new wealth is constantly being created. And net worth is a valuation, a price tag, not an amount of cash (which is the primary reason it can go up as fast as it can--cash money simply can't do that). Given these facts, expect this gap to always exist (and almost certainly continue to widen), even after poverty is eradicated.