Hmm. honestly, the lifestyle described here might cost some money, but if people are rich, they typically have 100x or 1000x the money needed to do even that.
The simplest way to classify “rich” is capitalist class. Those that no longer perform labor. Instead, their wealth passively generates wealth that sustains their lifestyle. There’s no set, defined number. Someone who is “rich” does not need to work and affords luxury.
Which, this is only facilitated via an exploited working class that are not fairly compensated for the labor that they perform and the profits of said labor is traded back and forth amongst said capitalists. Hence why the rich are a parasite class. Socialism for the wealthy and slavery for the workers.
Basic fundamentals of capitalism. Meritocracy is the myth that allows it to function similar to how a religious mandate provided legitimacy to a monarch.
The simplest way to classify “rich” is capitalist class. Those that no longer perform labor. Instead, their wealth passively generates wealth that sustains their lifestyle.
That means everybody who managed to retire is rich.
Retirees live off deferred compensation from their own labor in the form of savings, pensions, social security, etc. Capitalists live off returns generated by other people’s labor. The distinction isn’t whether you work, it’s where the income comes from.
And if retirees were actually ‘rich’ by your logic, elderly poverty wouldn’t be rising as benefits get gutted. People are committing petty crime in their 70s to survive. Poverty and crime are intrinsically linked, even against the belief that as age increases, the level of crime committed will decrease. That’s not a rich class, that’s a working class that got squeezed their whole lives and arrived at retirement without enough buffer.
The actual capitalist class never has that problem because their wealth compounds regardless of policy. Conflating ‘not working’ with ‘owning capital’ is exactly the meritocracy myth my previous comment was describing. It obscures who actually extracts value from whom.
This video was very informative on the retirement situation in America imo. When in reality, most of that “retirement money” is for people that would never need it given their vast wealth.
I was just trying to point out, that the definition of not working is problematic. It includes pensioners and it excludes a lot of people, who I would call rich, like say Fortune 500 CEOs. It therefore needs to be enough capital to allow a passive income well above global average. A good number would imho be something like USD 1,000,000 to be a proper capitalist. And yes a lot of US Americans are rich.
US American pensioners lowest possible social security payment is higher then the median Chinese wage. Cry me a river.
The CEO argument collapses under the smallest scrutiny. Are we seriously suggesting Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, or Mark Zuckerberg perform labor? Their employees do. The engineers, the warehouse workers, the content moderators, they all generate the value. The CEO class performs ownership, and the ideological justification for their outsized returns is supposed to be risk. But when that risk materializes it gets offloaded onto workers through layoffs, wage cuts, and benefit reductions. They privatize the upside and socialize the downside onto the very people generating the value. That’s risk transfer which is exactly the exploitative relationship the original definition was describing.
The Social Security vs Chinese wages comparison is purchasing power theater. You’re comparing raw dollar amounts across completely different cost of living contexts without PPP adjustment, while ignoring that Chinese wages have been rising rapidly and the social policies that significantly reduce the cost of living for Chinese citizens. And even more absurd is the fact that Social Security payments in many cases, such as minimum payments, can place Americans below the poverty line. Most importantly though, it’s entirely beside the point. American elderly poverty rising in the context of American costs is a domestic policy failure. ‘Someone somewhere has it worse’ has never been a coherent rebuttal to a structural critique. It’s a deflection.
And wealthy pensioners have completely different voting incentives than struggling retirees. Conflating the two obscures a deliberate class dynamic. The generation now calling younger people lazy came of age with defined benefit pensions, strong union density, affordable higher education, and accessible housing. They built their security on a social contract that existed because previous generations fought and died for it then systematically voted to dismantle every piece of it once they’d extracted what they needed. ‘Fuck you, got mine’ basically, which is exactly how modern CEOs operate, amassing their wealth, laying off employees, stock buybacks, corporate bonuses, and abandoning ship on a golden parachute eventually.
Housing is the clearest mechanism. Homeowner retirement security is often directly financed by artificial scarcity. They vote against density, development, and tenant protections because their nest egg depends on keeping supply constrained. Their comfort is structurally contingent on younger generations being priced out.
Then they attribute their own material advantages to hard work and personal virtue, and younger generations’ struggles to laziness and poor choices. That’s just ideological cover for a clear material interest as we continue to be more productive than previous generations. We’re just too tired and burnt out to put on the theater anymore and call out the problems with the system that the older generations benefit from or are too much of cowards to admit. The meritocracy myth in its most cynical form, deployed by people who benefited from collective infrastructure and then pulled up the ladder. This is why the older demographic skews Republican and MASSIVELY so. It’s not nostalgia or confusion. It’s class interest expressed through the ballot box, dressed up as culture war.
On some level, that is a useful way of looking at things. The reason for making the distinction between workers (people who sell their own time for a living) and owners (people who own for a living) is because they have different political interests. The workers benefit from paid sick leave, higher minimum wage, and from wellfare state stuff like progressive tax funded health care and all that. All of this disadvantages the owning class. And, if you assume retirees fund their retirements through investments (which is not generally true btw, private pensions are not the only model), this holds on some level for retirees as well. If their income depends on the profits of some company, then it is not to their benefit if that company needs to pay workers more.
It’s a simplification, but yes, it can be meaningful to think of retirees as “rich” in this sense for some political analyses.
And, if you assume retirees fund their retirements through investments (which is not generally true btw, private pensions are not the only model), this holds on some level for retirees as well. If their income depends on the profits of some company, then it is not to their benefit if that company needs to pay workers more.
When you have a public pension, the difference is just that you do not take it via profit, but via some sort of tax. So for pensioners in general, they do not want to increase the real pay of workers. It is also hard to argue that a government pension is not a form of wealth, when something similar on the private market is considered that.
