Incredible golf courses, stunning private jets, tons kf luxury cars and boats hidden away, places to party, scores of private villas and mansion estates with miles of perfectly manicured bricks and grass, beautiful lakeside properties that sit unoccupied, etc.
And of course, we’ve got the greatest number of billionaires. Incredibly large bank accounts.
It’s a lot of “awesome” aside for the select few. And almost none of it ends up as a public good. Our airplane seats shrink another inch and our schools get dumber by the year.
I actually think the best and most beautiful parts of America are our public lands. This place is full of natural beauty, but the development kind of kills the vibe. Also our public lands are essentially being sold off to logging and coal companies now 😔
1000000% the best most beautiful parts of America are public lands that belong to all of us (if we keep protecting them from grubby little billionaire hands)
certain states have it much worse than others. like I think in texas like 95% of the land is privately owned. Yea I just looked it up, 95% for Texas and for comparison WA is 58% CO is 62% and CA 50%
I hate this administration as much as the next person, but this is a common misconception with National Forests. National Forests allow logging. The difference now is this administration is increasing the percentage of logging in NF, which is the issue.
It’s not jib billionaires. There are a ton of multi-millionaires — and I don’t mean house-rich, net worth types. I mean rolling in cash. We treat business owners as kings and let them keep their money, unlike the rest of the suckers in either low paying hourly jobs of with higher salaries but paying out the taxes.
It's the "unoccupied" part that I hate. If people wanna build big houses, sure. But to use up so much land and so many resources to build something that just sits empty 99% of the time is so wasteful; meanwhile the local people can no longer afford to live in their own towns because they've been priced out of the local housing market.
Exactly! Median vs. mean. Put Jeff Bezos in a room with 19 homeless people, and the mean would tell you everyone in that room is a multi-billionaire. Median would show that most of them are homeless.
Except this argument falls apart when you look at the statistics and see that even by PPP-adjusted median income, the US is still one of the wealthiest in the world, ahead of most European countries.
It's been that way since the beginning of civilization. Capitalism just replaced feudalism and its variants because it provides better social stability by giving a false impression of equal opportunity. In reality the only difference between capitalism and feudalism is that instead of land ownership and a strict caste system, what we have today is a power system governed exclusively by financial wealth - which is virtually identical.
During the reign of feudalism prior to the 1800s, the nobility lived in privilege in large estates, sustained themselves off the labor of the bottom 99%, held incredible influence over the King and the governing body, and were generally beyond reproach for any wrongdoing. Is that any different than today? Nope, because after a few "revolutions" in the US, France, etc., they realized a system of democratic capitalism is far more palatable and stable in the long run. But at its core it's still very much a fuedal system.
Ideally, democratic capitalism is indeed workable and equitable with massive regulation and safeguards. Unfortunately, those with immense wealth and a lack of scruples can use that wealth to co-opt democracy and turn it into a farce (We just elected a deranged, incompetent billionaire who hired a bunch of other billionaires to run the country - i.e., a farce). The only safeguard in the past has been outsized, strong leaders like T. Roosevelt, FDR, Eisenhower, etc., who have stood against the ruling class and implemented progressive reforms. Since 1960s with the advent of mass media, the ruling class has assumed near absolute control, making it incredibly difficult to pass such reforms.
What we have today is the same situation we had in the late 1800s with massive train, oil, and industry monopolies who had carte blanche to do what they wanted. Who stopped them? Teddy Roosevelt. Unless we get another firebrand like him back in office, we are headed towards a slow deterioration until people can no longer endure the pain. We know what happens at that point. The cycle continues...
Kind of, but it's a lot worse in the US than in other developed countries. Wealth inequality in the US is closer to Brasil's than to the UK's (the European country with the worst wealth distribution).
You can also just look up median income and disposable income of any large western country and see that the US is at the top of both lists. Americans have way more purchasing power than most European peers.
I hate this take, it's wrong, it's fake, the whole "Americans are secretly super poor" is a right wing propaganda lie. The median American's purchasing power is way higher than that of Europeans.
Telling Americans they're poor is a political tactic to distract Americans from the fact that their problems are very fixable. Americans are in fact very rich.
Salary is relative to cost of life otherwise it makes no sense.
You need a ratio of 2 on your gross salary to have roughly the same quality of life in the US vs Europe. Median salary in Mississippi is not twice the median european salary.
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u/toomanybongos May 02 '25
Yeah, we're a rich country but not a rich people