I blame Reagan.
this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2024
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Our progress party was compromised, and by compromised I mean bribed to work against progress starting in the 1980s. Today's neoliberals.
Both parties are well paid to protect the rigged economy that exploits you that they spent decades rigging against you from you, while they war about social issue symptoms you get to vote on for the illusion of freedom.
We don't get a vote on shape or priorities of the economy. Well bribed Republicans and Democrats will lock arms, declare martial law, and authorize lethal force on us before they'll let the people end their legal Wall Street bribe gravy train. A shining example of why legality should never, ever be conflated with morality, especially post Reagan.
That's where we're at and why. Jimmy Carter was the last POTUS who wasn't all in on turning their constituents into desperate capital batteries. That is a prerequisite for party support.
Up vs. Down. Large shareholders vs everyone else. Everything else is dancing to their pfife. Pity their class traitor capitalism worshipping sycophants, but our true enemies can be identified by net worth.
Important to note here the important difference between "mean", aka the average, and "median", the middle number in a set. Assuming Krueger intentionally used "median", the situation is actually worse than people realize.
The average can be affected by large outliers - like billionaires. IF the "average" American makes $50,000 a year, the median could actually be more like $30,000 (totally made up numbers, as an example).
In other words, the median is the more "accurate" number to use in these comparisons because the income of the extremely wealthy has less of an impact on the result.
You're right about everything, but the post explicitly talks about median for everything but healthcare, so it should be fairly accurate already
True, yeah. I just wanted to be clear about it in case people confused median and mean. I work with high school students who struggle with the difference every year. So, thought maybe some adults who'd been out of school for a while might also not realize the difference.
When talking about stuff like this, large diverse populations and a near continuous variables, a single measure of central tendency is not very informative whichever you choose. They necessarily misrepresent most of the population, quite a lot, just for the sake of what . . . brevity?
That seems lazy to me and makes me think the author doesn't really care too much about the people they're trying to describe.
At least pick a few points across the distribution, and a give a bit more time to understand or explain maybe like 5 or 6 "representatives" out of of however many millions are being summarised by the one statistic.
If the author can't afford to draw a full fledged histogram - at least do a box-and-whiskers.
Maybe that twitter thing is just fucking awful.
Kind of feel like the box and whisker would look something like this, only worse.
Median is (arguably) best if you want to give one value. Of course it's better to give more, like first quartile, median, third quartile. But sometimes brevity is useful too
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But the 1% got 100 x wealthier! Ain't that great?
That means the economy is booming. Fuck yeah! 😎
Leaders don't care about you or me. If we collectively can't get off our lazy assess and force changes to happen that benefit us, they won't. It's really that simple. The working class needs to take responsibility for civilization back from politicians and corporations or well all continue to be genocided by the greed of a relatively few powerful human beings.
Leaders don’t care about you or me.
Too broad. Bernie clearly cares. Lots of politicians care. Not all, of course.
The problem is that not enough people care to figure out which is which. And somehow Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan keep getting reelected.
Not really too broad. There are aspiring leaders who might care but they don't end up leading. Bernie doesn't seem to ever end up leading much does he? Business leaders keep choosing political leaders. It's leaders everywhere, not just political leadership. People who run things don't seem to give a shit about anyone but themselves and they meddle in everything to make sure leaders help them first and foremost. Half the political class also is the business class so...
Also one exception tends to prove the rule. The vast majority of our leaders, political and business, religious and cultural, are horrible fucking people who only do good when forced to and we have utterly failed as a citizenry to make sure they do.
AOC and Bernie and at least a couple dozen others are certainly not the choice of business. Sherrod Brown, Rashida Tlaib, Elizabeth Warren, Tim Walz, etc. The problem is that we have the attention span for maybe 12 names. The business cabals research and promote every name.
If you're not researching your ballot at the least every time you can vote, then you're contributing to the problem. Ideally you're also spot checking some key votes and doing some deeper research into the vote topics that you're particularly knowledgeable or interested in for spot checking.
Personally, I remember fewer names and have a bit easier time because I'm always voting against 90% of my incumbents. But you can't just say things like "vote out all incumbents" and think that's helpful. They're really not all bad.
And nobody you listed has been in positions of significant leadership. The DNC stopped populist Bernie, Pelosi is shuttering AOC, none of them has been close to DNC leadership roles let alone the presidency. Bernie came into the DNC with his own political clout he built from outside the DNC which is the only reason he is where he is. DNC leadership actively suppresses changes in top leadership.
My point isn't that good people don't exist it's that the systems we have seem to actively and aggressively prevent them from gaining any real power. Good people are a threat to the way things are being done and less than good people keep it that way.
the systems we have seem to actively and aggressively prevent them from gaining any real power.
Primarily by not getting enough votes. And those systems are advertisements, PACs, and control of the media.
If we could counter those systems, we'd have a pretty good shot at fixing it.
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Income inequality is also much higher than it was in 1971, it's about where it was at the start of the Great Depression