Hmm. honestly, the lifestyle described here might cost some money, but if people are rich, they typically have 100x or 1000x the money needed to do even that.
The simplest way to classify “rich” is capitalist class. Those that no longer perform labor. Instead, their wealth passively generates wealth that sustains their lifestyle. There’s no set, defined number. Someone who is “rich” does not need to work and affords luxury.
Which, this is only facilitated via an exploited working class that are not fairly compensated for the labor that they perform and the profits of said labor is traded back and forth amongst said capitalists. Hence why the rich are a parasite class. Socialism for the wealthy and slavery for the workers.
Basic fundamentals of capitalism. Meritocracy is the myth that allows it to function similar to how a religious mandate provided legitimacy to a monarch.
That means everybody who managed to retire is rich.
Retirees live off deferred compensation from their own labor in the form of savings, pensions, social security, etc. Capitalists live off returns generated by other people’s labor. The distinction isn’t whether you work, it’s where the income comes from.
And if retirees were actually ‘rich’ by your logic, elderly poverty wouldn’t be rising as benefits get gutted. People are committing petty crime in their 70s to survive. Poverty and crime are intrinsically linked, even against the belief that as age increases, the level of crime committed will decrease. That’s not a rich class, that’s a working class that got squeezed their whole lives and arrived at retirement without enough buffer.
The actual capitalist class never has that problem because their wealth compounds regardless of policy. Conflating ‘not working’ with ‘owning capital’ is exactly the meritocracy myth my previous comment was describing. It obscures who actually extracts value from whom.
This video was very informative on the retirement situation in America imo. When in reality, most of that “retirement money” is for people that would never need it given their vast wealth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRLxcx79OvE
I was just trying to point out, that the definition of not working is problematic. It includes pensioners and it excludes a lot of people, who I would call rich, like say Fortune 500 CEOs. It therefore needs to be enough capital to allow a passive income well above global average. A good number would imho be something like USD 1,000,000 to be a proper capitalist. And yes a lot of US Americans are rich.
US American pensioners lowest possible social security payment is higher then the median Chinese wage. Cry me a river.
I stand by my distinction.
The CEO argument collapses under the smallest scrutiny. Are we seriously suggesting Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, or Mark Zuckerberg perform labor? Their employees do. The engineers, the warehouse workers, the content moderators, they all generate the value. The CEO class performs ownership, and the ideological justification for their outsized returns is supposed to be risk. But when that risk materializes it gets offloaded onto workers through layoffs, wage cuts, and benefit reductions. They privatize the upside and socialize the downside onto the very people generating the value. That’s risk transfer which is exactly the exploitative relationship the original definition was describing.
The Social Security vs Chinese wages comparison is purchasing power theater. You’re comparing raw dollar amounts across completely different cost of living contexts without PPP adjustment, while ignoring that Chinese wages have been rising rapidly and the social policies that significantly reduce the cost of living for Chinese citizens. And even more absurd is the fact that Social Security payments in many cases, such as minimum payments, can place Americans below the poverty line. Most importantly though, it’s entirely beside the point. American elderly poverty rising in the context of American costs is a domestic policy failure. ‘Someone somewhere has it worse’ has never been a coherent rebuttal to a structural critique. It’s a deflection.
And wealthy pensioners have completely different voting incentives than struggling retirees. Conflating the two obscures a deliberate class dynamic. The generation now calling younger people lazy came of age with defined benefit pensions, strong union density, affordable higher education, and accessible housing. They built their security on a social contract that existed because previous generations fought and died for it then systematically voted to dismantle every piece of it once they’d extracted what they needed. ‘Fuck you, got mine’ basically, which is exactly how modern CEOs operate, amassing their wealth, laying off employees, stock buybacks, corporate bonuses, and abandoning ship on a golden parachute eventually.
Housing is the clearest mechanism. Homeowner retirement security is often directly financed by artificial scarcity. They vote against density, development, and tenant protections because their nest egg depends on keeping supply constrained. Their comfort is structurally contingent on younger generations being priced out.
Then they attribute their own material advantages to hard work and personal virtue, and younger generations’ struggles to laziness and poor choices. That’s just ideological cover for a clear material interest as we continue to be more productive than previous generations. We’re just too tired and burnt out to put on the theater anymore and call out the problems with the system that the older generations benefit from or are too much of cowards to admit. The meritocracy myth in its most cynical form, deployed by people who benefited from collective infrastructure and then pulled up the ladder. This is why the older demographic skews Republican and MASSIVELY so. It’s not nostalgia or confusion. It’s class interest expressed through the ballot box, dressed up as culture war.
On some level, that is a useful way of looking at things. The reason for making the distinction between workers (people who sell their own time for a living) and owners (people who own for a living) is because they have different political interests. The workers benefit from paid sick leave, higher minimum wage, and from wellfare state stuff like progressive tax funded health care and all that. All of this disadvantages the owning class. And, if you assume retirees fund their retirements through investments (which is not generally true btw, private pensions are not the only model), this holds on some level for retirees as well. If their income depends on the profits of some company, then it is not to their benefit if that company needs to pay workers more.
It’s a simplification, but yes, it can be meaningful to think of retirees as “rich” in this sense for some political analyses.
When you have a public pension, the difference is just that you do not take it via profit, but via some sort of tax. So for pensioners in general, they do not want to increase the real pay of workers. It is also hard to argue that a government pension is not a form of wealth, when something similar on the private market is considered that.
I don’t understand this. Why?
Why give more to the workers, when you can take it yourself?
Yeah, so that argument makes sense when your pension is privately funded. I can’t really connect the dots for the public ones.
it depends on your standards.
For some people a $10,000 trip is poverty lifestyle or their heating bill for the month.
What is your heating bill, 300 bucks?